Buying back a business you started takes courage. Doing it when the team is gone takes even more.
Cathryn Lavery founded BestSelf, bought it back from private equity in 2024, and rebuilt it AI-native. In her own newsletter, Little Might, she describes finding "a successful business with no team in place", with SOPs that were "outdated or missing".
What BestSelf did
Lavery built custom GPTs as an initial support system while she rebuilt the team. Her post describes six: an Ad Creative GPT, a Newsletter Brand Voice GPT, a Product Research GPT, an HR Policy Assistant GPT, a Data Analysis GPT and a Legal Compliance GPT, which does a first pass on contracts and drafts standard agreements before a lawyer is involved.
Each one draws on documents the business already had. The Ad Creative GPT, for example, uses brand voice guidelines, a creative strategy playbook, eight detailed customer personas, copywriting formulas and hooks, and product reviews, press features and testimonials. Gathering them took about 3-4 hours, and the outputs needed 4-5 rounds of tweaking before they were right. Lavery reports no figures on results; her account is qualitative.
What it already gives the business
BestSelf now has its brand voice, policies and standards in tools the team can use without asking the owner. Lavery writes: "Now, we're a small but mighty team, and everyone knows how to create and use custom GPTs to multiply their capabilities."
She also describes the Data Analysis GPT spotting a trend in customer feedback: "Last month it spotted a trend in our customer feedback that led to a product improvement we never would have caught manually."
The ExValu perspective, a hypothesis
Where a Company Brain could take it next
The GPTs work from documents. A Company Brain could add what documents leave out: the reasons behind a winning ad, the supplier conversations, the calls Lavery makes from experience.
Kept in one shared place with clear owners, that knowledge would let any team member see how BestSelf decides, as well as what it decides. That is our hypothesis to test against BestSelf's own results.
What an owner and a buyer would look for
The owner can track how many routine questions reach them each week and how many standard tasks the team finishes from written playbooks.
A buyer looks for current SOPs with named owners, plus proof that the team uses them. Keep customer reviews and HR records inside tools approved for that data, and check the legal basis before customer personal data goes into any assistant. This account is self-reported by the owner on her own blog.
The problem behind this case
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About this analysis
* The image is AI-generated and does not show BestSelf staff. The facts and figures on this page come from the published source named below.
This is an independent ExValu analysis of a published case. Facts, figures and names are as reported in the source below, which our team checked on October 14, 2026. The ideas for next steps are our own perspective and make no claim about conditions inside BestSelf. To request a correction or removal, write to [email protected].
Primary source: Owner's own blog post, Little Might, January 2025. Available at www.littlemight.com/building-custom-gpts-that-actually-work-how-i-run-a-7-figure-business-with-ai-assistants.