How to Become an AI CONSULTANT Full Walkthrough (& get your first clients)

Feel like I'm still trying to figure out the best way to make money with AI, build a career for the future. Like so many people out there right now, we know there's a massive opportunity, but how do we grasp hold of it?

When I got the chance to sit down with Andrew Dunn, a real-life AI consultant who's built and scaled multiple seven-figure businesses using AI workflows and exiting his last consulting company, he gave me an hour and a half of his time to walk me through step by step how to be a fully-fledged AI consultant, plus how to go and find my very first client without even needing an audience this afternoon.

The AI revolution is here, and I really hope the following 80 minutes or so can change at least one other person's life, if not hundreds or thousands of people who are trying to figure this out, too. So, put your phones down, grab a cup of coffee, and tune in because Andrew breaks everything down so clearly. Andrew Dunn is the original vibe consultant. What are people going to get when they watch this video today? What are you going to show us?

Okay, so it's going to be a very exciting one. So, first of all, thank you for having me. And second of all, my goal of this presentation and this this podcast with you and these wonderful watchers is to explain the opportunity of Vibe Consulting or AI consulting in its normal term and essentially how non-technical people are going to have an entry point into this AI revolution because candidly a ton of people just think you've got to be some type of tech whiz kid and you and a bunch of other people are proof that you don't need to be technical at all because you know I I I struggle to turn on my computer in the morning and yet here we are consulting for some massive companies around the world. So that that is my promise to you all and I by the end of it I will show you four clear distinct paths which start with this model of vibe consulting and where you can basically take it and throughout this whole thing you can ask whatever you want. I've got tons of examples of people who've gone out and crushed it in all different paths and ways.

First question, first question is what is Vibe Consulting?

Vibe coding, Vibe Marketing, right? This idea of Vibe, I don't know why. Why is Vibe AI? Why does Vibe mean AI native?

So I just looked at the domain. Hey, well, I've been a consultant for a decade. I wonder if Vibe Consultant is available. Hell, NameCheep did me a did me a solid and I managed to scoop that bad boy up. So the idea of vibe consultant or vibe consulting is people it's more like professional services who are AI native. So we use AI for acquisition, we use AI for delivery. So we essentially just have ultimate leverage. So with my last firm, that last consulting firm, that's what I did throughout that entire process. I took that firm from being very laborious, which most of them are, to being totally AI native and we work from went from working like 40 hours a week each to working like maybe 10 or less. And that was all through the power of harnessing AI to actually help with, like I said, acquisition and fulfillment.

So, that is a vibe consultant.

It's AI consulting.

Yeah. And you're a non-technical person.

Yeah. But you have consult, you're an expert consultant and you've learned to harness AI within that and show other people. So, for someone like me and I think probably a lot of people who watch my channel, I know how to use AI really well. I'm not a technical person. Now, I'm like, okay, how do I what service do I sell or how do I make money with my skills? And that's what

You're going to show me today.

Absolutely. I'm going to show you with you don't even need all of the AI knowledge that you and your audience have from your channel.

You don't need you don't even need that. This is the beauty of this model. like we we we can take it down another notch which is why this is so approachable for everybody because the vast majority of people I work with, they barely got a ChatGPT account but by you know, the end of learning this process, they're much more familiar with Claude and ChatGPT and all that stuff but we're not doing it to the nth degree. We're not building N workflows and all that craziness unless people wanted to. We are we are coming in as a consultant and helping businesses AI transform through this AI revolution. So I'm going to You know what? I'm going to start unpacking some of this opportunity because I think giving some statistics here is going to help people understand just how big this market is.

So AI is about to disrupt a $1.06 trillion market. So people can't really conceptualize how big consulting is. But just for example, you got like Bain, PWC, Deloitte, McKinsey, all the four biggest consulting firms in the world. They do anywhere from 20 to 80 billion a year in revenue, right? So people think like this idea of like an AI automation agency is like this huge business but it's actually not. In the in the market cap is about 22 billion right now. Digital creative agencies 276 billion. You got SaaS which people think is enormous 370 billion. The entirety although it's not here of like all digital marketing agencies across every spectrum is about 750 billion. Um, but consulting is actually the biggest of all of these markets and it's a $1.06 trillion market and ultimately consulting is just white collar knowledge work. Right? We come in with our expertise and we help people achieve an outcome. Right? That's all a consultant has done and AI has made that more efficient than ever before.

This is that market then?

Because the first thing everyone does when they realize what AI can do, they're like, I'm going to use Claude code or Replit or something. I'm going to build a SaaS and I'm going to build a software and sell. But the consulting opportunity is over double the SaaS thing and you don't need to know how to build software. Is that

Exactly.

Basically that?

It's exactly that. And not only that, but the SaaS market is actually shrinking because of AI agents are actually gobbling this up, right? And that's kind of not something that I cover within this, but we are seeing the SaaS market go essentially start to shrink at an exponential rate as AI agents are essentially able to do what people were previously paying SaaS companies for.

Exactly. 100%. Like you know, I'm using, you know, I'm not using Buffer or anything for scheduling posts and stuff. I've got it all inside my Claude co-work, right? like when it comes to all that stuff, newsletter, like it's all within there now. Um, and I think becoming an API first software company, um, which is like another thing is actually the only way they're going to they're going to survive. But yeah, I mean, you you the market claim, Google, they're all just Grok, they're just destroying SaaS at a crazy rate. And like again, some more context, this is good old Google Trends. um and the growth rate of AI consulting and AI consultant. Uh, you can also look up things like AI managed service providers, right? So AI MSPs is just growing at like a drastic clip. And comparative to say management consulting, which is what the big four do, we can see on these graphs how fast it's growing. Like how many people are now searching like, hey, I want an AI consultant. I need somebody to come in and tell me where AI can basically plug the holes in my leaky bucket of a business, right? Holes that have previously been, you know, missed by employees or just not been sold for whatever reason. So, this is essentially the the opportunity and and the growth rate and we are at the very start of this. So, you know, anybody watching they're like, "Oh, is this you know, already passed us by?" People thought that with the AI automation stuff, it like we are the early adopters, like innovators, early adopters, like we couldn't be closer to the start, the tip of the spear. I always say like it is so early and there is hundreds of millions of companies that need this. So when people like, "Oh, it's getting swamped or crowded," this opportunity is going to be alive for a while. But what I can say for sure because every every opportunity proves this that the early adopters will own 80% of the market.

And every single business in the world needs AI.

Basically.

That's my opinion.

Yeah. I mean, the only ones that are going to uh be able to avoid it to a certain degree would be sort of blue-collar service style because, you know, the plumber doesn't need to adopt AI. It would. But if you're if you're a plumbing service and you're busy and you're quoting for jobs and there's other plumbers out there that are using AI and they're getting their quotes and proposals out within 30 minutes and you're taking a week,

Yeah,

you're you're struggling.

Well, there is there is truth to that, but if you're the only plumber in town, it doesn't make any difference, right?

Hey, like if you're selling hot if if you're selling hot dogs in a like a baseball stadium, then yeah, fine. But

Exactly. No, that this is the thing. I mean, it's don't get me wrong, what's going to happen, right, is the large the companies that adopt AI are just going to gobble up market share of the ones that don't.

But they they'll it's a bit like with digital transformation, right? When people all came online, like how many genuinely tens of millions of companies still don't have a website and that is just like a crazy idea that they still in 2026 don't have a website. But there's tons that don't and they obviously do all right for themselves, right? But yes, there is there is always the people who adopt technology early always usually own the market, right? And that's basically what we're seeing right now is the people who are pushing this um are just are gobbling it up at a drastic rate.

So, let's talk about the three distinct ways on a more digital um with a more digital scope that I see AI being kind of commercially viable for most people. And like I want to break these down um and this is kind of going to be a core tenant of this of this uh podcast. So, we got the AI consulting and we're in the business of identification, right? And you're going to hear me discuss a lot about diagnosis and stuff um throughout this. We've got AI creative agencies. So you might know these as people made like AI avatar, AI UGC, all that stuff where you you previously had influencer pools, talent pools that you had to pay, you know, X amount to record a video. They're now being gobbled up by, you know, nano, banana, and um Arc Ads and all all those amazing services that basically now building complete AI influencer pages and influencer profiles that, you know, I'll be honest, I'm struggling to tell the difference with like as of recording. I I sometimes look and I'm like, is that AI? No. You know,

I I feel I look at so much stuff and we look at this stuff all day every day. I'm like,

I know.

I I don't I'm not sure.

Like I almost got I almost got crypto scammed the other day by a fake Donald Trump.

It's it's crazy and this is this is what I'm saying. like we are deep in the trenches with this and we are still now double-taking and going hang on, is this AI or not?

And that's scary. And I I one thing just on the creative agencies whilst we're on it.

Part of the reason is as well is because a lot of women use filters. So when you put a filter on your videos and on your photos and then you got AI, they both look too perfect. So then it's

We're also recording in Riverside right now. Riverside has makeup features and blush and all and you can put them on Zoom and everything, right? So, everyone's using them in their digital world anyway,

which makes it harder. So, now your imperfections are your moat to being real.

You know, that spot on your face is your moat.

Yeah. Which is great. And then the third time for ugly people then this is when they come.

Yeah. Yeah. 100% 100%. And the same thing happened when Blu-ray and DVDs came out. All the actors complained Blu-ray raid was showing their imperfections, which was hilarious. I still remember that. Um, the third is the most common, which is AI automation. This has been out for like the last sort of two or three years. The idea of use Make.com, Zapier, N8N um to build workflows for people. So whether it be autoresponder or voice agent, knowledge base, chatbots, things of that nature. Now this is the most common um of of the three kind of opportunities. Now when it comes to what each model actually sells to the end business, the AI consultant sells clarity. So the owner walks away and goes with a with a clear road map ahead of how they can essentially AI transform. The creative agencies are selling output. They but just give them the assets like, hey, here's your 100 UGC bits of content that you want to run for marketing or on your socials. An AI automation is selling a system. So it's like, hey, here's the thing you wanted. Here's the workflow. Now the downside of the automation is

Plug and play like just plugs into the business and goes.

Yeah. But the issue is is a lot of them aren't plug-and-play, right? Because every business is different. So you've got the integration problem and the systems problem with this, which is why you need to charge higher prices. Um, and without the clarity piece up front, I use this analogy of like businesses are like a Toyota Corolla and they want to become these Lamborghinis. And the issue is they're now like trying to stick on Lamborghini bumpers and doors and get an engine in there. And at the end of it, they've got a Toyota Corolla with a load of Lamborghini crap on it. And then they look back and go, "That's what I wanted." They they actually wanted Lamborghini. And for companies to become the Lamborghini, uh, they have to actually take it down to a chassis, start there, and and understand like how do they become an AI first company?

They need a blueprint to build their car, right?

Exactly. Yeah. You've got to be you've got to be strategic first. You got to plan it out and go, "Oh, I need the chassis of the Lamborghini before I need the bumpers and the engine and all that stuff."

Which is why like these two work in tandem very well, and we'll touch on that in a little bit. But, um, this one without this one is a big reason for the failure rate, which is now what I want to talk about. for for businesses out there that might might be looking at this from the other point of view.

Just going and buying an N810 workflow or bringing someone in to just be like, I'm going to build AI into your company doesn't work very well, is what you're saying. And we need to start actually what what are the problems in my business that need solving or that AI can solve and then I need to build those specially for my business, not just go and buy an off-the-shelf solution and try and sort of plumb it in somehow.

Exactly. Solutions aren't business-specific, right? As in like an off-the-shelf solution isn't business-specific. So you have to solve specific business problems with specific business solutions, right? So you have to match them one for one. So yeah, I mean, this is kind of what we're we're going to discuss right now and why a lot of these projects end up failing is because you know the founders, the owners see something cool on YouTube, on Twitter, gets the team so excited. Hey, we've got this workflow that's coming in that's going to do XYZ, right? The tool gets plugged in. So they they they pay somebody off Fiverr or Upwork or some agency to plug it in and then everyone hopes it works, but there isn't actually any change management and any adoption from the organization as a whole and then three months later, that tool that they paid a bit of money for is not getting used. The team didn't adopt it and it's now just collecting dust. And MIT did a study, I think it was 95% of AI implementations when they did it had failed to deliver any meaningful ROI. And it's because there is like a couple of core pieces missing that we do within consulting that basically take them from a low chance of success to a high chance of success. And one of them is the strategy part. So actually figuring out what would be meaningful to that business, which is what we're going to discuss today. And the other one is what you call change management, which is essentially what we both do on YouTube, which is upskilling people to actually start using AI as a person to start understanding that it's not about a replacement, it's about enhancement. And if you actually take that mindset of like, hey, we're we're going to upskill you and elevate you into like a super human, let's call it, um, then actual change, like real meaningful changes happen within businesses. But those two things have not been happening, right? They haven't had a good strategy and then even when they have and they roll out an implementation, if change management and adoption wasn't there, it doesn't matter how good the implementation and the strategy was, it still doesn't happen, right? Because the people weren't bought in. And it it's like the fastest way to know if you pro the uh the implementation is going to fail is how bought in the people are within the company. Like, are they excited? Are they trepidacious? Sounds a great word.

Yeah. You you you need a founder or the top level leadership to not just be ticking boxes of we did AI. They actually need to understand the whole picture of what's going on.

Exactly that. Right. They they have to be they either the founder has to be very um AI aware and want to do it, or they have to have a senior member who is what we would deem an AI champion. So they might have, let's say, it could even be like the CFO, it really makes no difference, but they have to be in a position of power within the org and they have to be really pushing for this. So when there is hurdles, they are the person that the organization looks at to overcome them. If it is kind of like, oh, everyone kind of do something, this is where this failure rate comes from, right? There the there has to be a very distinct road map to get a company from where it is now to where it wants to go. um and and all those pieces in between, which is why, you know, getting an AI chatbot has has never fixed anything, right? Because it it's you know, it's not solving a root cause in the business. You know, it's it's just it's symptom versus cause.

So on the flip side, the top 20% are seeing insane results. So the people that actually have a plan, actually have road maps, and actually follow you know, all these tried and true principles, which is strategy, roadmap, implementation, and then adoption, and all in kind of one bucket. I've seen 100% plus ROIs. Like you're seeing this on your end with everybody you're working with are seeing insane ROI where they are just constantly eliminating bottlenecks. And this is another huge thing that comes from adoption. When you upskill a workforce, you also now don't have to go in and do everything. You are training the people to do it for themselves. So there is like this exponential growth curve within an organization when you are upskilling their staff as well. So the way this always breaks down is we find the expensive problem within the organization or expensive problems as it always is. We quantify the cost. So like what's the labor wastage on this? How much is that spending? Like what's the tool wastage? All that stuff. And then then we prescribe the solution. Right? So we're not ever giving them a solution prior to having an understanding of their business specifically.

So these are the three, what you're saying, if I'm right, these are the three steps of AI consulting.

Yes. These are like 30,000 dropping them.

Here's here's the solution.

Correct. 30,000 foot view. This is basically what we're doing. Right. So we're going in, we're finding all the expensive problems. We're quantifying the costs of you know, what would basically get them in ROI and then we prescribe the solution to them.

Exactly that. So, I've got a saying that, you know, I use all the time in my content in my business, which is prescription without diagnosis is malpractice. And it obviously comes from the medical field. And I always love that because it with the AI, you know, revolution, that is what's been happening, which is everyone's saying, hey, buy my AI chat or buy this workflow, do this. And they haven't actually diagnosed if there was a root problem they're solving for. They're just prescribing them the solution that they have.

Right. This is why

To jump on that, uh, medical sort of angle to to to kind of get this straight in my mind is I mean in the UK we have our our GPs and our general practitioners where I go to to just I've got a problem or like I feel like I should go to the doctor. He diagnoses the problem and then he prescribes something. He doesn't actually or she rarely actually delivers the actual treatment. You usually get sent to go to the drugstore to get the drugs or you get sent to the surgeon to go and have an operation. Is that, because for non-technical people, is that the same sort of thing that we're going to? You might be touching on this later. The same sort of thing. Like you get to the the diagnosis and the prescription, but you're then working with sending them off to other people or doing the implementation.

Yeah, absolutely. We're going to be covering that. So, there is a few different.

Jumping the gun.

No, no, no, no. It's great. So, yeah, the reason the medical term I use it um is because it's so relatable, right? Like we all know what it's like. you go to a doctor and it is literally a like a crime that carries a very serious jail sentence if you give people drugs without diagnosing their actual problem, right? Like it's it's not like, oh, it's like a slap on the wrist. It's serious serious stuff. And yet in the AI world, that's all people are doing. Like everybody is just prescribing. Like that's that's it. And that's the issue with these AI automation agencies is the found the CEOs are coming and saying, "Hey, I want this." CEOs a lot of the time they're too far away from the core problems, which is what I want to I want to dive into here, right? So, there if if here's how we kind of we're going to break it down, right? This is why it fails. Step one is if there's no quantifiable problem, there's no way for us to measure an ROI for us implementing a solution. So we can't tie back money or time to it, right? We can't measure ROI. Right? The other thing is if people just speak with CEOs, they only know where they're at and kind of where they want to go, but they don't actually know the road to get there. Like, you know, the bricks and the workflows and actual day-to-day tasks, they're too far away, which is what most people do. They speak with the owners and founders and they say, "Hey, I want again, I just keep using AI chatbot because they are definitely my villain. Like I just like people who just sling AI chatbots riles me, man. It is my villain. AI, I'm telling you people that sell goddamn AI chatbots. Um, and then yeah, so you without diagnosis, you're just essentially you're just selling a hammer, right? So most AI sellers walk in with a solution without hunting for that problem, which is what we've discussed, right? When diagnosis derisks the solution for the buyer. Now, the flip side is obviously, hey, they've now got to pay for the diagnosis. Yes, but big businesses do this. And this is something that I want to mention now is that AI consulting, one of the advantages of it is this isn't as prevalent in like a five or 10 person business because a lot of those companies just want to grow. It's like, hey, I want marketing. I just want to grow, right? And they might know, hey, I I do just want an AI receptionist. Let's just use that blanket example. But when you go into a $50 million per year manufacturing company and you find out the owner is, you know, 80 years old and still does all the quoting and estimates, which by the way is mega common. Like people like, "No, it's not. Seriously common because"

It is. Like I see that as well speaking to business owners, manufacturers down here in Cornwall, basically every manufacturing business is run by a 60, 70, 80-year-old owner who's doing is still fixing the toilets.

Yeah. And and the big reason is that especially like on the estimation and quote side, right, is because they've grown up with the industry. So they they they look at like stock prices and stuff. I don't want to go too deep on the rabbit hole, but they understand their margins and scope creep and they they've just it's all in this like mental model that they've built up over 30, 40, 50 years of doing it when now AI can actually import all that information, like drag it all in and actually enable, you know, a young Thundercat, you know, some 25-year-old who's really into his manufacturing and engineering to come in and actually have access to that knowledge base of the 80-year-old where projects now aren't being you know, misquoted and, you know, which is losing the company money.

Which is just it's a huge huge unlock for a lot of traditional businesses which are incredibly owner-reliant and

Believe it or not, size, like I said, I've been inside of um manufacturing engineering companies which I've done a bunch of this in and there'll be 50 plus, you know, people again, like, you know, they might be doing 30 million a year. Owner, maybe owner and his wife, she still does all finances and he still does all of the sales and estimation.

Like and yet they are deep in the eight figures.

Real common. Um, and you can think like they're just a couple of examples, but it's the same in so many businesses. Um,

No, I I don't want to get too bogged down in this bit, but it it also uh when you look at this the sort of talk around that generation wanting to transition out of their businesses and wanting to try and sell them and stuff, it becomes really hard to sell that business because it's so reliant on the the two owners.

Yeah. That actually

Thinking about some of the stuff I've done in the past, that's an even even deeper niche for AI consulting is like I'm going to help you sell your business as well as implement these systems. Like the opportunity just keeps growing in my mind. So anyway, I want to learn how to do this. I was going to say I'm glad you brought that up because we've actually consulted with a company and their goal was to reduce key man risk to exit in three years because the guy's literally 84. No word of a lie. And that is literally was the point of the engagement was to remove key man risk to automate what he does so they can sell the business in three years.

So that that the whole point of the engagement was actually to do with enterprise value and exit. So we do we do that too. So, I'm going to break down now uh the six-step framework that we use to actually basically figure out the business problems um and prescribe them with the correct solutions and then type.

If you're if you're watching and listening to this now, I think this is the time to real like put away your phone and pay attention. Andrew is about to tell us how to do this in six steps.

Give you give you some nice little insights here so you can go away and do it for yourself. Okay. So, first thing is is you'll hear this from a lot of business owners. Oh, we need AI. We want to automate X department. We want to automate our fulfillment. We want to automate marketing, right? But these aren't outcomes. These are just vague wishes, right? Like you have to get really specific, right? So, if you can't measure it, you can't improve it. If you can't quantify it, you can't prove ROI. And if you can't prove ROI, you don't get paid, right? So, the things you need is you need a current state, a target state, and then the measurable delta between those two things, which can be tied back to what we do as consultants. Okay. So here's what this looks like in practice. They say, "Oh, I want to improve lead response time." So the current state is three to four hours, which we touched on with the plumber, right? Maybe three weeks under five minutes, right? Could be within 30 seconds with AI receptions. Conversion rate goes from 20% to 24%. Very measurable. Repetitive work. AI do you know five hours a week of posting content or content creation. This is now zero hours because it's all done by AI. We've got out of hour out of hours coverage, which is huge huge huge in service industries, huge. And it's like we have no out of hours to now we have 100% coverage weekends. As soon as we shut five, we have coverage. Okay. So stop asking what they want to automate and start asking where the bleeding money is. These this is the core and most focused part of the uh engagement is the initial discovery part. So we need to ask a lot of deep questions to many people within an organization to figure out where they're actually bleeding money, like what are the things they hate. So here's a few examples of those things to start with.

Exactly. Yeah. We just we really want to unpack their processes end to end. Right. So it's like, what is the most expensive problem you're dealing with like right now? Right. If we solve this one thing, you know, that would move the most in revenue, what would that be? You know, how where are you losing money but haven't fixed it? So what are these things that maybe overwhelm or too technical? They just don't know how to do, right? But every outcome you need to tie it back to monetary uh to a monetary amount. So that doesn't need to be like, oh, we're losing $10,000 because we're not doing this thing. It can be, you know, Sandra spends 15 hours on this task and that's like a good chunk of her week's work. She's focusing on this thing. So if I can get that back, I can reallocate those hours somewhere else. She can start doing this stuff where we can generate additional revenue from her work. But also Sandra gets paid, you know, hypothetically $100 an hour, saving 15 hours a week, right? You do the math. You you give your $1,500 bucks per week better off because you've now got that time back for to reallocate her, which is really where AI consulting comes into its own because as consultants, we are much more focused on bottom line. So how much money, how much profit we make companies. We're not focused on revenue. So, we're not trying to grow them. What we say to prospects is, "Hey, you're at $10 million ARR right now. You do 1.5 in net profit or EBITDA or whatever you'd like to call it. We're going to help you raise that to 2.2." Right? That's where we live. We live in that delta. We don't live in, hey, you're at 10, we're going to get you to 12, right? where growth consultants.

You're blowing my mind a little bit on the what we were just discussing about setting businesses up for acquisition when you talk about hey you guys don't have to grow. I'm going to do this. It's going to be a succession plan for you and hey your EBITDA is going to look pretty dang good once I've helped you implement these bits.

100%. They become more efficient. That is literally the focus of a consultant. Right. So, let's talk about mapping because this again is very important. And what's crazy is most businesses have never mapped their processes ever. Literally ever.

Step two, just so we're finding all the problems and asking deep questions. Then step two is we need to

We're just asking all the questions to figure out their processes and then we've mapped them. So step one is asking all the questions, figuring out their processes. Now we want to map their processes. So we need to ask all the executives and all the employees everything from day-to-day. So we need to know everything from strategic thinking and decision all the way to the thing getting done and whether it's a success or a failure. We need to know every single bit in that chain. Okay. So we need to know the full workflow of all their processes and that is where we will then identify bottlenecks and her basically inefficiencies that AI can solve for and I'm going to show you a few examples in this presentation as well. So executives show you know the destination, but operators know the road. And this is why interviewing both, you know, the executives and the employees is incredibly important. And one of my favorite techniques for everybody to take away is um ask them, walk me through exactly what you did yesterday morning. And then just keep asking, and what did you do then? And why did you do that? And what did you do then? How does that work? What? And all of a sudden you'll just start to figure out, oh, they have to open three tabs and take it from that CRM to this ERP to the and you're like, why are you doing all that? That's just how it is.

So, we're literally all you have to do, sorry. All you have to do is in this mapping process is sit down with someone and just get them to show you or slash tell you from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. what they do all day.

Correct.

Simple. That's as simple as that. Yes, but it sounds simple, but you've got to be good at just unpacking because a lot of people will intuitively just skip over the inefficiencies because they're used to them. So, they'll go to Hub and then we do this and then we do this and then they'll be like, well, what do you do in Hubs? Oh, we have to click here and we have to duplicate this. Why do you have to duplicate that?

Like, show me every click of your mouse during the day.

Exactly that. Which is what we are we are going to be diving into. Here is an an example, right? So, a follow-up with leads. Well, what does that look like? It's one task. People just follow up, right? Let's break it down. So, if they open the CRM, they'll filter leads in the last 24 hours. They check the ICP match, make sure they're a good fit for the company. They read the submission details. They'll then draft a personalized response. They then send an email, and then they'll set a follow-up reminder.

So, the assumption of we follow up with leads, which we all do, is actually seven tasks. But what's the actual SOP that you have in your mind that isn't written down anywhere?

Correct. It's it's the assumption we all make. It's the clicks we all do without thinking about it. And this is this is where we want to pull out the inefficiencies, right?

And that's what as I said, then what happens? This is stuff. Then then what? Then what? Then what? Okay. So, let me walk you through a real example. We did an assessment or an audit on a company that had a a reasonable sales floor. Okay. So they had eight SDRs um at the time and each SDR was wasting about two hours in the morning before they did the single sales call. SDR, sales development representative. Think about these are the guys not closing the deal. So from like a prospect, whether they're doing the prospecting, they're going out and having to source the leads, might be inbound leads, but then they will set them up to to set with an account executive who closes the deal. Right? Yeah.

So they are basically all they do is identify prospects, qualify prospects, and then book calls with an account executive to close deal. That's that's basically the flow. Very common in um like SaaS. This is like super common, right?

They're doing a lot of the grunt work.

Correct. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the VP was like, oh yeah, they they spend all their time selling. But then what we actually found is between 9 and 11, all the reps were having to manually prospect, right? But they just didn't know, right? Real common. And he had no he just had no idea. He's too far away. Right? Here is another example as well. Right? And I'm going to break down the numbers of the SDR one in a second, too. This one's really unusual. This is actually an investment firm who focused on deceased property owners, right? So, this was like their niche was like finding properties that basically they didn't have owners anymore because the person had died. So, it was like this is what their steps look like in the day to try and identify a lead, right? Pull tax records, filter by value, filter by taxes, uh individual or company, ancestry, obituary, public records, and then cross-reference, then verify, then document, then next lead. Right? So between steps eight and nine, just these two bits here was about 15 minutes a lead. So once they'd got this, they then had to do about 15 minutes of verification. Right? So, if we're pulling, you know, 30 leads a day and we can save them 15 minutes here on each one of those leads, we're starting to get back some some serious time in just this one workflow.

So, you're not even talking about automating the whole or like trying to AI thing. It's like, what is I've got this thing. What is one step in this process that I could use AI for to start with?

With this one, we couldn't do it because of some of the like a lot of the portals and stuff weren't modern.

So, I was breaking down in terms of like the goal isn't necessarily to go from step one to step 11. When you're breaking down these processes, you're like, "Okay,

If I can just auto, if I can just improve one of these steps or two of these steps here, and it's going to save 15 minutes of clicking around across a whole sales team,

you could then calculate the ROI on just that one little thing in a business.

Correct. I mean, ideally though, I would automate this whole thing. So,

Yeah. So with with again, and this is where I think tools like Co-work and Manness and stuff actually would be able to automate this a lot more of this now. And this is another advantage of us being in the AI world. Projects we did three months ago, six months ago, we could now go back and sell them more stuff and update those processes because so much has evolved like in the last three months. In our internal consulting firm, we have like totally abolished N everything is in Claude code now, literally everything. We do not touch Zapier, Make, N basically anymore for anything. Like you the might have the odd little thing, but it's honestly it's like we are 99.9% Claude code. And that is in the last last three months. That's how fast it evolves, right? So now with authentic services like Manness, right? And Claude Co-work, that can go on the browser, you could actually automate more of this now. And with the ability to make your own MCPs. I don't want to go way too technical on this, but you can now, you know, develop your own stuff there.

For people in the past like myself who would have been like like I get this stuff, but I don't build those like crazy N810 flows you see people posting on TikTok and LinkedIn. And I look at them, I'm like, great, but you haven't actually replaced the whole marketing department with an N810 flow, which is probably going to break, and I'm going to spend more time trying to figure out how to fix it than it actually runs.

Yeah.

And and you're not the only business that has had that sort of Make.com back end that's gone, uh, I don't need to call up my Make.com guy anymore because I can just tell Claude Co-work or Claude Code to to do the thing. I don't really care how it does it. It just does it.

Yeah, for a not not for everything, like that would almost be on the extreme as well, but for a lot of stuff, it absolutely can.

I I those those videos but yeah, replace my No, you didn't. No, you didn't. You made relax. You made a YouTube video. The um the funny like I give people this example all the time. So, this is one we did for a solar company and this was an N810 was really really useful. So, anyone that's dealt with large sales team and solar is like an extreme because it's all door-to-door. They'll have like they might have 500 plus reps. Anyone that has dealt with a sales team knows they are terrible at admin. Sales people hate it and they just don't do it. And it is like the bane of the managers and my existence to chase them up. Right? I've got a sales team. So, the simple workflow we built was in Telegram was voice-to-text transcription with a CRM update. So, they would go door knock and they'd say, "Hey, I knocked on 123 John Street. Uh, the owner wasn't there," and they'd send a Telegram, and then it would transcribe that and then it would update the CRM with that note, and the reps would more than happily just voice note after each door knock and just fill it in.

So, so here we're saying I'm speaking to this company and they're an old whatever firm and it's an 80-year-old owner and it's like, "Oh, we but my team, they'll never be able to learn AI to use this stuff even if you implement it." But that's not even necessarily always the case. It's like,

I'm just going to make it easy for the staff to do their job. Don't worry about what's going on underneath. That kind of takes care of itself. That's all I

So they're not you. Yes, you can go in and upskill all the staff and train them how to use Claude Co-work and Claude and stuff,

but you don't even have to go as far as that.

Definitely not. And and and candidly, don't try and force a square peg into a round hole. There's a lot of people that don't want to learn this, but they're happy to operate within a system you put in front of them. And I I'm a big believer in like, hey, I'll give everybody an opportunity and and really push the ones that want it. But, you know, again, like if if Doris just she's happy, you know, to say, hey, just go and click these buttons and do this process now. And you just train her on it. She doesn't need know the back end. She doesn't want to know. She just needs to know how to do the job. Like that's absolutely fine. But yeah, like all AI is trying to do, like let's not let's not over here. We're just trying to make everyone's life easier, right? And and

That's that's all these processes are doing. We're just we're trying to make these tasks that most people find laborious and hate to make them more enjoyable.

It's

I mean, sales is the obvious one. So they're getting rid of that drudgery and that like doing work and being like if you're a salesperson, you can spend another hour every day talking to people. You can spend another hour with one client or go and find 10 more to to speak to rather than filling in your CRM.

Exactly. So this is these are the the four questions that we ask about like every task within an organization just to figure out whether this is something that's really genuinely should be um automated or improved with.

AI, right? So, is the input structured? Is it yes or is it no? Is it, you know, vague versus formal? Right? Are the decisions rule-based? Yes or no? Is it a judgment call? Is the output predictable? No, it's creative. It's a strategy. It's whatever. It's almost a bit more esoteric. Or yes, it's like standardized responses. And is it repeated often? Yes and no. The only one of these that I was... it quiveron maybe is not the correct word. It's four.

So, um, I know I didn't do this project myself, but there was a guy I know did a project for an IPOed company and they have to do quarterly reports, earning reports, and it's usually two to three days of all the execs >> somewhere putting this stuff together. So even though it is, like, you know, one off every three months, the actual cost to the company is enormous because these are all earning many six figures a year and they're now all have to sit in a room and go through all the quarterly reports and put the whole document together. And the idea now is AI: it's not going to give you just a full final, yeah, you've done nothing 30 seconds later you got it, but with a lot of AI stuff it will get you 80, 85% of the way there. Like, that's the beauty of it, right? Like it gets you that much further. So now rather than needing a full, you know, 4-day offsite for all the C-suite to do something like a quarterly earnings report, you can now do something like that in a day, right? Huge measurable impact, right? And also standardizing the process too, which is >> so you got to think, like, is this worth it at the end of the day? Which is, I guess, ties back to that ROI and >> 100% >> selling it to the business >> 100%.

So the way we do this for the companies is we have what you call an opportunity matrix, which just allows us to prioritize what we found. So we've identified a bunch of solutions. How do we prioritize the ones we go for? Right? So the quick wins are the ones which are highest value but also the least in cost. So that might be cost and or difficulty. Right? And then you got big swings, which are the ones that are also really high value but they're just going to take a lot longer to do. So when we're working with a company, we obviously always start with the quick wins because these are what I like to call the springboard. This is how we jump up to those big swings. We deliver them a measurable ROI that they can see and that basically finances the next stage, right? And it also builds that relationship.

>> Hit me with, hit me with like some examples of quick wins. Like, I go to a business and I'm like, "What's a quick win that you see?"

>> Um, cool. So, the uh solar one is definitely one. We did one for a property management firm and, uh, they had a nightmare because they did short-term rentals with invoicing. So, you got all these contractors. They're buying furniture for all these people's Airbnb rentals. And it was literally categorizing everything and then making the invoices to send to the actual Airbnb owner. So, because he's got to pay the property management firm. So, it's like this triangle that we saved them like 25 hours a week just on that one task. Really quick to do.

>> Um, very similar thing with actually a trucking and transportation company was invoicing, uh, from the drivers. Um, there's a bunch. I mean, I'm trying to think of some others off the top of my head. Accounting. Uh, so we did accountancy practice in the UK and that was a lot to do with client onboarding and also billing as well was a real quick win because they're using platforms like Xero and whatnot as well. Um, yeah, I mean there's some off the top of my head, but it's all, it's all manual document laborious processes. Like they're always the quick wins because they don't require sort of a huge knowledge base or a data center. They don't require you to build something massive to actually deliver the ROI there. Because with big swings, like one of the main ones that we do for companies that they want and they candidly they need, because if you want to become an AI-first company, you have to first be a data-first company. So the big thing that every business needs, and this is the biggest opportunity for everybody listening to this, especially if you're technical, is every company needs a centralized knowledge base. They all need a brain where everything goes to it. Everything. Then, and this, by the way, what I touched on earlier about the Lamborghini chassis, that is the chassis. This is the bit that most people don't realize.

>> The sha, the Lamborghini chassis is the data center of that organization, to which you bolt on chatbots and all your quotations, your estimations. That all comes from the central repository. Such a huge point in making AI work for anything. The, obviously, central sort of truth for data when you're doing some of this stuff, but even on a fundamental level, when I'm coaching and training people, they go in and they're like, "I want AI to do my marketing for me," or "I just want to use Claude to, like, do my marketing, write sales reports," but it gets it all wrong. I say, "Okay, you need to set up a project." And this is so simple, but like, set up a project. Okay, you need your ICP, your ideal customer profile. You need to put that in there. They go, "Oh, we don't have that." And we go, "Okay, can we get—can I get a copy of your brand guidelines?" "Oh, we don't have brand guidelines." And you're kind of like,

>> "Okay, let's take it back a second. We need the fundamental core pieces of, yeah,

>> what a business and a brand is before you can train AI to—or move data and train AI to work for you." And that's it's a missing thing in so many businesses.

>> It, it's, it's basically not in any business. This is the point, like,

>> AI consulting, and I call it like boring AI, um, is it's the bor—it's like strategy and data and just basically teaching companies how to have good foundations so AI can then actually come in and genuinely transform them into the vehicle that they need to become in this next wave. Right? And

>> so it's not what people think AI is, or this the first step is not—because I've been to people and they want me to, like, help them AIify their business, which is great. I can train, upskill people, but I feel like sometimes they've got a huge tech stack. They've already got like 20 pieces of legacy software in the company, and me going and saying, "Hey, use Claude, Copilot, uh, use this, use these five AI tools," it's just adding to them. And the staff are just like, "But I've already got to use seven tools a day, and now you're telling me to use three more, and it—and they're all disconnected because all their data sits in a different piece of legacy software and a OneDrive and a Google Drive and then an accounting system and this and that." And it's like, well, first we need to get everything in one place to, then, then you can start building on your Lamborghini foundations.

>> 100%. Yep. That's it. That's literally it. Yep. Um, so let's tie back to some ROI. So, you know, we touched the SDRs, sales development representatives. So, this is actually the numbers for this team. Um, so our business owners, they're logical people. They buy ROI and outcomes. They don't buy some fancy edit and workflow. This is why people that say, "I build this really complex thing," never make sales, because no one cares, right? They just want to know what it's going to do for them, right? Standard sales principle. So this is the formula for you all to use. Time wasted times number of people times days per year times loaded hourly cost is the annual waste. So this is the real number for that SDR one. They were wasting two hours a day. There was eight SDRs, 260 days a year. $40 an hour was what we, uh, averaged out at. So this one workflow was—um, sorry, this one process was wasting them $166,000 a year. Now if we said, "Hey, we're going to charge you $60,000 to fix this," and candidly, most people are going to charge significantly less. They're going to say, "We'll do it for two grand," which is something that I see so often is people undercharging like crazy. Like,

>> it's unbelievable how you go, "Oh, we've got these solutions and we've pulled out, you know, we can save you $500,000 a year." And they go, "We're going to do it for five grand."

>> What?

>> Like, what are you doing? Like, it's worth like a hundred grand. And you're thinking, "Yeah, but it's really easy to do in N8N, or it's really easy doing." They don't know that.

>> It's easy for you because you know how to use N8N. It's not easy for anyone else.

>> Correct. Like, it's this thing that riles me is people undercharge like crazy. Like, one of the big things I coach on is pricing, right?

>> It's unbelievable how many people have just belief-shattering breakthroughs when they go to market and go, "Oh, how much is running an AI order assessment?" You're like, "Anywhere from 5 to 15,000." I wouldn't say that. I'd just give them a price. And people go, "They're not going to pay five grand for me to put together a presentation." And then when you do it and then we, we had, um, someone, uh, her name's Horse. She's awesome. And she charged five grand for a first order, and it was what, actually ironically, was a manufacturing company. And the owner called her up after doing it and told her that he felt guilty for not paying her more because he didn't realize it was going to be this valuable. Right? Like, you people really don't understand how valuable it is we're offering because we're all digital.

>> Can I, can I just go back one step?

>> Yeah. Yeah. Sure.

>> Because you said she charged $5,000

>> pounds

>> $5,000.

>> Yeah.

>> For the audit.

>> Yeah.

>> So just the, um, going in and seeing what they do and saying, "Hey, here's all the different options. Here's all the ways you're wasting time and money."

>> Correct. Yeah. Uh, it's a presentation deck we put together very similar to this where we break down where they're at now, you know, what we've identified, the workflows that we identified, the AI solutions, the costs associated with them, and then the roadmap to—

>> and the business owner said just for the audit, just for the diagnosis, that she was undercharging.

>> Correct. Yeah.

>> Okay. So now, yeah, now I see. When that first slide, I understand

>> more that that opportunity that you were presenting at the side at the start.

>> Exactly.

>> We're not—we don't even have to, like—so, I'm just trying to get my head around it.

>> I don't even have to teach them to use any AI. I don't have to implement anything. I don't have to build an N8N workflow. I just have to tell them the problems they have and map out the ROI for them, like in its most basic form, and I can charge for that process.

>> Correct. Yep. Which, by the way, is what the big four do. Like, they start with strategy. So you have to have a roadmap. Like, this isn't weird to big companies. This is how every big company works with consultants. It's—

>> which is why you obviously get that thing of like consultants get paid a lot for doing nothing. But actually, you can't do the rest of—you can't do the rest without

>> the

>> diagnosis, as you said.

>> Yeah. Yeah. You have to have—

>> Yeah. You have to have a roadmap. That's the point. It's like there has been, like, I think 40 billion they estimated, but it'll be more than that, was on ROI solutions that just didn't work. Has already been spent, but it'll be significantly more than that. And it's like, yeah, because they didn't have a roadmap. They were just bolting bumpers onto a, onto a broken-down Corolla and they expected it to work. And there wasn't all this stuff that we've touched on so far. Like, consultants exist and they've existed for a long, long, long time for a reason. And AI isn't—people think, "Oh, consultants are going to be dead because it's knowledge work." Here's what I see: so many people are trying to do. They're like, "Oh, I can use a voice agent to jump on the phone with the owners. They can ask them a few questions. AI can actually do the interview process." No. No. The reason we're able to charge so much is because it's human-to-human. And then the reason—

>> nothing grinds my gear—you've had your grinded gear ran. Nothing grinds my gears more than going into a business and them saying, "Can you automate the whole thing for me? Show me how to do it so that I don't have to have any staff and I can just sit on the beach and, like, maybe, like, I'll take a couple sales calls for, like, high-value stuff, or I might send a few WhatsApps."

>> Nothing annoys me more, 'cause I'm like, you don't want to—you don't want a business. You don't want to run a business or be—you just want to make money without doing any work for it, which—

>> which, unless you've got to Warren Buffett status where you've got enough frigin capital to just sit on the stock market,

>> that doesn't happen.

>> Exactly that. Right. It's like, it's la-la land. Exactly.

>> There's no, there's no re—there's not really a such a thing as passive income because it needs some work somewhere for 99% of people.

>> 100%. Yeah. Unless you got a lot of money.

So, let's dive into some, like, ROI, right? So, like, this is where we're tying it back to, like, what we earn for a company. And again, if you have ever worked with a big company, if they can get a—what you call a 12-month payback period, so basically whatever they invest with you, they can get that money back within 12 months, that is a home run, like a home run.

>> A lot of big, billion-dollar companies, they look at can they get their investment back in 10 years, right? So, like, when—and this is why it works better with bigger companies.

>> So one year is the home run. What's the, like,

>> bunting a single—like, payback period 10 years?

>> Uh, yeah. Well, to be fair, terminology, but

>> yeah, I was going to say, I'm not—I like baseball's not my jam either. But, like, what I'm referencing is how AI consulting and building out these implementations for them,

>> the payback is always under 12 months.

>> So these are just all home runs. So, like, this, this is an example, right?

>> Was, um, was $215,000 was recovered, right? That, that's basically what was identified and there was 166, uh, percent ROI, right? And there was a 9.2-month payback, right? So I don't have the exact number—whatever that works out to be was charged—but 9.2-month payback. So it's been about $150 grand roughly was charged for this and then they were, they were good to go, right? And this was the property management company that we did for—

>> um, so I want to now dive into some, like, more revenue models around this and, like, how this transitions from people—and again, by the end, um, I'm going to show you like the four—the four distinct roadmaps that I've seen and they are playing out in real time, uh, with people that I know. Okay. So you start with an audit or an assessment and then you can actually build that into, you know, years of revenue. So I know people have had clients four years, two, three years, because once you've got that relationship, you can just keep selling them more stuff. And AI is evolving so fast that that opportunity is always going to be there. So just for the audit, the diagnostic, the assessment: 5 to 50K, right? You want to be in that range. I would say common is 5 to 15, right? For anything sort of sub-50 to 100 people, you're in that range. This is where most people I know sell between 5 and 15K for just the assessment. Um, this will then automatically transition into implementation. Now, if you're non-technical like me, have a few options here. So, the way I started is I started with just, uh, out—basically a partnership with other companies and I took 10 to 15% off the top of the contract. So, let's say the contract was $100K to make the numbers easy. I would get 10 to 15K, the rest was theirs. They dealt with the client. They did everything. I transitioned into a white-label. So I used them but then they didn't have to deal with clients. So then my margins went up to like 50%. Right. They're just doing the technical side,

>> you know.

>> So get the audit.

>> Yeah.

>> Implementation.

>> Hand that off to someone. How do I find—because I feel like AI is so new and so changing. How do I find someone that can even implement this stuff short of just a guy building N8N flows on TikTok which don't, you know, it's not really that legit?

>> How do I find a good company to partner with?

>> This is, basically, this is a challenge and it's a challenge I still have. So, you can find some great—I still use Upwork a ton, right? And I found some absolute killers on there.

>> The biggest issue I have found in getting implementation, there's a few key points, so thanks for asking. On finding people to do simple workflows, even simple cloud code, simple N8N—because there's nothing wrong with using N8N, you can still use it—I'm just saying internally we don't—right? There's—you can find tons of very capable people on Upwork. Seriously, like, there is a lot, right? And they're not expensive either. I, though, don't like touching any of the big swing, like big implementation, like custom platforms. We have now done two, we're on our third, and, like, it is, personally, just wiped me out. Like, it is insanely stressful for me.

>> Can I flip—can I flip this back the other way? Because there might be implementers out there

>> correct

>> who are sat on—who are on Upwork and they're trying to work out—I want to

>> I want to be the guy—I'm just being hired by other people.

>> Yeah,

>> they might be watching this to find clients. But also what you're saying is there are AI consultants out there who are desperate to find good implementers. So you making yourself known as someone who partners with consultants is actually probably

>> everyone's winning, rather than everyone trying to do stuff or implementers trying to become consultants and trying to work out how to sell. You can take—get rid of your pain of having to go into sales and sell your service and just let someone else handle the lead gen for you, essentially.

>> Correct. You can do that. The other option is, and I've got multiple people who have done this, is they're the implementers, and because they intuitively are way too technical and they just overwhelm prospects and they go, "We build this crazy workflow." And they don't focus on outcomes,

>> they—you can train that out of people. Um, and they can actually use the assessment process to actually land the implementation contracts they want. So, I've got two people in my community who have done this at very large scale. Um, and they basically use the assessment as an entry point, but they wanted the big technical stuff. So, they did it like the other way around. They went, "Hey, we give either a free or very cheap assessment away," which I always say don't do, but they did it. But then, so Alex landed a $40K contract and, uh, yeah, another guy called was, uh, over a six. So, he was the fastest to $100K in 63 days and that was through an audit.

>> Say that again.

>> Yeah. Yeah. So, we have a guy in the community who did $100—landed $100K contract in 63 days and he was technical. So, his problem was finding clients, like that's what he wanted to do—

>> and he landed a $50 million per year company in Australia and he sold them an audit and that was seven and a half grand, and then the implementation and maintenance, which we're about to touch on, and the initial contract was over $100,000. He landed that in just over two months.

>> Yeah. And he came from the implementation first. So he was here. So what I will say is the implementers, if they can get out of their own way with the sales side, actually tend—I don't want to say make more money—but they make larger amounts of money per client because they get two bites of the apple. They take the consulting and the implementation when people—

>> same with any business, right? Like, sales and—like, you could be the best at the world at something, but if you've got no sales and marketing, then you're never going to have any clients.

>> Exactly. Yeah. 100%. And then the final part is maintenance. This is the bit where, you know, gold standard is you want recurring revenue. When you've done the implementation, you need to maintain what you've done. This isn't about charging the customer war. You are and you're making great money, which is awesome, but it's about actually ensuring that what you delivered stays delivered, right? This is very common in, like, IT and software land. You have what you call MSPs. This isn't some, like—you're not, you know—people like, "Well, they've paid for it." Yeah, they paid for that version, but AI is evolving so quick and stuff breaks. They need the technological person—or tech person—the tech person on their corner to, um, to assist them. You know, they're not the tech people. That's why they hired you. That's why they hired your team,

>> right? And this is how you build that recurring base. And this is, this is, this is awesome. And you can also do advisory as well, right? So, this is everything we've basically just gone through. So, we've got the diagnosing, figuring out where are the holes. We prescribe. So, we go, "Hey, this is the solution that's going to solve this problem." We then maintain those solutions. So, we ensure they get an ROI. And then also we can do advisory and consulting on the other side, which is what I personally love to do, which is again—people watching your channel might think, "Hey, is that even a business?" It's a huge business. You can probably attest to this yourself.

>> Tell me more about—tell me more about this one. This sounds interesting to me.

>> Well, this is what you do, my friend. So, so, uh, advisory is you become the, uh, the key to the AI door for that industry or for that company specifically. So rather than these companies wanting to go out and learn AI and have to figure it out for themselves or try and staff someone, they pay you three, $5,000 a month. You might have a call with them a week or a, you know, might just have a, you know, a f—you know, the ability to call you, right?

>> And you basically just are always telling them what's going on in AI, keeping them in the know and saying how, basically, different solutions could be put within their business, right? And again, a lot of the time this hasn't been possible in other industries because there hasn't been the same hockey-stick evolution that's going on in AI. But having somebody that always has their finger on the pulse of the AI world is an incredibly valuable thing for businesses, right? Because

>> so for me, from a completely selfish point of view, out of all of this, like, I'm giving a lot of this stuff free away on YouTube. Yes, I talk to a lot of businesses, do some training, but I could be probably leaning harder into—like, I'm just your—they use the term fractional now. Like, I'm your fractional AI

>> guy, to, like, when you have a question, you bring me. When a new tool launches, I'll tell you if it's relevant for you or not.

>> Correct.

>> Yep. Just—

>> exactly that, from a broad-level view.

>> The B2B version of what you do and essentially what your listeners do is advisory. So right now we're on, you know, YouTube, on this podcast, teaching people who want to go out and do this for themselves, right?

>> so they might be, uh, you know, what we call "prosumer"—like normal professional people who want to become, you know, business owners. They're kind of in that middle ground.

>> Well, when you take that from a B2C lens, right, so teaching normal everyday people to teaching business owners—that's a B2B lens. That's just called advisory. And there are billion-dollar companies that just do advisory, right? That's all they do—is keep people's finger on the pulse, right, of what's going on, how it could benefit them. And it's worth big money, because if you have somebody that knows when something changes, it could be hugely beneficial and that company becomes one of the first movers on it.

>> That could be worth, depending on the company, hundreds of millions of dollars. It really depends,

>> you know. Um, you, you know—do you know Cody Sanchez?

>> Yeah, of course. By boring businesses. I, uh, I heard her talking and she was saying that she just has one person in her company who's just—they're like head of AI, but not even to implement and build and do the stuff. It's just to text. She's—there's obviously so many companies in her portfolio. Stay on the polls and just be like WhatsApp-ing people and "Hey, like, guys, this is important for you guys. Pay attention,

>> you know, maybe, maybe push them in the right direction, but actually just like staying on the pulse, filtering the noise, getting the right signals, and, like, feeding that information to the right person.

>> Exactly. That filtering noise is key. Think about this, right? This is going to sound insane. If you paid someone $10,000 a month, right, to basically do what you probably do anyway, which is go on YouTube and watch all the launches on Twitter and everything and just figure out and play with it. You'd be like, "Why would I pay someone a director's salary to do that?" But if you have a big business and then one of those things comes about and you implement it and then it, like I've showed you, you got an ROI. "Oh, we did this thing and we implemented and it now saved us,

>> you know, $500K." I actually just saw a, a podcast with Eric Sue, who's the owner of Single Grain, and he said exactly that. They found a solution and he implemented it within seven days. Um, and it saved him over $500,000 over the course of the next 12 months.

>> Yeah.

>> And it was like one, it was like it was just like an oversight, but because we didn't have enough—we didn't have the data coming in. This is how he's like AI evolved his company. And it's like—what he was like—it was literally one small thing. We just didn't realize we were doing because—

>> I mean, even two things on that. Firstly, if you're still watching and you are one of these big companies that need an AI person, then my inbox is open. So, it's my channel. I'm going to plug myself.

>> Even something simple that I was talking to someone yesterday of like, "Hey, Claude just released scheduled tasks." Sounds really small, but actually has massive implications for what can be achieved, what can be automated that you were doing manually before, included.

>> Yeah. I mean, that one little nugget

>> with the dashboard, it's huge. It's huge. Like, I'm—I haven't started playing around with it yet, but I already know, like, we've got Close CRM, we've got a Google Calendar, we got—I just want to start plugging it all in. We used—to the point we had earlier about having a single source of data

>> and truth—

>> when something like live artifacts launches, now all I got to do is connect that up to whatever my base row or whatever it is

>> and just tell it what data I want to see every morning and compare it to my Slack.

>> Yep. Yeah. Which is where every company can get to. Now, basically, that's my point: like, if you are currently using a CRM, if you are using Google, if you're using this and that, you through, you know, MCPs and connectors and all this stuff, you now could literally have your own custom live dashboard in—if you hired a decent consultant advisor to come in and do it, probably within a day—where you could log in each day and hit refresh and you just got live data from your whole business. And, like, that's crazy, you know? Like, this is what Looker Studio did for Google and that's what we had—like, I'm—I hate to admit it, but I am, like, a Claude fanboy basically till I die. Like, I use Claude, Claude Pro, Copilot, and Claude Code.

>> I, I've been accused of—there's a subniche we've developed is the, uh, there's the AI bros.

>> Yeah,

>> I've been accused of being a Claude bro several times, and then someone actually told me I'm now—I'm now sculpting the Claudosphere. So

>> I love it. I love it. All right, so here's the three paths. Um, okay. So, if you've got industry expertise, you'll crush it as a consultant, right? Because your industry knowledge and your skills, it just leans you to the consulting side, right? If you are technical, you can either partner up with somebody or learn how to basically sell and just be more of a consultant. Um, and then if you are both, like some of the examples I gave, you can just run it down and you make a ton of money because you get both parts of the chair. So for me, back to the like vibe consulting.

>> Yeah,

>> ex-SEO, have done a ton of AI stuff with my own SEO stuff over the years. I should just go to every SEO agency and say, "Guys, I've already figured it out."

>> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the thing is about SEO is one of the ones that got hit very early as well, right? Like, it's very automatable now. Like, I've even got skills and plugins that do AEO, sorry, GEO, SEO, like, you know, all—

>> it, it's kind of gratifying. It's, it's not good, but in some respects it is good. But when I saw ChatGPT come out and it took me a week to try it, actually, and I was like, "I got to try this." And I sent my boss a message. I was like, "Holy crap, have you seen ChatGPT?" And I think I realized then—one, obviously I needed to figure it out for clients, etc. Two, I remember thinking, like, I don't think my job as it is will exist in 5 years. Now, in the UK, people are very slow to actually uptake this, so the job does still exist. But when I think now about what I was doing, what I can do, what I see other people—what I, like, just skills that I build for other people to go and run audits and stuff like that—that's 80% of what I was doing back then, and it's, yeah,

>> five years later. So I'm, I'm happy my thought paid off for once. You transitioned, right? Yeah. So, here's the thing. So, building the automation is the easy part, but deciding where to build it is actually what determines success, which is why you want to become a VIP consultant. Now, as promised, these are the four paths that I have seen play out in real time. Um, and training is, like, also on the advisory side. So we got consulting—you just become the strategic adviser. You do advisory on it as well, but you are hardcore on, like, hey, giving people and companies the roadmap to AI transform—

>> and do you find that some of the bigger businesses, they have the people in the company that can implement? Like, they have the technical—

>> so, yes and no. Believe it or not, most don't. Um, and if they do, they don't want to burden them with more workload. So a lot of the time they do want to out—still outsource it. Um, so it, it depends though, because a lot of the AI championing and upskilling you can actually, like, tandem them, which is why it works very well. Like, strategic and training can work very well together. Um, you got what I call full-stack consulting, which is strategy, implementation, advisory, maintenance. You're doing everything. So we got people in the community there. They wanted just, you know, five people—want five clients and they basically want the five clients for the next, you know, 10 years type thing. And that's the whole—the whole ethos, which is not unrealistic. Very common in, like, the MSP land, where they've had clients for 10, 15 plus years. Like, when you are locked in and you are maintaining technology for companies, it is very, very, very difficult for them to leave. Like, so that's what full stack gives you. Here's another one which I have now become, um, which I didn't plan for, but here we are, um, which is use consulting to actually figure out all the problems, the pain points, and you do them enough times over enough people where you basically productize them. And then the next step after productizing them is you can actually build a platform, right? So we've got multiple people—I can think of three right now. So one's in, uh, project management, uh, one's in, uh, and one's in accounting—forget the other one—is, um, they are building platforms. So they've done a bunch of advisory roles, they've done a bunch of consulting, they built N8N workflows, they solved the problems, and now they're actually transitioning that into a platform. So they are basically transitioning from being a consultant to essentially being a SaaS founder.

>> So if you are someone that wants—who dreams of having a SaaS business, that's the goal. They, for whatever reason, that's what they want, instead of making the fatal mistake of building before they validated.

>> Yeah.

>> And then being like, "Oh, no one—I spent however much—" even now you can run up a big bill very quickly. Uh, now and obviously most, most AI bros—and I've probably been guilty of this, in class, like, "Hey, just go on Reddit and then just like find a problem and then solve it," which again is like might work, but haphazard—

>> pick your—you know, everyone knows some particular industry, even if it's like they've been working in hospitality. Pick an industry you know really well.

>> Become a consultant. Find the problems. Solve the problems. And eventually you will find that reoccurring problem that every—or, you know, a decent proportion of the industry have.

>> Once you've figured that out, you already have the trust of clients. Go and build the SaaS product and then sell the SaaS product back to the clients you already have, plus everyone else in the industry.

>> Exactly. Yep. Because you've already got—you've already got product-market fit. Yeah. Exactly that.

>> Um, and that one's obviously the most technical. Um, again, with the options two and three, I would highly advise you—

>> the, like, long-term—the long-term progression of, like, "I don't want to be consulting forever. I want

>> to get closer to that passive-ish."

>> It's more recurring. It's more enterprise value is much more. They want to exit and they want, uh, they want to have a platform they could actually sell. That's why—because the big difference between full stack and basically productizing it is a lot of the full stack people are working in industries where it's hard to productize. So again, I we go back to manufacturing engineering. Really difficult to productize any of the solutions because you might have two manufacturing companies, but they work with—you know, one manufactures plastic bottle caps and one is a precision engineering and one does sheet metal and they've got—they just don't have similar processes, they don't have similar systems. So even though they're all manufacturing, it's just—I've done a bunch in that space. It is—

>> obviously SEO is the obvious one because it's already automated a lot of it anyway. But

>> yeah,

>> like, 99% of SEO is just the same process.

>> Yeah. So marketing is the one bit that can kind of be productized across almost every, every vertical. SEO, GEO, if they're B2B, cold email and stuff like that, potentially. Content is obviously a big one as well, but like, we're, we're usually operationalizing, uh, inefficient workflows they currently are doing. Now, obviously marketing may—but a lot of companies aren't doing SEO. Like, these are, like, additional recommendations on the growth side, but it's not the core part of being a consultant. You know, the core part is like, "Hey, this is what Sandra does from 9 till 5 every day. Like, where can we find these inefficiencies and how do we solve those bottlenecks?" You know,

>> and then the training, which is again what we touched on, which is a huge opportunity as well. And this is again very non-technical. So option one and four, very, very non-technical, which is, um, upskilling current workforce, right? So whether it's the founders, whether it's the team within them—huge business, lots of money available, very non-technical, allows you to scratch that, um, the shiny object syndrome of, uh, chasing every AI tool as well. But the—these first—the consulting is very much more professional, right? And we're just adopting, you know, the big four, um, practice. And this is, yeah, these are like the, the, the full transitions that you—or the four transitions, should I say, that you can do, um,

>> or just starting with consulting. And yeah, I've seen literally people do all of these and I have literally done all of them. So I started in consulting, we went to full stack. Uh, I've then built Consultics and we've got another platform that we're launching shortly. Um, which is we've developed our own productized solutions. And now a big focus for me is on the training side.

>> And you actually coach people on how to become AI vibe consultants.

>> VibeConsultant.com, baby. I own, I own the domain. Yeah. Which is an absolute great snag.

>> I, I hate to admit it. I might have had a few beers.

>> That might be the most valuable thing you've got here.

>> Yeah. Yeah.

>> But yeah, it's, um, yeah, you want to—we want to become a vibe consultant, an AI-native, you know, professional, like, we got you covered. Um, for sure. It's, um, there is so much opportunity here. Um,

>> yeah. So you have your school community that you teach people step by step, literally

>> how to do this, if you want someone to hold your hand to do it.

>> Exactly. So yeah, we, we teach people basically how to become AI consultants and do what we've spoken about. So all of those processes are covered. We focus obviously heavily on the strategy and training side. Um, but then the, the technical side we cover a little bit as well with when it comes to building workflows, but much more of the non-technical side of, um, getting on the board the AI revolution for sure. So let me—I think let's finish with the, the burning question that I think—like, I've seen this—I think I can do this.

>> Mhm.

>> With what I know and how—certainly, obviously the training and the, like, advisory, but the rest of it, the audit.

>> How do I get—how do I get my first C? Like, what do I do now? I'm like, I've got Friday afternoon. How do I go and get a C? Can I go and get a—find a client this this afternoon? How would I do that?

>> Yes, absolutely you can. So, assuming you have a career, had a career, still have a career, wherever you are in, um, in your, you know, life right now, there is a very, very, very high chance that someone in your Rolodex, um, would be open to doing this. So, a lot of the time—

>> for younger people, you might need to explain Rolodex.

>> Yeah. Yeah. So, Rolodex is just your list of contacts. So you look at your phone, email, maybe your LinkedIn, you know, and there is tons of people. So a lot of the people that I work with, the reason they close their first deal in, you know, we've had people in a day, three days, a week, like many, um, is because it always comes from their warm network. Now, does that mean if you don't have a warm network, you can't do this? Obviously not. It just takes more time because you're going to start prospecting. And the first one I recommend people either do it for free to become comfortable with the process, or you do what you call a backend deal, which means you take no money up front and you say—and if you are satisfied, you know, it'll be, you know, a couple of thousand—but for any reason if you're not, as long as you're willing to give me a case study, test reference, I won't, I won't, you know, hold it against you. But like, I just need those three things. Because once you've got, you know, some social proof, once you feel more comfortable with the process, you will also just realize how insightful and how valuable this is to companies.

>> And I'm not—I'm never a, a big proponent of working for free, but

>> yeah,

>> I would say I would always advise people—this back when I was doing SEO and they're like, "How do you get started?" Like, go to a business and offer them it for free for the first couple. So, you can get skill, get confidence, and get case studies, and then

>> you can start selling. And I'll also say for people out there that think they can do this as well, obviously go to Andrew's community, but also go to any networking event. Go down to the local pub.

>> I was in a Premier Inn in Paddington yesterday

>> and I could literally hear people at the bar, a couple of business people. I was earwigging, and you just hear people talking about AI like, "Oh yeah, I use ChatGPT for," you know, the conversation is ripe. You mention AI to anyone at any time there, the conversation just is, like, open.

>> It's huge.

>> I'm glad you brought that up, honestly. So, we had a guy called—we've had two, a guy called Darren and a guy called, uh, Chris. So, Darren closed a $3,500 deal from his first networking event. And Chris closed two people. He closed one at $5K and one at $3K with $800 in MRR just from literally.

>> So, they, they just went straight to being—they didn't even bother with the free stuff. They were like, "I'm going to go to a networking event and I'm going to ask people. I'm just going to say I do AI,"

>> essentially, and people are like,

>> "Can you do it for me?" Is a very simplified version of the conversation, but like, that's the conversation I've been having with people. I probably just didn't know that I should be doing this full consulting process for them because I've never—well, I've been an SEO consultant but

>> didn't frame it right in my mind about how I should be talking to people about AI and how it can help them in their business properly.

>> So yeah, you position yourself as that consultant. It's not even just "I do AI." It's like, "Hey, I show businesses how they can AI-transform and become AI-native and not AI-absent." And yeah, they both went straight to pay. I mean, you can absolutely do paid straight away. You just need to have confidence in your process, right? So, if you have a plan, you know how you want to do processes, like, awesome. Just go ahead and go straight to paid. Like, I would rather everyone get paid initially. And I recommend, even if someone gets paid $500 for your first one, it's still like you getting paid $500 by essentially a stranger or someone that you didn't think.

>> And again, this is process. Like, you're just following a process for people.

>> Yeah.

>> So it's scalable.

>> So once you've got confidence in the steps you do in auditing a business and handing it off, you can then easily hire

>> young guns to come in and

>> go out there and consult for as many companies as you want without really—it's like a pretty simple growth scenario. In my mind,

>> it's just traditional consulting with an AI lens. Like, it's not—we're not—the process isn't new. It's just the frame is new. Like, it was management consulting, it was HR consulting, it was all these—they're all the same. They literally all the same, but they just—we're now just doing AI consulting because now it's feasible and valuable. And not only is it feasible and valuable, it is arguably the most valuable skill that you could have right now. And it's also a skill that uses your current industry expertise, knowledge, and skills that you gathered through whatever you have done in your life and your Rolodex that you can now monetize in a way that you never thought was possible. And I've had so many people who've been in the industry 30 years and go, "I didn't realize I had something to sell them, and now I do." And they go back to contacts they've known for their whole life and people buy from them,

>> but it was never an opportunity before. I think that's a great place to leave this: if you're anyone out there who loves AI, maybe you're not even that technical, but you're wondering, "How do I make this? How do I make money? How do I make this a career? How do I make this a business?"

>> You already have—you likely already have it inside you of industry expertise, whatever job you've had for a decade or more.

>> Yeah, 100%. Now you just need the right frame and the right process to find all the inefficiencies and recommend where AI can help.

>> Literally exactly right. Nail on the head, mate. Nail on the head.

>> Amazing. So give us a rundown of where people can find you and, uh, and yeah,

>> if you are wanting to become an AI consultant, or maybe you're just curious, right, just check me out on YouTube. Just search Andrew Dunn AI consulting or a channel there. I share all about it, more depth, more workflows, just so you know you can go ahead and basically, uh, see if this is an opportunity. And then I've got links in my descriptions of all my YouTube channel where you can check out more about my training and basically how we could work together more one-on-one. You can obviously check out VibeConsultant.com as well, which links to everything too. Uh, but yeah, check me out on YouTube. I think that's going to be the best first port of call for everybody to really start understanding more in-depth about this process. I've got some pretty long videos on it, and, you know, I've got examples of interviews, I've got all sorts on there. So, um, I really am just trying to upskill everybody for free and then, you know, when they're ready and they really want to, want to go and commercialize this, they can, they can come to me.

>> Amazing. Thank you so much, Andrew. It's been awesome. Life-changing, potentially.

>> Much love. Thank you for having me on. And, uh, yeah, I hope to see some of your wonderful community inside of my community, too.