How to make $10K/month selling AI services (step by step)

Speaker A: i have multiple ai concierge clients paying me anywhere from one thousand two hundred dollars a month to two thousand dollars a month and at that price you don't even need one giant contract to build a ten k a month ai services business you only need between five to ten recurring clients so in this episode i'm going to show you the three stage offer ladder that i use to get there in just a couple of months starting with a free mini assessment that upsells into a one to two thousand dollars paid assessment to that then upsells into a recurring revenue ai concierge offer we're going to break down the math how to land your first client exactly what to deliver at each stage and the three mistakes that can make this model impossible to scale i'm going to make sure you don't make those mistakes so let's start with the free fifteen minute assessment so there are three stages that we're going to go through to get to ten k a month selling ai services we're going to go through each stage one by one then we're going to talk through the math that makes it all work we're going to talk about finding your first client we're going to talk about why this breaks or the pitfalls to avoid and then we're going to go through how each stage actually works so we're going to go through each stage in detail once we've kind of gone over the high level overview now before we jump in i want to say i put literally each of these individual stages into its own standalone resource so if you go to the link in the description or in the show notes you can download each of these mini playbooks for free so we've got a full playbook on the mini ai assessment a full playbook on the ai tools assessment full playbook on ai concierge and a full playbook for the eight objections that you're probably going to face those are full basically mini courses that i'm giving away for free that goes even deeper on what i'm about to cover here so you can download those in the description so let's go ahead and dive right in now stage one is offering a free mini assessment okay what is a mini assessment a mini assessment is when we sit down with the business owner for fifteen minutes and we go over uh some of the pain points in their business and we're really looking to identify one single pain point that they're facing so that we can prescribe one single tool or one single ai workflow uh that they could implement to fix that one bottleneck right so again in fifteen minutes we're gonna ask them questions like where does work tend to pile up what have you tried to automate in the past and failed and really get a feel for what are they struggling with in their business we're going to rank the top three opportunities and really focus on the biggest opportunity the number one and then in a follow up call we are going to deliver them either a simple off the shelf ai tool that they can implement to fix that bottleneck or one suggested workflow that they could build to fix that bottleneck whether it's a claude skill or using something like claude cowork bottom line the free assessment in a nutshell is identify one pain point and prescribe one fix that they could implement now keep in mind because this is free we're not implementing this for them we're literally just prescribing the fix so i want you to keep that in mind right and the goal of the free assessment is to get proof and is to get case studies and testimonials so we're only going to do a free assessment for the first one to three people that we talk to in order to get a testimonial and in order to um tee ourselves up to upsell the next step the next stage which is the paid assessment so we're only going to do one to three of these and we're going to prescribe one simple fix stage two is the paid assessment right so when we give them the free assessment we're prescribing one tool or one workflow the paid assessment prescribes anywhere from three to seven tools or three to seven ai opportunities so this is where in the paid assessment we're going to do a more in depth really usually about a forty five to sixty minute interview to uncover even more pain points than we uncovered in the initial fifteen minute free assessment and then we're going to take those uh use cases those you know those bottlenecks that they have and we're going to rank them on a matrix of effort versus impact so we're going to focus on the fixes or the opportunities that are both high impact meaning the solutions move the needle but they're low effort meaning they don't take very much effort to implement so this is usually going to give us a list of off the shelf ai tools that we can prescribe to the business owner to fix some of those issues that we uncovered now we're going to go deep into you know what kind of tools do we look for how do we find them how do we actually conduct the paid assessment later on in this episode um but just know that this is something that we sell for anywhere from five hundred dollars if we're starting out up to uh two thousand dollars which is what i'm currently selling these for today for a while we sold these for one thousand dollars and that was a really good sweet spot because it was a high enough price for people to take it seriously and it was low enough to be a no brainer easy yes for the business owner to say yes to so again the paid assessment is just a it's just three to seven deliverables versus the free assessment which is just one so it's basically just the free assessment on steroids stage three is where we really make the real money and this is where we create recurring revenue for ourselves and that is with um the ai concierge model right so ai concierge from a very high level is where we are doing done with you consulting with a small business owner so we're sitting down with them twice a month for two forty five minute strategy calls per month where we are inside of claude cowork helping them build skills and helping them automate their current manual processes by turning them into claude skills that's literally all we're doing now in order to do that we're following what we created uh the aoa framework the aoa framework simply stands for audit optimize automate so that's just the process that we follow in order to turn their manual processes into cloud skills now quick side note uh on ai concierge and on the aoa framework so we actually have a community called ai operator academy based in school where we teach people how to become profitable ai concierges so everything you're going to learn in this video everything from the free assessment to the paid assessment to ai concierge we teach that in even more granular detail inside ai operator academy so if you want to learn how to make money selling ai services and how i'm currently making over a thousand dollars an hour as an ai concierge we give you the full playbook inside ai operator academy and if you don't land your first client in ninety days we refund every dime that you have so the link to join that is going to be in the description or you can go to aoa dot com munity if you're interested in learning more now the other thing that we uh that we sell as part of our ai concierge package is unlimited access to us via a tool called voxer so voxer is just a walkie talkie app on your phone you can send voice messages back and forth with people what i love about including this in the ai concierge offer and the reason we're able to charge so much money is because to the customer this is a very attractive offer it's very high perceived value because a customer sees this and basically thinks okay well i have basically an ai expert in my pocket that i can ask questions to at any time via voxer and ah what's great about this for us is that customers actually don't even really use it so it's very high perceived value for the customer it makes them willing to pay top dollar but it's actually very little additional work for us so again for the two monthly strategy calls for the unlimited voxer access where we are just building building claude skills for the client we are charging anywhere from one to two thousand dollars a month as an ai concierge all right now that equates to um roughly anywhere from seven hundred fifty to one thousand two hundred and fifty dollars per hour if you're charging a thousand dollars a month it's about seven hundred fifty dollars per hour if you're charging fifteen hundred a month it's one thousand dollars an hour anything more than fifteen hundred a month and you're making more than a thousand dollars an hour so that is ai concierge and that's really our key to getting to ten k a month now let's look at the math right so if we're talking purely about ai concierge this is how the math works out where the assessment revenue is like the icing on the cake so completely excluding revenue from assessments which again we're charging one to two thousand dollars for if we have ten ai concierge clients at one thousand dollars a month each that's your ten k a month right if you have seven ai concierge clients at fourteen thirty dollars a month each that's ten thousand dollars a month you can have five ai concierge clients at two thousand dollars a month each and that's ten k a month so i my ai concierge clients right now my lowest paying one is one thousand two hundred dollars a month my highest paying one is two thousand dollars a month so i can say with one hundred percent certainty because i'm literally already doing this you can charge easily between one and two thousand dollars a month for this my next client i'm actually not going to be taking anyone else so for less than two thousand five hundred a month so this is entirely realistic and i'm just breaking down how the math works if you want to get to ten k a month now uh who do we call how do we sell this how do we position this really the best people for this offer are going to be service businesses that are owner led that have a lot of repetitive work so for example some of my ai concierge clients i have an insurance agency i have um an info product business i have a fintech company right all these other different industries that you know that people are working in where they're doing repetitive work lends itself very well to the ai concierge offer as well as having a lot of opportunities for ai to help which is why they're willing to buy ai assessments there's a lot of visible bottlenecks there's urgency and they have budget so typically you know my ai concierge clients are uh businesses doing three to ten million dollars per year in revenue or more because businesses that are doing that much in revenue can easily afford to pay one to two thousand dollars a month for ai consulting and they're even more easily able to pay one thousand dollars one time for an ai assessment right now these are people that already feel the pain so they know that they're doing things manually they know there's room for improvement they know that they need to use ai they just don't know where to start so in my pitches i haven't even had to do a lot of convincing it's pretty easy to say look this is what you get this is the outcomes you can expect are you interested and it's a pretty easy sell from there so the steps forward for those of you watching this i want you to take out your phone scroll through your contacts and make a list write down on a piece of paper ten people you know that run small businesses these could be people in your network these could be friends from the gym from church parents um of your kids friends write down ten business owners that you know text three of them and offer a free ai assessment right the mini assessment that we talked about in the opening of this episode we're about to go into more detail on that here in a second literally offer them a free mini assessment and if you do three free mini assessments you will probably upsell one of them to the paid assessment and for every two people that you upsell to a paid assessment you can typically upsell one to ai concierge so if you were to text all ten you're going to get you know five to six free assessments you're going to get two to three paid assessments from that and you're probably going to get one ai concierge client from those ten text messages and the key is to use the same interview and the same scorecard every time when doing the assessment and when doing ai concierge and that's something that we actually include inside ai operator academy we give our members the full question bank like literally the step by step everything to ask during uh the interview portion of the um ai assessment we also give them claude skills that automates the entire assessment report building process we give them claude skills that automate the entire ai concierge fulfillment process basically ai operator academy is this entire business that i'm teaching you it's the business in a box right so that's something you can build on your own or we give you inside the community now three things to look out for in this case right three ways this breaks a big risk that you run when you do the free assessment is you don't want to do more than you're promising right the free assessment again is one bottleneck one prescription we stop at the roadmap we do not build anything we do not implement anything we we want to make sure we're putting a boundary around our time and therefore positioning our paid offer as the actual next step and not doing paid work for free the next risk we run into is that concierge that's supposed to be two forty five minute calls a month turns into unlimited calls where the client is asking you to jump on calls ad hoc the fix in this case is setting very clear expectations upfront making it clear that this is a once every two week cadence we do not jump on any zoom calls in between if you want to do additional calls then that's going to be an additional fee so just setting those expectations up front and then lastly another risk that you run into is building out a custom stack for each client this is something that makes it very difficult to scale which is why in the ai concierge model we standardize the tools and we standardize the process for helping those clients and and we keep it confined to the cloud ecosystem specifically cloud cowork and building them cloud skills to automate their workflows now that is the what let's go into the actual how each of these things work right so the free assessment like we said is going to start with us inviting uh a warm contact so we're going to send those text messages that we talked about earlier we're going to run a focused workflow interview now keep in mind the free resource in the description includes the mini ai assessment playbook so literally i'll even open it up and show you here right this is the full playbook on how to run the mini assessment everything from how to structure meeting one meeting two full templates for those so i'm going to go over the high level overview right now but call one is fifteen minutes where we uncover one pain point that's all we're doing right then between calls one and two we're gonna rank the top three ai opportunities and we're gonna pick the one that's the lowest hanging fruit step four which is the follow up call which is literally just another five to ten minute call uh with the prospect is to deliver a simple next step action plan so for example if the one bottleneck that we uncovered is they're spending two hours or five hours a week in email then the follow up call is simply hey you're spending all this time in email i went out and found a tool called sanebox dot com sanebox helps you use ai to batch process your email go and download sanebox dot com that's it right that is literally the recommendation that's the action plan that they get as part of the free assessment and our follow up upsell from there is hey yeah that's one tool that you can implement i think we could find three to seven more but that would be a part of our paid assessment are you interested in um a paid assessment where we can dive even deeper and i can find three to seven more additional opportunities for you to use ai to save time or make more money that's the upsell from there now again the deliverable is uh the ranked top three so you can even give them m the top three that you found but we're just giving them the prescription for the one and the action plan to implement that the boundary in this case is remember this is a roadmap only we're not building anything we're not implementing anything we're not doing any free implementation and the ask in this case is for a testimonial say hey i did this for free i found you this tool are you willing to give me a testimonial or a referral to somebody else that you think might be interested in the paid assessment and the other ask is also obviously an upsell to the paid assessment we want to ask if they're interested in that next step in the process now uh the paid assessment how does the paid assessment work so again it is literally the free assessment on steroids so instead of one recommendation and one pain point it's three to seven pain points and three to seven recommendations so again this is where we're going to spend forty five minutes instead of fifteen minutes mapping the most important workflows scoring them on a matrix of effort versus impact so this is where we focus on those things that are both high impact low effort we call them quick wins these are typically going to be off the shelf ai tools that they can literally just subscribe to or install to fix the pain points that we identified during the discovery call we're going to document the assumptions behind the roi and we're going to do that by asking them um during that forty five minute discovery session how much is your time worth per hour so that we know exactly how much you know how we can quantify the roi that they're going to get and then for every bottleneck that we uncover we're going to ask them to quantify how much time that's taking them each week so again from our using our example from earlier it's like oh well yeah you know the person we're talking to is like oh yeah email is a big bottleneck for me i think that's taking up a ton of my time okay well how much time is that taking you per week i probably spend about an hour per day in email okay great how much is your time worth per hour uh my time's worth about two hundred fifty dollars per hour so if we can find them a tool like sanebox for example and this is not sponsored by sanebox by the way this is just it's our most commonly prescribed tool when we do these assessments but let's just say if they they say an hour a day in emails how much they're spending their time's worth dollar two hundred fifty per hour that's five hours per week that's one thousand two hundred and fifty dollars per week that email is costing them if sanebox can get them from five hours per week on email down to one hour per week on email then that effectively saved them one thousand dollars a week and they can't argue that because they told us in their own words how much their time was worth and how much time each week that task was costing them so that's why again we document the assumptions behind the roi we get them to quantify in their words how much time these things are taking them and how much uh their time is worth per hour and then again we build a prioritized ai roadmap so this is something that i actually give you guys right this is part of the um the free playbooks that i'm giving you here so this is the ai tools assessment report template that is a template that you can drag and drop into cloud design to actually structure the roadmap that we give to clients as a deliverable it's the real deliverable that we give to clients we sell for a thousand dollars you can get it in the description or you can go to audit template ai and download it completely free but it's basically a like a uh consulting level report that looks very professional that we use to present this information to the client okay so the deliverable like we said is that roadmap is that report and we're actually going to schedule a thirty minute follow up call with all of our paid assessment clients to go through the report with them where we are sharing our screen and we're going through the report so we're saying hey from our call uh we found out that you had this pain point well here's a tool that can fix it and you said you had this pain point and here's a tool that can fix it so again we're literally just going point by point explaining to them all the work that we did all the analysis that we did and from there we will upsell our ai concierge service now um the price in this case like we said earlier we sell this assessment anywhere from five hundred to two thousand dollars we started at five hundred dollars when i first started just to get testimonials and to see what the market is willing to pay what we found is that people are more than willing to pay two thousand dollars for this assessment now one thousand dollars is a really good sweet spot especially if you don't have any testimonials yet so keep that in mind um five hundred to two thousand dollars is where you should be pricing that now when it comes to ai concierge which is what we would upsell after the paid assessment let's go into how that works so we're going to do two monthly calls like we said these are two forty five minute calls per month where on each of these calls we are going to work one scoped improvement at a time so we're basically going to look at all the things that they're doing in their business manually and we're going to work down the list one process at a time turning each one of those processes into a cloud skill inside claude cowork and we're going to do that by running what we call our aoa framework on each of those processes so let's just say for example our ai concierge client right now when they onboard a new customer into their business it takes them thirty minutes per customer to do the onboarding because they're doing it manually they're having to you know go into their crm and they're having to pull information from email and look at the call transcript and do all these different pieces so in order for us to automate that process as part of our ai concierge engagement we run aoa which first the first step is audit right audit the manual process so i would ask them show me how you do this process today step by step so they're going to literally walk through the process sharing their screen and i'm going to take notes and just write down each step of the process step two is optimize so we're going to then optimize that manual process because almost every single process as it exists today is more steps than it needs to be so using that same example that onboarding process that that client goes through maybe it's fourteen steps when it only needs to be eleven steps for example so we're going to cut out three steps we're going to cut out that waste and at least get the manual process to a point where it is much more streamlined so it's already a win because we took their fourteen step process down to eleven and then lastly the last a in aoa is automate so that is where we are going to actually then automate that newly optimized process by turning it into a cloud skill and again this is where we are it's done with you consulting so they are sharing their screen and we are walking them through how to do this right we're helping them build the skill we're telling them what to prompt we're telling them what to write we're literally telling them where to point and click that is the value of an ai concierge and we're going one process at a time down the list on every call until pretty much forever because we're never going to be able to automate everything in their business and we're always going to find new opportunities that's something i've noticed during my ai concierge engagements is we start the engagement with uh a rough idea of what we want to do and we get two calls in and they're like oh i didn't think even think about this process so let's add that to the agenda and we end up finding that there's almost unlimited things that we can work on with each client right so that's where we're going to coordinate tools and resources in this case we almost exclusively have them working inside claude cowork building claude skills it's just the easiest way to standardize processes across every client so that way you as the ai concierge you're not having to learn codex and claude and chatgpt and zapier and like all these different tools you you're just able to master one ecosystem and get clients inside that ecosystem because at the end of the day building skills like building ai skills can apply regardless of which model or which agent you're using that's always gonna translate so we don't have a risk of like oh if next month chatgpt is the tool of choice we can still use the skills that we built inside claude and transfer them over to chatgpt so we don't really have a risk of vendor lock in but you're able to just master that ecosystem and and become really good at that and from there we can help them write the sops and train their team on how to use the skills that we've just created so from there you know if we just built them a new claude skill that automates their customer onboarding process we could literally just ask claude hey i need you to write a i need you to create a google doc that lists out the new steps and how to run the skill that i can circulate to their team so now they now the team can use this new ai powered process much more easily and it's that simple right so it's helping them it's working with them to fix some of the manual things that they're doing in their business and then um extrapolating that out to the rest of the team and they love you for it this is a very low churn offer once you get in there and start helping them you're getting them wins from day one and they will love you for it and want to continue doing more and more with you now the deliverable in this case is you know adoption of the ai tools because this is done with you we want them to actually use what we're building and we have the agreed metric here because one of the things that we do at the start of any ai concierge engagement is we have them fill out a form that says hey what are all the tasks what are all the processes you want us to tackle during this engagement and those are the ones that we work on those are the ones that we focus on and so as we start knocking those off the list that's the metric to say to the client like hey yeah you should renew next month because look you had a list of ten things we've already crossed four of them off we've added five more because we've uncovered even more opportunity and we're making really good progress so we're kind of holding each other accountable to that list and make sure we're working on things that they actually that actually move the needle for them now the boundary in this case like we said earlier is the cadence it's two forty five minute calls per month no more no less um i'm always going to respond to voxer messages in twelve business hours or less so if they expect like immediate responses or if they want to jump on another zoom call that's outside the scope that is not allowed and they can pay for that separately we make that very clear up front and the pricing like we said is anywhere in the one to two thousand dollars per month range my advice here is if you're starting off as an ai concierge charge one thousand dollars a month there's thousands if not millions of business owners who are willing to pay that price it's a steal in terms of what they get for value and every time you get a yes raise your price by dollar two hundred fifty so if you get one person to say yes at one thousand dollars the next person you pitch at twelve fifty when you get that yes at twelve fifty the next person you pitches at five hundred uh sorry one thousand five hundred and you keep raising that bar that's exactly what i did and you'll find that more and more people are willing to pay the higher prices and if they're not willing to pay the higher prices then they are not your ideal client so that is that that is literally the full roadmap for you know how i've gotten to over ten k a month selling ai services in under a year and if you follow this roadmap you can get there even faster two things before you go like we said go to the link in the description get the free ai services resource library so that's going to contain deep dive playbooks uh on everything that we talked about today so the mini assessment playbook the ai tools assessment report template the ai concierge playbook and eight objections that you're naturally going to get when you're pitching these services and how to absolutely destroy them and then again if you want to go deeper on this if you want to learn directly from me and alongside one hundred twenty plus other people who are making money selling ai services particularly assessments and ai concierge join us inside ai operator academy we give you this entire business in a box all the skills templates everything you need turnkey plug and play to start and scale this business you can go to aoa dot com munity to join us or you can join at uh the link in the description as well thank you so much for watching and i'll be back soon