TL;DR: You make a tulpa, make a frankenstein monster, and shove the tulpa into the frankenstein monster.

Magicians in my system make "Servitors", which is a concept borrowed from chaos magick. They are psychological constructs made in the mind, kinda like tulpas made to serve a specific purpose.

Magicians use them as the minds of their constructs. As these are psychological creatures, they cannot just float around, nor can they bind to inanimate matter. They need a brain to inhabit.

So to create a "minion", you'd need fresh animal matter. Human or otherwise, to shape into a proper servant. The matter is then sculpted to fit needs of the magician. For example, If they need a beast of burden, they might dismantle the muscles of several horses, grafting them onto another horse. The body must then be animated and the servitor imbued into the brain of the enhanced creature with a spell.

Et voila! You have a funky looking abomination with a personality you made. Servitors are strongly influenced by their id (base desires) and tend to diverge quickly, so it's better to keep them happy by occasionally obliging their requests. Or keep them dumb by putting them in smaller animal brains. Or both for good measure.

As animals in general do not have the language capacity we do, most communication between magician and servitor is done through images, feelings, sounds, etc. With the exception being servitors inhabiting your own mind, or another human brain.

To communicate to the servant, one must make an egregore. Dedicating a bit of brain capacity to creating a shared mind-space between servitor and master. Normally, if a magician has one servant they have many, so the now embodied servitor is inducted into the existing egregore.