The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - Companies Are Panic Paying for This Skill. Here’s How to Get In⏐Ep. #264
Episode Date: January 9, 2026Ride the AI tidal wave together. Join the community of consultants learning to charge $500–$35k/mo (per client): https://playmakersai.com/━Check out my newsletter at ...https://TKOPOD.com and join my new community at https://TKOwners.com━In this interview, I sit down with Brandon Gadoci, who went from launching his AI consulting firm to an $80,000/month run rate in just 5 months. We discuss why companies are desperate for "AI Operators" , how to price your services between $20k-$35k/month , and the specific tech stack used to build solutions.https://x.com/bgadocihttps://gadociconsulting.com/Enjoy! ---Watch this on YouTube instead here: tkopod.co/p-ytAsk me a question on or off the show here: http://tkopod.co/p-askLearn more about me: http://tkopod.co/p-cjkLearn about my company: http://tkopod.co/p-cofFollow me on Twitter here: http://tkopod.co/p-xFree weekly business ideas newsletter: http://tkopod.co/p-nlShare this podcast: http://tkopod.co/p-allScrape small business data: http://tkopod.co/p-os---
Transcript
Discussion (0)
So I made a new friend on Twitter.
His name's Brandon.
Why is Brandon awesome?
Because five months ago, he started an AI consulting business.
All my normal skill sets plus AI equal superpowers.
Using a lot of the same tools that I talk about on this podcast.
And within five months, he went from zero to $80,000 a month.
Put a number on a proposal that was kind of made you feel sick a little bit.
It did.
And he's growing every month.
And it's just him, a tiny bit of overhead working from home with a couple contractors.
I firmly believe that being an AI consultant is one of the biggest opportunities that anyone in the world can take advantage of today.
And so I wanted to sit him down and say, how are you doing this?
How are you finding customers?
How are you helping these customers?
What size companies are you working with?
How can we do what you do?
So without further ado, let's get straight into it.
Brandon?
Yes.
Thank you for having us.
Absolutely.
Why don't you tell us who you are and what you do?
Brandon Godossi.
I own a AI consulting and services company that I've started recently in the last couple of months.
And so married 23 years, two kids, 16 and 15.
I live here in North Dallas.
And yeah.
Okay.
So in business for two months, three months?
Probably four or five months now.
Okay.
Fully dedicated to this, yeah.
Now, it walks back the last couple of years on what led you to this business.
Yeah, it's a funny journey a little bit.
There's that kind of wandering in the desert for a while trying to figure out, you know,
you know, where I was headed and what was going on.
I sort of, in my last gig, ended up for the last three years of that,
what I called AI Operations.
There's a woman named Rachel Woods out of Austin.
She kind of coined that term.
But just really experimenting with how to bring this magic that was dropped on us in November of 2022.
How do we take this and bring it into the enterprise, into the business,
in a way that actually has results and it's meaningful?
So, yeah.
Okay.
So what, like, what was that triggering event that really made you?
want to go all in on this five months ago?
I've always been entrepreneurial.
I've tried a million different things from little wooden coins that you give your kids when
they do a good job.
Something called a spark shelf.
My buddy had an idea with.
It was it charges your phone while you put it on the end.
I've started websites.
I've always been entrepreneurial.
And I was like 12, somebody gave me a pen.
You know, like an ant or something would give you a really nice pen to add your initials
on it.
It was like a little box and I opened it up and I had my initials on it.
And I thought that'd be cool to have like a business someday that was, you know, BG,
consulting or something. And so as these forces sort of aligned and I saw that, you know, I was
super curious about this technology and the way that it worked and passionate about learning it.
And then what was happening in the market, it just seemed like everything just fell together.
I've told people for a long time that if it's the way that you're supposed to be going,
it won't be, it'll be hard, but it won't be complicated. And that's what I feel like happened
with this. And so it's been, it's been challenging, but it hasn't been complicated.
Yeah. It's like it was a clear path, but it was still difficult. And that was your signal that you
were on the right path.
Yeah, it just finally, it felt like there was wind in the sales.
Like a lot of times things that I've done, I feel like I'm just paddling,
paddling and paddling, and this time it felt like, oh, I'm getting a little momentum
as well.
And you could call that product market fit, right?
When just like it's, the signals are telling you this is the right thing.
And it's tough because sometimes business doesn't look like that.
And you're still on the right path, right?
Sometimes business is pushing a boulder up a hill and it just keeps coming back down.
And I think sometimes people hit that and they're like, oh, I'm in the
the wrong business. Not necessarily. That's like 80% of the time, but occasionally you catch
lightning in a bottle and you're like, oh, like I'm sailing and I'm cruising. Like this, I can't
handle all this wind. Yeah. And it's such a contrast because I've been in that, you know,
push the bold. I've been in businesses that have been successful, but it hasn't been a lot of
that push the boulder up and it rolls back. And yeah, so I've been on both sides of that.
And so this was kind of so far, been a very nice like marrying of my skill set, my curiosity
and market need at a time when I'm actually freeing up and having some time more free.
than I have in the past being a dad and everything.
So month one, what was your AI skill set at at that point?
Like what tools were you using?
How proficient were you?
Was it just Chad GPT?
Was it deeper than that?
Yeah, it's so interesting because AI is like,
it's a technology, but it's teaching us to be more human again.
And so I've said it for a long time that we kind of like,
we've been lulled into this world, unbeknownst to us,
that when we interact with technology like Google,
look at the next time you put a,
a Google search in there. It's not a sentence. It's like a carefully constructed list of subliminal
keywords that we've learned to do a thing and we say, hey, and then it gives us something and we go
and point and click and whatever. And AI just is a lot more human, ironically, than the technologies
we've been using. So that already matched up with like my skill set. So this ability to have nuanced
conversations with it worked. I taught myself to code a while back. And so I'm not a computer
science major. I'm not a former developer. So when AI came along, it really unlocked that for me.
So to answer your question, what skill set did I have at the time?
All my normal skill sets plus AI equaled like superpowers.
Yeah.
I could do everything that I've done in the past just a lot better and faster.
Yeah.
So kind of a super broad, like mile wide, few inches deep skill sets, plus AI equals superpower.
Yeah.
Do whatever you want.
Yeah.
It's almost there's a burden that comes with it.
Like this idea of unbridled progress and answers.
You can do anything now.
You can get anything answered.
You can research anything.
All of that.
For me, my personality was awesome.
And I learned so much about so much fast.
But you get to a point where you're like,
I don't know if you've seen the movie Limitless with Bradway Cooper.
Yeah.
It's kind of this feeling like, oh, my gosh.
Where do I go?
There's too much to do.
So we do nothing oftentimes.
Yep.
Yeah.
So, yeah, my skill set was, I learned all the chat GPTs,
all that stuff that was out there and went deep in their features,
but also used my development coding slash skill set to like create custom solutions and learn
how to interact with the APIs of these companies and, you know, what is agentic air?
What does that really mean?
And how does that work?
And what's hype and what's real?
So month one, all the skills that I normally have, which are broad, but tuned up.
Yeah.
So we're using tools like is Apier make, like Claude Code, Replit, stuff like that before
you started this business or did you start kind of tinkering with those with this business?
Yeah, so I'll answer this in two ways.
The original approach I had at the last company, which spurred this approach,
was like a very consultative.
I'm going into a group asking questions, what do you exist for, what's your major friction points,
just like a consultant would do.
And then I would either find or build tools for them.
And in that process, learned all of those things, chat, EBT, Claude, Gemini, Zapier,
Relevance AI, make, N8, and all the things.
What I've come to believe, after many iterations of this now, is that I think about
solutioning for AI in three levels. So the first level is, it sounds like this. You would say,
I have this problem or I want to do this thing. I would say, did you know that this feature in
chat GPT can do that? And you say, no, I don't. I say, let me show you. Now you know, save 30%
of your time. You're happy. You get to talk practice on time, all the things. That's a level one
solution. A level two solution would be, that's not enough. We need to now cobble together
some different systems and move information around. We want AI to be involved somehow.
But they're existing tools.
Zapier, all the different ones that we just mentioned.
That's a level two solution.
And a level three solution would be we have a complex task that needs orchestration.
We need some combination of deterministic and probabilistic interactions with technology, and
we need to build that and deploy it ourselves.
And so my tools that I've used, they fall into those kind of levels.
That's what I think about it.
One, two, and three.
Describe what you mean by deterministic and probabilistic?
That's good.
AI is a probabilistic technology.
Ask it the same question.
you're going to get different answers each time.
Directionally accurate, but it's not a if this, then that.
Yeah, it's not one plus one, it's always going to equal two.
You're going to ask it like, what is the best suitcase for my trip to India?
Yeah.
Right?
And it's going to, well, you're going to kind of get the same result, but different words, different
structures, et cetera.
So probabilistic in that it's giving you the highest probable outcome based on the patterns
and the math that AI exists.
Deterministic is more that if this than that type of thing.
And that's what traditionally our code has been, right?
And what I think is happening in the industry right now
is this promise of agentic AI that's out there
is not being fulfilled.
It is very alluring.
There's going to be awesome things that happen,
but the technology is not there yet.
And so the most successful implementations
of agentic AI that I see out there
are some combination of deterministic code,
get this, give me that, do this, move over here.
Probabilistic AI, do this thing, bring that back.
Okay, let's move that around.
So that back and forth is what I'm finding.
The most value is right now.
It's kind of like,
a Zapier integration of three years ago with Chad GPD kind of overseeing it and using
some logic to kind of fix things as they break.
The way that I would look at it is like there's a confluence of sort of automation and
AI.
Like everybody talks about AI and a lot of times are just talking about automation.
And so you want to find where the AI is doing something that automation can't do on its own.
And because AI has a context window and can understand nuance and can tease things out, we can
just now do so many more things with automation that we couldn't before. Like evaluate this and
tell me is it this, this, or this, okay, now do this thing. Whereas before is it's like, does it have
these keywords or not? So, yeah. So what does an average customer of yours look like? What type of a
business owner? Are they exclusively business owners? Industry, business size, etc. So I'm finding that
every single company has this problem. Anytime I say I'm in AI, the response is like, I just
got off a conference call with our CEO and they said, we need to do something about AI. You got a
of leadership acting out of fear or hope saying, you know, what are we, what are we going to
do with AI? I've heard, overheard on conference calls, high level people. We've got to do
something with this AI thing. I've been asked to talk to people just so they can say they talk
to an AI expert for their earnings call. There's pressure for people to do stuff in this space.
And so I'm finding that, you know, companies with tens of thousands employees need this and then
startups need it too. We come in, I say we, it's me and a developer and one other person,
But we'll come in in a fractional, like transformational.
Let's talk about change management.
What's the culture at your company?
How can we be AI Native, AI first?
How do we change this group of 400 people?
And then I also come in with like, here's a specific thing that we're trying to do.
Can you build that for us?
What about like a non-star, like a small business but not a startup?
Like a local business or a home service business.
Yeah.
So those are really fun ones.
Are you saying that sarcastically?
No, I'm saying like that you can help somebody out so much.
Yeah, you're opening their eyes.
And you're letting them do the work of 10 people now on their own.
And so I don't have a lot of commercial relationships in my practice with that sort of level.
But I do a lot of that help just because I like helping local businesses.
Like have you, you know, my brother owns a gym.
What can we do on AI to help you with your leads or, you know, whatever?
Do you have more customers on the startup side or like the bigger established business side?
I would say right now it's kind of split between like what I'd call a medium-sized company,
but 400, 500 person company, kind of medium small.
And then on the larger side, kind of in the 6,000 employee, you know, range somewhere in that range.
So that's where most of it falls.
And then I've got some like smaller agency type stuff where there's 40, 50 people at a company.
Mostly hundreds of employees enough.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
One of the things that AI introduces is a lot of security issues.
And so you have to be careful with that.
And just the bigger the company gets, the more things you have to check off before you can make progress.
You can go faster with smaller companies, but that's not new to AI.
Okay.
What does an average proposal look like?
Let's say you're sitting down at the owner of a 400-person company.
What are their typical problems and what kind of questions do you typically ask them?
We can come in a lot of different ways.
So sometimes if that, you know, somebody at that company says we have this thing we think AI can help with, then we just get right to it.
Like, okay, tell me about that, do discovery.
You know, who's involved, who's the subject matter, espers, what are the systems?
How long does it take now?
What does it cost?
Whatever.
So shape that out.
Sometimes what I'll do is I'll come in and do a survey, right?
Send us out to all your managers, employees, whatever, we get that survey back.
What's cool is the way that I built it is when we get those results back,
I can actually instantly summarize and give AI insights and charts.
So within two hours, three hours of that completing, I can give a, you know, very nice
15-page report on the state of your AI readiness.
And I also deliver a chatbot experience with that, too.
So they can go chat and, you know, like, who hates AI and who's worried about it.
And then it kind of spans the game with like, do you want to do a workshop?
Do you want to go to find use cases and help you there?
Do you want someone to come in and just do some education presentations around those level one solutions?
And at the top of that sort of pick list is like I come in as like a fractional executive and implement a framework of AI operations that I've come up with that kind of revolves around three core concepts, which is an AI operator, an AI solutions brief, and then the leveling of the solutions that we talked about.
And if we can get everybody speaking the same language and using the same approach, you start to unlock.
this pent-up, what I call pent-up innovation that's been on the sidelines for years because
nobody could afford to get their ideas out of their head into the wild. I like that phrase,
pent-up innovation. Pent-up innovation. You know, and if you can unlock that, you kind of get this
micro-innovation at scale. You know, you've got a frontline worker who has an idea in the past,
they never would have got it off the ground because they're not going to get development time
resources. But they have the best ideas because it's the most relevant to what the companies do.
They're the subject matter expert. Now, that person, I'm finding this out there all the time. They
They used Claudecode to code up an application for them and two other people that's become
integral to their process.
The CEO doesn't even know about it.
It doesn't even know.
But it works amazingly.
And then our job is to say, that's great.
Let's get it off local host and somewhere where we can manage it.
But you want to see that.
You want to release that pen up innovation that's been locked away in these corners and silos.
And AI is allowing us to do that both through the tooling and the features that it offers,
but also just because of our ability to spin up custom software for small groups.
Yeah, pent up innovation would be a good sales tool.
Yeah.
It's just like it gets people excited about the future potential of their business.
You're selling the outcome and not like the features.
Well, and the other thing that you're doing too is you're infusing joy and excitement back into an employee's job.
Like all of a sudden they're empowered to have innovation and be an entrepreneur and so they're excited.
I see more people when we show them that we can do something with AI like light up and have this ah and then get fired up about, I want to do this.
I want to do this.
you're empowering, what I call it, creating superhuman AI-powered employees.
Yeah.
Inside your company is what we're trying to do.
So this is a 400-person company, hypothetically, that we're talking about.
What would you charge just for an audit, give or take?
I know it can vary, but.
$10,000 to $15,000 usually, depending on, you know, how deep we want to go,
one-time fee.
Point solutions and stuff after that depend on how we want to do it.
Usually what ends up working is coming up with sort of just a monthly amount that you want
to spend, and we'll do as much as we can for that.
velocity.
But what we do too is the way we set it up is on the bigger engagements, right?
So if we're coming in to do like a cultural transformation, let's get AI first or whatever,
one of the platforms that we build or introduce is for the AI operators.
Anytime you have a new technology come out, internet, email, you know, cloud service, there's
never just like budget that comes with it, like let's go do this thing.
And so we find the same thing with AI.
All those executives and leaders that are saying like, we need to do something about it,
they're not carving out millions of dollars.
There's no precedent.
Right, right.
So when it comes to somebody like me, I've got to figure out a way to scale this and introduce
this with no budget.
It's an interesting task.
But one of the luxuries we have with AI is people are excited about it.
In any department or company, about 10%, five to 10% of the people are already like heading
this direction.
I need to know more about how to use AI in this.
And so introducing this concept called an AI operator, we just say, who wants to be, who
wants to work with me?
Point of contact.
Point of contact.
Exactly.
Who wants to work with me?
We're going to learn about AI in business, all the things are happening out there.
I'm going to train you how to do discovery.
Yeah. You're going to become the point person inside your organization, your group that is going to help discover these use cases. You're going to take those. You're going to go to this platform that I built. You're going to enter those in this solutions brief. That's a templated way of understanding, you know, what's the problem? What are the steps? Who's involved? What's the type? I talked about this before. But when they fill that in and when you have everybody filling those in, all of a sudden leadership gets what they want. They get a transparent look into where does innovation lie within their company through that, like, aggregate reporting on all of those briefs. And so you can start to calculate potential ROI, potential
time savings, potential quality improvements. And that's what they want to see before they invest.
Yeah. So at the end of it, we can say we've got X amount of level one solutions, X amount of
level two, X amount of level three. Here they are prioritized. Now how do you want to do it? So back to
the question on what I charge. A lot of times it's let us set that up at a, you know,
I'll come as a fractional rate somewhere in the $20,000 to $35,000 a month range. Let's get all
that set up. And then it becomes a question of do you have the resources to implement or do you
want my team to do that and so on.
One of the reasons I think I've had early success
is I'm just not telling people about this stuff.
I actually build the solutions as well.
So I can get people running.
Yeah, because a lot of consultants say they play quarterback.
You want to try this and use this.
And they're like, that just adds more friction to their plate.
You just create a bunch of problems.
Or which one is better?
Well, this one is a research shows that they're just like,
dude, just do it for me.
Right?
I will pay you to remove this friction from my life.
Yeah, 100% what I did.
So I don't leave them hanging with a bunch of reports.
and stuff.
Once I find, it's not uncommon in the first 30 days for me to already have built three, four,
or five solutions that are having tangible, measurable.
Yeah.
And they love you.
Yeah.
Do you ever work yourself out of a job in a sense?
I'm trying to every time.
Yeah.
If I've done my job correctly, I've democratized whatever the hell I know about.
I always tell people I'm only like three, four weeks ahead of you in the market because
I'm concentrating on this.
Engaging on that top level, if I can teach those AI operators how to solution for themselves,
now all of a sudden we've democratized all of that knowledge.
And so hopefully you have to do that.
platform implemented in doing yourself.
Yeah. Now I know it's early. We're five months in, but how does like churn look so far
when you're hired on a fractional basis? Like, are you working yourself out of a job?
Or is, are you just creating new opportunities for them and they keep you around?
Yeah. So it is early. Churn has not been an issue yet. It's quite the opposite. I think
we're finding so many use cases inside these companies that the question is going to be, you know,
how many can we get through the resources that we have? I think there is some learning that
I'll have to do on my side about what is the best fit?
Is it a big company?
Is it a medium-sized company?
Is it a bunch of point solutions?
I don't really know the answer to that yet,
but in a perfect world, I'd build this company
to handle all of those situations.
Yeah.
And so...
How did you land on that pricing?
Because, I mean, if people are paying it, awesome.
To me, like, I wouldn't know where to start.
I think people are much more likely
to underprice themselves than overpriced themselves
because it's out of like an insecurity,
like, who's going to pay that, right?
Yeah.
How did you land on that?
It's way more than I was comfortable putting into a proposal.
I did a ton of research, like using chat GPT and Claude to go do internet research on this.
And a lot of times what they can find is only from the big four or five consultancies.
And there's certainly a premium on this type of service right now.
And so I kind of just worked my way up.
I would do one at a certain price.
And the next one I would price a little more.
They're not saying no at 10 grand.
They're not saying no at 15.
That's right.
As long as I feel comfortable that I'm delivering the value for that, then I'll go as high as it goes.
Yeah.
But at the point that I feel like...
It's not worth it.
And, you know, is there a bubble around this stuff?
Everybody's talking about that now, specifically with AI consultants.
Probably there's a ton of hype out there.
But I know this.
If we stopped right now with development of AI, there's 10 years worth of work and implementation
that need to be done.
Oh, yeah.
There's plenty ahead of us.
I mean, anytime there's a bubble in anything and the bubble pops, that thing doesn't go away.
The prices just drop a little bit.
And then just like real estate, like it just goes up and down, right?
What did you first start charging on month one for like a fraction?
engagement. The first couple of gigs I did were not fractional. They were more like come in and
be involved. So I charged a retainer. Honestly, the first one that I did was with a very well-respected
friend, Rachel Woods, who's huge in this area of AI operations. And we just kind of got together
and she paid me a retainer fee, but it was more about just getting to work together and getting
the experience and stuff. And so then I priced several jobs out at like an hourly rate that worked
pretty good. So yeah. And I just kind of kept bumping that up. But the first few projects that I did
We're probably in the $4,000 to $5,000 range.
Per month or one time?
One time.
You wanted like case studies, I imagine.
To be honest, it was less about the case studies.
I kind of had a bunch of blurbs and soundbites from the work that I've done in the past.
I just really wanted to prove to myself that what I wanted to do or thought had commercial value did.
A lot of the hype around AI is that, you know, there's MIT, or I forget the report that came out,
but 90% of Gen AI pilots fail inside the enterprise.
I had not had that experience in the companies I worked with in the past.
But I did experience a lot of like, I made something and people didn't use it or, you know, it didn't quite go the way that I thought.
Yeah.
So as I sort of pointed this at the market and said, I'm going to put my, you know, my kids through their college education on my back if I want to do this.
I wanted to really prove out that, like, I could make something that was outside of what I had been doing for a new industry and all that stuff.
So kind of stack in those wins early on and get to the point where I had enough courage to, you know, put a number on a proposal that was.
Kind of made you feel sick a little bit.
It did.
The market said that it was there.
Yeah.
But I can remember, you know, being like, like, I'm going to put this on there.
I'm going to send it.
Let's see what happens.
Yeah.
I would imagine that, like, actually getting the company to adopt what you're suggesting
is a key part of all this, especially to reducing churn, is having that AI operator a key
component to that, someone that owns, like what you're doing, basically.
Yeah, it's a really good question.
So, you know, if you look at things like marketing operations, sales operations, revenue
operations, fin ops, like all the different things, you know, those all have become
disciplines that live within the department, they're not sort of like a centralized thing anymore.
And I think we'll see the same thing happen with AI as the industry matures.
You'll see this AI operator operations piece come.
I think it's one of the most impactful things that a company can do right now is identify
who those employees are that have a proclivity for these types of things and then empower them.
Give them the tools to do the job.
So whether I'm coming in and saying that, you know, this is the framework that we want to put in place
where you're not working with me, I would say, you know,
explore the idea of this AI operator.
And I'll give Rachel Woods again credit.
She came up with that term.
And I said, hey, I'm using that in my business.
Is that OK?
And she's like, I will have succeeded when I see a job opening posted
for an AI operator at some point.
Well, I would think that when you ask the corporation or 10
people on a Zoom call, like who the AI operator should be,
it's going to be nine people that are like, and then one person that's
like, that's me.
Is that usually what you see?
And that's the guy you want.
Yeah.
Because you want them to be fired up about it.
Well, and sometimes you have to demystify it a little
But some people think AI equals technical.
Like I need to be technical.
It's not true.
The people that I'm finding the most impactful
in this AI operator role are people who are curious,
their high agency, and their systems thinkers.
Yeah.
And great communicators.
Because so much of AI is just communicating well.
But yeah, the AI operator person that shoots their hands up,
that's the one you want to look at first.
What types of businesses did you first start working with
in month one versus today?
Has that evolved over time?
Did you start with smaller businesses and work you way up?
Yes.
It started in smaller businesses and projects and point solutions.
Can we do this thing?
Yes, we can do it.
And then usually that ends up.
You do it once and they want more, right?
And so it's, okay, can we do another one?
Can we do it?
It's like, yeah, we can, but we should have a holistic strategy here.
Like, because all of a sudden we're going to have 35 different solutions.
Where are we putting those?
Who's governing?
Like what?
And so it's been a naturally evolving thing.
I think that the next stage for me, and I've been building a lot around this is you've got to prove out that ROI the best you can.
over time. There's some complications with AI and ROI in different departments. But over the
course of a year or two years, some company that's made of significant investment and this
needs to have answers. I've been building my solutions with that in mind. How do you show them
that your money is well worth it? Yeah, there's some things when it comes to AI operations or
AI implementation are very easy to do that. You created a custom level three solution that does a
task that used to take X amount of hours. Now it takes X amount of hours. So every time you run that,
You're catching that and putting in a dashboard so you can see real time.
We've saved 92 hours and $2,455.
There's other areas that are a little bit more difficult.
So if you look at just that general education, that level one that I talked about, solutions,
if you're training people how to just use chat EBT and do the bits.
It's a little bit harder to say you come in and say, like, how do we quantify it?
If you have certain plans, you can look at usage and so on.
But I don't concern myself too much with that.
That's just something that needs to happen.
That's just business getting.
And they're not expecting you to tie that directly to R.O.I.
Leadership has a lot of different views on this.
I mean, some of them are.
They still want to see that.
And so you have to come up with creative ways to sort of get them that answer.
The ones I like the most are like where we can show very clear ROI.
Let's make sure we do it.
And then we just know we have to move in this direction.
I was on a call the other day with someone that we were talking about this.
Or what were your metrics around email and internet usage last month?
Like what do you mean?
Like you don't track, you don't have metrics about internet usage?
Like, no, we don't really track that.
Like, why?
Well, we just know that it's, there's some title shift technologies that come along.
that just become a part of the way that we work.
There's an edge to AI that is that as well.
I imagine like during the kind of discovery phase
before you've closed the deal,
it's super important to ask how many hours X, Y, or Z task takes.
Because then, you know, after you've completed the project,
you could say, hey, you told me that this task took 92 hours,
you know what I'm saying?
And you're not directly saying, you paid me this bunch
and this, but they're connecting the dots for themselves.
Because in that coding process,
you literally need to know how much time they're spending.
on these tasks, but it also supports you on the back end that you can point to it and say,
this is the ROI I delivered for you.
Yeah, that and one of the things you're doing, if you do discovery correctly and you catalog
correctly these potential solutions, you're training people what is not AI too.
Just put some AI, sprinkle some AI.
And there's a lot of cases where you're like, this is not actually, you're wasting your
time.
Yeah.
And so going through that process allows you to prioritize things, figure out what is not AI,
educate people as to how to solution, but then pull out those very important metrics that you need
to evaluate truly if you should be doing a solution. And the other thing that allows you to do is
that level one, level two, level three solutioning. You always start at level one. What can I get
accomplished with that? What can I get accomplished with level two? Because a lot of times we find
we get 80% of the benefit at a level two solution. It's not worth investing the time to go to level
three solution because we've pulled those metrics out. Yeah. For someone that doesn't have
your background and wants to start doing something like this, what do you recommend they do to get their
first customer because that's the hardest one right yeah i've had a lot of conversations about this actually
in the last year as people kind of turn and and say you know i would say just go see if you can solve a
problem for somebody for free even yeah i would that's kind of yeah until you get confident enough
that you can do it and then i would just start rolling up that that price but yeah i would go i would
go look for these use cases inside of companies and they're everywhere yeah people have asked me
what's your process for doing discovery i don't really know i just kind of sit down to have a conversation
Yeah. And I asked the what question. Find the pain points. Yeah. Why do you do that? Where does that happen? When does that happen? You'll hear things like, that takes us hours. That's done manually. And so you get good at listening for these. Then just, you know, see if you can put something together. So that's how I'd say to get started. How much of what you're implementing is actually AI and how much of it is just an automation? It doesn't matter, right? If it solves the problem, but. Yeah, there's two ways that I look at it. AI is offering solutions that didn't exist before through features, like in chat, TBT.
you can do this or in, you know, that's one way,
but it's solving problems.
But the other way is it's just making us so much more efficient
at building software or in building solutions.
So there's sometimes that I'm solving a problem.
I'm using AI to quickly, you know, build the solution out
for a cost and a time period that wouldn't have been available for,
but the actual solution I deliver has very little AI in it.
You're using AI to build it, but the delivery of it is not AI.
Yes.
You know, in the past, you couldn't spin up a bespoke application for, like I said,
a team of three in a cost-efficient manner.
Now I can do that.
And that's, I think, what makes me different about my offering.
It's like both let's do education and strategy and cultural transformation, but also if you need
to get your hands through it, like, just let's build.
Yeah.
Let's go and make this thing.
So I don't know about like how much I'm finding there's AI versus automation, but I do look
at it.
I would say about 70% of the solutions that I'm building actually are using AI in the solution,
and 30% are just being built because AI is allowing me to build people.
Yeah.
Okay.
And then back to the first customer question.
Where do you think they go from there?
Like, they get someone to have their problems solved by you, by the,
them. You do that for free. What's the likelihood of that business owner needing an additional
problem solved and being willing to pay for that second one? 100%. You just open the floodgates.
Yeah, I think especially in this industry at this time in history, if you can prove that you can do
one meaningful thing like that, you go to a company, you're going to immediately, even through
the survey process that I do in the beginning of that audit, we're pulling out 40 use cases just
from that. Wow. And some of them are good and some of them are AI and some of them are not
AI and whatever. But it's a unique time in history where people are doing this, companies are
doing this inventory of what's possible. I've not had an interaction where there hasn't been
follow-on work. Yeah. Because if I start like a web design agency and I have no customers,
I do a first website for free and then they're good. And then I use that as a case study.
Here's my portfolio of one website. I charge $500 and you're going to be much more likely to get
that second job. But in this business, it's like I built this AI voice agent for an HVAC
business owner and now he needs me to do a chat bot on his website.
website. And I'm going to charge 500 for that. Oh, now it needs me to do this. I'm going to
charge 3,000 for that, right? So if you're watching this interview with Brandon thinking,
I could be an AI consultant, 80 grand a month. That sounds pretty good. Just so happens. I have a
community of people doing exactly that. It's called Playmakers at PlaymakersAI.com. I'm teaching
in there every single week live. I have 21 paid experts teaching in there every week,
how to find customers, how to fulfill these services for customers. Check out PlaymakersAI.com
or at the link in the description.
Yep.
And then you have revenue
and you have case studies
and you probably have some referrals in there.
Are you getting good referrals?
Yes, but there's also other people
that don't want to tell folks.
They don't want you to get too busy.
They don't want you to get taken away.
Right, yeah.
So I have received more referrals
than I've been able to service at this point
and building this, I don't know what it looks like
in the future.
Most of the higher-end companies
that I'm doing work for,
they do want to bring me on full-time.
There's a layer of fear that exists
in the enterprise
that maybe didn't,
exist with other technologies. The best companies are bringing in somebody like me to address that
and say, hey, we're investing in this transformation and in you, so don't worry about your job.
We're going to make you a better employee and do your job better. But they want a face for that.
They don't want some random consultant just coming in and being like, here's the AI person.
They're going to bring in six people and do the different stuff. So I am learning that. It's a
personal thing. Yeah. I imagine, like, in a lot of situations, you could be the enemy to a lot of people
in the organization, right? Yeah. And maybe even more so.
if they hired you on full-time.
It's like, oh, this is a guy they hired to replace all of us.
Awesome.
Yeah, there's definitely, I've seen that fade a little bit over the last year.
But there's some people that are super excited and so glad you're there and they want to talk
and there's other people that are a little skeptical.
What I find, though, is the more that I engage and talk about what we're doing, like,
one of the phrases everybody uses it now was like, AI is probably not going to take your job
in the near term, but somebody that knows how to use AI is going to put a lot of pressure on you.
And AI enable you, so you're the one, you know, that's ready for the future.
I also have seen this trend happen.
Even those that are hesitant to talk to me at the end of our time together, a couple sessions
together, in 180-degree turns.
Yeah.
And now they're asking me, can I get more time?
Can we solve this thing?
Can we...
So if you're doing your job right, you are communicating to them.
Like, my job isn't to come in and put people out of business.
Yeah.
I'm passionate about helping people do their job better so they can do more.
Yeah.
Well, AI is growing the pie for everyone.
So if a company wants to grow their proportional share of the market or pie, so to speak,
then it needs its employees to be empowered.
And 10 years ago, that increased market share
would look like hiring 500 more employees.
Now it might look like hiring 10 more employees
but all 510 are now empowered by AI.
And so they're still taking a proportionate share of the market,
but they're not having to hire 500 more people to do so, right?
Yeah, I've found leaders, executive leadership
tends to have one to two outlooks on this.
One is you do absolutely hear some of them being like
how much money can we save head,
count can we reduce and whatever. The other side of that is saying like think about how much more
we could do with what we have. So I know both exist out there. I tend to like working with
the latter more. Yeah. Well, I would think that the former, right, the guy that wants to replace
his head count, they eventually graduate to the ladder, right? They graduate to the mindset of,
oh, I'm looking at this too simplistically. The pie is going to grow. It's not, it's like good
guys and bad guys, optimistic and pessimists, but just like less informed, become more informed.
Yeah, because at some point, if you reduce your
headcount, then you're asking the same thing as the other guy.
Yeah.
How can I get more out of the West headcount?
Yeah.
I've come up with six personas that I think exist inside the company for AI adoption,
like enthusiastic Emma, traditionalist Tim, curious Chris.
I won't go through him on.
No, I want to hear him.
This is good.
Curious Chris, traditionalist Tim.
Enthusiasm.
Enthusiasm.
Principal Pat.
Curious Clara.
cautious.
It was cautious Chris and Clarious.
I don't have much time.
And the point in identifying those is not just some pedantic exercise that sounds
good is that each one of those have a different learning curve with AI. Your traditional, you know,
change management, skills gap, adoption curve. Emma's really excited about it, but I can tell you
what's going to happen to Emma. She's going to see something that's very cool that I show her. She's
going to go do it herself and it's not going to work the same way. Yeah. And she's going to lose steam.
Yeah. So for her, it's about like coming alongside. Each one of those has a different little graph
on how you progress them through the adoption phase. There's some, you know, that have serious
objections to it. My job's not to convince everybody to be an AI, but it is to give you the information
I have to help you make good decisions. So you run to people like AI uses too much water. It stole
from all the artists out there. Those are real conversations. In fact, when I roll out a program,
I'll often do a follow-up presentation for AI concerns. And I'll just get in a room and say,
these are the biggest ones that are out there. Let's talk about. I'll give you information I have.
How long did it take you from month one to five, where we are today, to go from going out and
to finding customers to, I don't need to find any more. Like, they're finding.
me. I'm good. I don't need to hustle anymore. Does that make sense? Like, when did that? When did the
tide turn? I hate that I'm going to answer this way. Because most of my life has been around
grinding to find customers. Yeah. Creative marketing. When I started that Rit and Review Financial
Advisor company, I was running an iPhone promotion. Like, I've done all the things. Yeah. This one
didn't happen like that. There was people from the jump that were interested. I had a little bit of a
reputation of doing this stuff. And so I think there was one person in this process that I put a
sales approach on. Like they were interested. I sent them to emails like, hey, do you want to get
back together and talk? You follow it up like you're supposed to. I did this stuff. Yep,
yep. I built my whole consulting platform using AI, but I built my own CRM, my own calendar,
my own presentation deal, invoice, whatever. And I was using this to prospect this guy, never got
him, but it didn't need to at the end of it. So that was, you know, this one is just, it's just,
it's just happened. So maybe a month, I would say.
until got to the place where there was enough business out there.
And I think there's more.
I know there's more, but I kind of want to prove out this methodology and stuff I have.
You're having to say no to stuff already.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
What did your monthly revenues look like from month one to five?
I'll put it this way.
The first, I think I did about $30,000 worth of small projects in about a six-week period.
And then it quickly grew to annual run rate of around $800,000 through different engagements and stuff.
So roughly $20,000 a month to $6,000.000.
60, 70, 80,000 a month over the course of five months.
And I know it's lumpy, right?
Yeah, depending on when the invoice is coming.
Yeah.
And all that.
That's the kind of potential that's out there right now, yeah.
That's incredible.
And small team, right?
Your cost or your team and your internet connection?
Yeah.
That's incredible.
What is like a good example of a small project,
like a small solution that you provide an organization?
That's very common.
Yeah.
I signed so many NDAs as part of this.
So I'm thinking to be careful how I,
so there was one organization.
that came in and said, we want to build this thing that's going to help train people.
It's going to be a specific group of people, and it's a very complex subject matter,
and we want a better experience for training people.
And I said, okay, I know nothing about this area, but the way that we work together now is changing.
So in this particular instance, I did the initial call, and then I said, send me everything.
I want presentations, documents.
I want you, subject matter expert, to dictate into a word document everything about this project.
I want like snow me under with information.
I take all that and then I start using AI, Claude code in this example, to really understand
what's going on, do internet research, like figure out what's happening.
And then in like 10 days delivered a, it was for them as a proof of concept, but like a fully
functional training application around this.
So one meeting, you know, one dump of information using AI to get understanding to build
the solution, you know, deliver it days later and their minds are blown.
Another, you know, project would like would be, hey, we have this process.
The way that it works is we get some information from Salesforce, it comes to this team,
this team of three, then goes and does a bunch of internet research and they do this and this and this,
and they put together a CSV file, and that CSV file gets back uploaded to Salesforce.
How long does that take?
Well, it takes, you know, an hour and a half to do each one.
Okay, let's build a solution where automatically the information from Salesforce gets sent to an AI agent.
That AI agent goes out and does research with a very detailed prompt,
bring back what we need, gives it to another agent to structure it into a certain format,
send that back to our application, use the deterministic code to pull out what we want and create the CSV file the way we want it.
So within a minute to three minutes instead of an hour and a half, they have that piece of information.
So that's another point project.
Yeah. That type of stuff.
So I'm thinking like if I go into like a regional grocery store.
Yeah.
Right.
They've got 400 employees and they're saying, you know, we do these slip and fall trainings with our new hire.
It's all done on paper.
They have to sign it.
We've got a training coordinator that manages it.
here's all the documents in a PDF, make us an app for this, right? So you use Claude Code or whatever,
upload all the PDFs, build a little interface, and it can all be done digitally on a web app,
and they can sign it digitally. Is that kind of like, could that be a project? Yeah, maybe.
You know, I'd have to dig into it more. That's like kind of a traditional software build that you
would maybe just be able to accelerate because you're using AI to do it faster. I think if to use
a regional grocery store, the questions I'd be asking are like, what is your marketing department?
do. I'm a big fan of getting a Miroboard or a loose of whatever you use and then right with the
client being like, okay, this box is X. Tell me what happens next. That goes over here and does this
and that goes over here. So kind of my approach is looking more for the workflow first than like
the product opportunity, the app opportunity. So I don't know what that. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
What does the sales process look like or the discovery call process look like? What kind of tips or
tactics do you use to get them closer to a yes? A lot of times on these initial calls, I am, you know, I'll do an
intro, a little rapport building, whatever. And then I'll just, you know, say, take me through
your journey, your experience with AI, where you're at? Are you a strong adopter? Are you scared
about it? Whatever? And people generally get pretty verbose in that response. I like it. I play around
sometime. My kid showed me this. So I try to get their feelings around AI first before I go the
next step. But the next step is always that workflow piece. Like, have you thought about anything
where you think AI could help? It's this, this, or, you know, for this. I try to never solution
on those calls. I think it's bad, like, midway through, be like, you know what you could do
do is this? So just ask questions, get them talking. What happens if you fix this problem? It's
classic sales stuff, right? It's been selling like implication quite like. If you could fix that,
what's going to happen? If you don't feel it, what's going to happen? A lot of that stuff,
classic sort of sales tactic. And then usually the process after that is to go back with several
options. Like here are four different ways to engage. Yeah. I know that I'm not very good at selling.
and I know that on a call like that, I would offer solutions in the moment, right?
Like, well, you know, you could do this.
And I do that from a place of, I'm going to show you how smart I am.
So you'll say yes.
Why isn't that a good idea?
Well, first of all, you shut down the process.
Like, as soon as you start solutioning, then the discovery is done.
And you're looking for a lot of stuff.
You want to find three, four, five, six different use cases.
Yeah.
And as soon as you start solutioning, then you get them.
That's number one.
Number two is you don't have all the information yet.
You might offer something that is not doing.
Now you just shot yourself.
You could do yourself more harm than good, right?
Yeah.
Like, this guy doesn't always talk about it.
Yep, exactly.
And it does come back to, there's an old chart when I was a financial advisor.
It's like a, you know, your classic X, Y access, but it's a U shape and it's effectiveness
of selling over time.
When you're young in the business and a rookie, you're very effective because you don't
know anything.
So what you do?
That could be an advantage.
You ask questions.
Yeah.
You're like, tell me about why is that important?
And what if we did that?
But then as we mature as salespeople, we start to think we know the answers to the questions.
Curse of knowledge.
Yeah, exactly.
You become less effective.
And the very best salespeople at the end know all the answers and still only ask questions.
And they're not even listening when they, like they may even be asking questions just to ask questions, but they answer them like, I don't know all this.
I already know all this.
Yeah.
And a lot of times it's about discovery.
At that stage, it's about getting the prospect to discover the thing, not so much, you doing the discovery.
Because you can ask a couple of questions.
I'm not there yet in the maturity of this particular thing, but in other times, I could ask three questions and know where to put you.
But yeah, that initial call, and look, I have all the background and knowledge about sales.
I know all the different stuff, the takeaway clothes, alternative clothes, and all the things.
I hate it all.
When it comes to this stuff, I'm literally asking the questions and not solutioning, but I'm not actually thinking this is going to kill the sale.
I'm just thinking, like, I want to help you.
Yeah.
And so I got to get all the information that I can get.
And I think that they feel that.
If you could wave a magic wand, you had a $100,000 opportunity in front of you.
You could pick the industry that you were going to pitch this opportunity to, right?
manufacturing, home services, startup, venture funded, whatever, what industry would you pick
because they would be most likely to close? And like close in a shorter amount of time and pay you
quicker, et cetera. What's the best industry? Let me maybe answer the question in a different way.
I would want the industry that's going to, I'm going to be able to provide the most value
to versus like close because I think I could close a lot of them that wouldn't work.
And I'll give you an example. If you're a company that has like a heavy PII, personal identifiable
information burden in part of your core. What does that mean? Yeah, you move around a lot of personal
information, which social security. Okay. Data integrity. Data, yeah, not so much data integrity,
but like just, we're a data company and we handle all this data, which includes emails and medical
records and all that kind of stuff. Like a fintech company or health care? Fentac would be,
health care would be that deal with sensitive information. Those are harder to work with because
you're using AI and then you've got to get things cleared and whatever. So the first thing would be,
like the perfect industry slash company would be one that doesn't deal heavily in PII as part of their core product offering.
Those that are forward-looking, they are interested in taking chances and AI, like, curious.
Is there an industry better than others, like an industry that tends to be more forward-thinking or?
I think you have all your, you know, traditional metrics or not metrics, but like filters you would apply to technology.
Companies like healthcare fintech are going to be harder to work with a little bit because of the data sensitivity that they have.
But every single company out there has this need for how do we take AI and operationalize it into the business.
And so for me, it's not really about industry.
It's about how ready that company is or that group is to take on these types of projects and this type of thinking.
I know we talked about headcount.
What revenue size do you think is a good target for getting to a yes?
Again, I think the need is so across the board.
it's hard to, in my experience so far, I have not found a correlation between, you know,
if you're trying to make a business out of this, it's going to be easier, easier to go with
larger companies than it is like a bunch of, you know, local businesses.
Yeah.
Because they just don't have the, they can't write the job.
There is a trade-up though, right?
It's harder to close a bigger business, but much more money.
Yeah, I don't know.
Okay.
Yeah.
I love all your answers, by the way, because I interview entrepreneurs and it's like, what's the best?
But here it's just like, this is really hot right now, okay?
Like that's the answer.
Like, this is a really hot industry.
I've never seen anything like it.
Yeah.
Everyone says yes.
As long as I get in front of them, I solve their problem.
I do what I promise I will do.
I charge a market rate, which is very high right now because it's very hot right now.
I get a yes and it's really good money.
Yeah, I mean, and I've been, that's why I said when I answered the question before,
it's like I don't like that I'm going to answer it this way because I've been in the trenches.
I've built, you know, I built my first financial advising practice by cold calling.
every day. All the side businesses and things that I've always started to create. It was a
grind and a hustle and feeding a kid in one arm and trying to learn, got a code in the other arm.
But this one is coming together of a lot of different things at once. To your question that you just
said about, it's harder to close bigger than, I think that's an old, you know, an old
well-debated sales myth in general. It takes just as much work. And in my experience,
sometimes less work to close the big ones than it does the smaller ones, especially at certain
price points. That's absolutely true. But then when you get into working inside of the company,
different thing. Big more bureaucracy, more politics. Touch points. Yeah, different things. And yeah,
that's, that's harder than a bigger company than a smaller company. How much of what you do is tied to
a company's revenue or cost savings? In my experience, it's easier to sell a service where you can say,
look, I saved you this many man hours, or I saved you this much money, or I made you this much
money. Is a lot of what you do tied to that, or is it not? Yeah, I'd kind of go back to the
the way I put it before. It's like, we want to tie as much to that as we can. Like, that's the win for me.
say we cut cost on this, our profit margin went up here. Or we were able to do much more because
we cut down the time. The more we can tie it back to actual revenue is the goal. But then on the
other side of things, it's like we educated the broad workforce on how to use chat GPT better and
do personal workflows better. That's not tied to revenue, but it is tied to employee joy. Yeah.
You know, your workforce and culture and all that. So the more someone, I think, doing what I do can
tie it to revenue, the more successful they're going to be because the biggest jobs that you're
going to get are going to want to know that. What executive leadership is desperate for inside of
these companies when it comes to AI is proof that it's not hype and then it's working. They're under
this mandate. Go use AI. Go figure out. Go do this. Yeah. And so they need to be able to bring back.
This is what we did. It saved this amount of time, this many hours. Yeah. Has it been hard to say no to some of
these job offers you've gotten? Yes. What have some of the offers been if you'd be willing to share?
They've been more money than I've ever made in any of my other gigs. And I'm not opposed to it. It's just that
When you start to make a commitment to one company and another one comes along and says,
we want you full time, but you need to give up that commitment.
That's just not the ethical thing to do.
I'm open to whatever in the future, but one thing I won't compromise is if I said I'm going
to take you from point A to point B, then I'm going to get you there.
I got to finish when I start.
What has this business done to your personal income?
I gave you some of the numbers before, but it's tripled what I have historically been making
at this point.
That's incredible.
And it's fun.
You like it?
Yeah, here's the thing that I like the most.
The ability to think about something to be with the family or see a Netflix documentary or watch
something on YouTube and have an idea and then put it into action the next day.
Like that's really cool.
The bigger companies that have, you know, startup companies are good about that too.
It's like the larger the organization gets, the harder it becomes to like have that short
feedback loop on what you want to do.
And I really crave that.
On a bigger existential level, you get to a certain point in your life and you realize you don't
want that much more materialistically.
Like, I don't want to move from where I live here.
I don't want, you know, I'm happy.
And so how do you find motivation to, like, do the next thing?
And for me, in my 40s, it was just like, what's the next version of me going to look
like?
And I mentioned the beginning, like, wandering around in the desert for a while, feeling
like what's going to happen.
And then this AI thing happened and just worked and fit with my skill set and personality.
And to wake up now and be like, this drives me.
It's exciting.
I can help people four years ago, three years ago.
I made a statement to my brother that, you know, I can't remember the last time I was
excited to get out of bed in the morning.
Yeah.
And, like, when I said it, it came across way.
more depressing than I thought when I said it. And that's not the case anymore. That's incredible.
How important do you think credibility is to all this? Like if someone were starting what you're doing,
how much do you have to lean on your credibility versus how much is this is just, there's so much
demand for it. You just got to know what you're doing. Or learn what you're doing as you're building it.
Because I imagine you've learned a lot of these skills on the job. A hundred percent. Yeah,
all of them. There's a lot of hype around AI. If you're on X, blah, blah, blah, blah. Just dropped last night.
Here's 15 things the way it's changing them. Blowing my mind.
You know, this guy automated, fired everybody in his company.
I just cloned Shopify with one prompt.
That's right.
No, you didn't.
No, you didn't.
Not at all.
No.
Just like hype and marketing around this agentic piece that I think it's really important
if you're going to be a consultant in this space, that your credibility and authenticity
and honesty is upfront non-display.
Yeah.
And so a lot of times I'm telling people what you heard is not, that's not true.
We're not going to be able to do that.
That's not going to happen.
So I think your credibility, your authenticity, your character,
of that is important no matter what kind of business you run. But I think specifically with AI consulting,
there's already an error of like, is this bullcrap? Do people need to know to code how to do this?
Here's the way that specifically, so you could be an AI consultant that doesn't have anything to do with
like coding or solution creating. That's not me. I think that's part of the value that I bring to the table.
I feel strongly about this because I taught myself to code and I would never consider my, I'm like a junior
to mid-level developer that I've taught myself. With AI, I'm great. I'll put it this way. My son started a lawn mowing
business this summer and I helped him with that and I said hey build your website and gave him
Claude Code and he built the website and it came out pretty good was like that's awesome and he was
like can I just build whatever I want with this I was like 100%. So he built like a workout tracking
thing and he built another thing and he built another thing and every time he would get to a point
where it would break eventually. That happens yeah like and he didn't know how to fix it yeah and
whatever it's because he didn't understand what he was doing yeah he was just telling it
what to do and he doesn't know models and databases and connection I would say that you've got to
know how to how to fly the plane in order to you know sort of put it on auto yeah and so
That's where I think it's worked for me because I understand enough about how everything works to build in a way that is sustainable.
If you were to be able to measure all of your AI knowledge, all of these tools that you're building, today versus five months ago when you started, what percentage of it like came from the last five months first before those five months?
That's really good question. I would say maybe 50-50.
The three years prior was about experimentation and learning that I can't just make a cool tool and give it to somebody.
There's like change management and training and all this stuff that needs to happen.
process, the framework, all of that was maybe 50% of it. In, you know, the last five months or whatever,
it's been, I think I've just got a ton of knowledge outside of the bubble that I was operating
in and to have the supplies for the rest of the world. And just so much it's changed. I mean,
cloud code codex and those types of really powerful agenetic coding tools are just coming on the scene.
Yeah. Yeah. Really in that time. So yeah. I guess that answered 50. 50. Yeah.
If you were to take all the AI tools you use on a daily basis to build automations, to build apps,
where would you rank them as far as how much you use them?
So clock code is my number one when it comes to custom development.
My stack on that side for anybody that's interested is like NextJS, MongoDB,
Tailwind CSS deployed to Heroku, but that depends on the company and client,
what they want to do there.
In the middle layer of those level two solutions, that would be like level three solutions.
Those level two solutions, you know, Zapier relevance AI is one that I've used quite a bit
recently.
I'm looking forward to using this agent kit now from OpenAI that they just launched.
N8N is one.
I don't really use Make.com.
And so that's kind of that middle layer.
And then when it comes to those level one solutions,
I just think ChatGBTGBT has done a better job productizing this magic than any of the others.
Like Anthropics a close second, and they're doing some really cool stuff.
But when I recommend kind of an AI operating system for a company,
it's historically been ChatGBT at this point.
Yeah.
Is there any type of like mindset shift you've had to have with this business compared to other businesses you've started in the past?
Well, I think when it comes to solutioning with AI specifically,
we've got to have like a retrain of our brain a little bit. And here's what I mean. So over the last,
you know, 15 to 20 years, whatever, somewhere in there. We've kind of found ourselves in this
vendor economy, this SaaS economy, this vendor mindset. And it's crept into the way that we
actually solution for problems. So a lot of times you'll find people inside of companies instinctively,
you know, reflexively, when they have a workflow or some, some area that they're trying to
improve. It's like, okay, what's the problem? What products are available out there that we can go
buy that'll solve that problem. Then can I get budget? Can I get it through procurement? Can I get it
in and train people on how to use it? You see it out there. There's like matrix of all these
product grids and this is good for this and this is good for that. So we're squarely in this vendor
think. And what I think AI is doing is allowing us to get outside of that. You know, there's,
there's going to be pressure on the SaaS industry because people can create these tools by themselves.
But when someone goes to solution for a problem, I like to try to do some other exercise, like an
intern exercise. Like how would you solve this problem if you had five interns that were the smartest
interns on the planet, but you're going to tell them something they're going to run away and do it and come out.
That gets you thinking about people versus products. You know, the blue sky, you said it a minute ago with
if you could wave a magic wand and do one thing. Same thing. Blue sky, I think, how would you solve this
if you had no constraints with budget people time? Start gets you thinking in a different way.
So just challenging yourself to not look for products first, but like what are some different
ways to think about this? Because that's how you can really feel what AI can do and come into the...
Well, it seems like a great sales tool, right? Getting them to ask questions differently helps you to
understand the problem better, helps you to sell it better, helps you to close it better.
Yeah. And I think it's refreshing when people, when they hear that. And I've heard it at
companies I work for like, I don't know why I wasn't thinking like that in the past. I just
stopped thinking that way. Yeah. And so it's cool to see that. Yeah. That happened again.
So yeah. Well, I'm out of questions. I think this was incredible. If someone watching or listening
wants to find you or your business, where can they do so? Yeah, just godosy consulting.com
is the website we'll link to it yeah how do you spot g-a-d-o-ci consulting thank you brand thanks for the time
