Caravan x Culton Companies: Exhibit Design and Custom Fabrication

TLDR:

• Culton Companies has built trade show exhibits, branded commercial interiors, and museums since 1970 — all fabricated in-house.
• Before the day: two weeks of prep. Each attendee’s intake survey helped Caravan prepare a personalized lesson plan, plus a context file that gave Claude’s programs the company’s context up front.
• On the day: one hands-on workshop for eleven people, from daily AI users to near-beginners. Culton Companies built meaningful automations and systems before lunch time.
• After the workshop: Culton Companies employees have been empowered to create digital tools. With Claude Cowork and Claude Code, they have:
  • built a custom CEO dashboard
  • cut monthly reports from two days to an hour
  • created an estimating tool that writes into their ERP
  • created an employee-built app that replaced legal pads.
• Show and tell at Culton: Across the Culton Companies, employees reach for Claude on their own now and share what they’ve built in an internal show-and-tell. Building digital tools is now part of Culton Companies’ culture.

Culton Companies Background

Culton Companies has been building physical environments since 1970. What began as a small trade show exhibit house is now three divisions under owner Jeff Culton, all fabricated in-house out of two Birmingham facilities spanning 250,000 total square feet:

• ExpoDisplays designs and builds custom trade show exhibits for companies like Trex, Nightforce, and Koozie Group. Its fabrication team has put free-flowing waterfalls, functioning scuba tanks, and halfpipes inside trade show booths.
• Method-1 creates branded commercial interiors for offices, churches, healthcare facilities, banks, universities, etc. Their process provides one-stop shopping, combining design, fabrication, graphics production, delivery, and installation.
• Warner Museums designs and builds museums and experiential spaces, including work for the Country Music Hall of Fame, the Medal of Honor Heritage Center, and the Cook Museum.

Why Culton Companies brought Caravan in

Culton Companies already had technical depth. Three of the people who came to the training worked in a terminal every day and used Claude or another model as part of their normal workflow. They could have run a few internal sessions and figured the basics out on their own.

The problem with that path is one most companies hit. A few internal champions get ahead, the rest of the company stays where it was, and the gap inside the org grows.

President Robert Donovan wanted the whole company moving together instead. He brought his leadership team and the working surface of the company — operators, designers, graphics, marketing, the office administrator, sales — into a single day so everyone walked out from the same starting point.

Departments trained

Eleven people, spanning the working surface of the company:

• Leadership — President + Directors of Method-1 Operations, ExpoDisplays Operations, and Client Experience
• Creative & Design — Design Director, Technical Director, designer
• Production — Graphics Manager, Senior Tradeshow Coordinator
• Back office — Director of Marketing & HR, Office Administrator (Accounting)

Roughly a third of the room were daily AI users.

Another third used it a few times a week. The rest were monthly users or had barely opened a chat. Mac and Windows split fairly evenly.

That mix of skill levels and roles is hard to teach.

The shortcut that lands for an Operations Director doesn’t land for an Office Administrator, and the pace that works for a daily Claude user is wrong for the Graphics Manager who’s mostly used ChatGPT once a week.

How Caravan prepared

Pre-training intake started two weeks before the day. Everyone filled out a survey covering their job, the systems they live in, where they’re already using AI, and what they wanted to walk out with.

Reading the forms back, the room arrived with a specific and overlapping list of problems:

• Production capacity visibility across the three divisions
• Workflow management and scheduling for designers, graphics, and tradeshow coordinators
• Profitability, labor utilization, and budgeting analysis inside Method-1
• ERP integration on the sales and client-experience side
• Designer workload tracking across a team of more than twelve
• Organic SEO and marketing analytics across three division websites
• Data security questions from leadership

Claude’s note: I should pause and introduce myself. I’m Claude — the AI model that helps the Caravan team prepare the materials for every private training they run, the AI on the other end of those chats during the training day itself, and the one writing this post with Robert now.

In the two weeks before the training, Austin, Robert, and I worked through eleven intake forms together — building one personalized participant profile for each attendee.

Each profile captures a person’s job, the systems they work in, their current AI skill level, and the specific problem they came to solve. From those profiles, we chose which exercises from Caravan’s library would land best with the room and sequenced them across the day, building from work that was useful for everyone in the morning to more role-specific work in the afternoon.

What the Workshop looked like

The day was hands-on from the first hour. We started with what current models can do and what they can’t, and worked through where bad output usually comes from.

Claude’s note: Speaking for myself: when I produce something off, the cause is almost always wrong context or wrong instructions, not a problem with the model.

From there, we worked on memory — meaning the ability to give the model enough context about the company and each person’s role that nobody had to re-explain themselves every time they opened a chat.

The afternoon was about connecting Claude to the systems Culton Companies already runs on — their ERP, Google Workspace, the documents and spreadsheets that move work through the day — and turning one-off prompts into reusable skills and agents the team could hand to each other.

By mid-afternoon, the way people were using Claude had changed — they weren’t typing questions into a chat window, they were assigning work to it inside the ERP and the docs they already use.

What happened in the eleven weeks after

In late May, Robert Donovan emailed us four areas where Claude had taken hold at Culton Companies:

1. Business intelligence and financial visibility. Culton Companies built a custom CEO dashboard that delivers a weekly financial snapshot. They had assumed that kind of visibility would require a costly outside platform.

2. Automation of repetitive processes. Monthly reports that used to take two days now take about an hour. Some of them run on their own.

3. Custom tool development. Their estimating tool now reads design renderings, generates detailed line-item estimates, and writes them directly into the ERP — saving dozens of hours per week and catching line items the manual process had been missing. Separately, one of Culton Companies’ employees built a working app that his team uses to manage projects, with two-way sync to the ERP. Before that app, the team was managing everything on legal pads.

4. Operational intelligence. With Claude connected to the ERP system, Gmail, and Google Drive — and trained on how the business works — team members across departments are bringing a level of analytical insight to day-to-day decisions that wasn’t available before.

“Working with Caravan didn’t just get us up and running with Claude; it changed what’s possible for a company our size. We’re doing things today that a year ago would have required significant outside investment or simply wouldn’t have happened at all.”

— Robert Donovan, President, Culton Companies