The Den Family Social, a Denver-based social club that combines hospitality, community, work, and play for parents and their children, has adopted ChatGPT Work to reduce administrative burden as it prepares a second location. Founder Chandler Lipe says the club exists to provide elevated, wellbeing-focused spaces where parents can feel like themselves and their children are welcome.
How they use ChatGPT Work
Using Gmail, Slack, and Google Drive plugins, The Den asked ChatGPT Work to gather and analyze information from across the business and recommend next steps. Leadership reports that planning has become more organized, repeatable, and faster, while they continue to review AI outputs for accuracy and make final decisions themselves.
Key impacts reported by the team:
- The leadership team saves roughly 10–15 hours per week on administrative work.
- When a hearing slot for the liquor-license process became available unexpectedly, The Den used ChatGPT Work to pull documents, identify missing items, and convert files into required formats — reducing preparation time for license materials from four days to three hours.
- Time-sensitive grant applications that previously took about three days can now be completed in roughly two hours, increasing the number of opportunities the organization can pursue.
Internal workflows and decision support
Chandler uses ChatGPT to explore questions and draft proposals before bringing them to the group, which she estimates saves about seven hours of exploratory conversations per week. Brooke, The Den’s Head of Programming and Partnerships, workshopped a more consistent partnership approach with ChatGPT: she shared which partnerships had succeeded or failed and why, and ChatGPT produced a proposed partnership structure for leadership review.
The Den also applies the tool to financial and operational planning. Maia, the General Manager, compiled financial reports from the accountant and sales and inventory data from point-of-sale systems, then used ChatGPT to organize that information into a digestible view of the business, making inventory forecasting and purchasing decisions easier across both locations.
Mobile productivity and future tech plans
Because Chandler travels frequently between locations and meetings, she has started using ChatGPT Voice to turn travel time into productive work: dictating emails for draft, capturing meeting follow-ups, and organizing ideas while they are fresh. She then reviews and sends items when ready instead of returning to an accumulating task list.
The Den also plans to explore Codex to build more customized systems, including a member check-in and class-registration app, improved integrations between point-of-sale systems, and Slack alerts to connect staff across locations.
Back to the club’s purpose
All of these operational changes support the original mission Chandler had when founding The Den: creating a place where parents can be themselves and their children are welcome. By cutting administrative time with ChatGPT tools, the team says it can focus more on serving families while managing expansion.
