The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - The Easiest Way to Actually Make Money With AI⏐Ep. #292

Episode Date: April 17, 2026

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Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 99 out of 100 people need the service. That's a $3 to $5,000 upsell all day. And a lot of people hear that and are like, oh, well, like, I'm not an expert. You don't need to be an AI expert to do this. You just need to be one step ahead of your average client, which is literally you studying the stuff for like seven days. And then you can easily go out and sell it. I did exactly that.
Starting point is 00:00:19 So these are seven ways that anybody can sell AI services, followers or no followers. So the first, and this one is such a no-brainer, but nobody is going to do it. All right, guys, today we're going to zoom in. I talk a lot about AI consulting this and implement AI in a small business as that, yada, yada, yeah. but let's just talk about doing AI audits for small businesses. That's it and getting paid $1,000 to do it. And all you're doing is prompting Claude and using a voice agent to interview a business owner about his business.
Starting point is 00:00:52 That's it. That's all we're talking about today is selling AI audits to small business owners for $1,000 with basically no cost. It's almost pure profit margin. I found a guy on Twitter who does exactly that. He's very good at it. He tells us how to get customers. He has a seven-step process for finding customers that we'll get to at the end.
Starting point is 00:01:08 And it's very real, very tactical. You're going to love it. I was at lunch one day with a friend of mine who was like, Corey, he's like, I would literally pay you $1,000 just to follow me around for a day in my office and just tell me where I can be using AI. And that was like a huge light bulb moment for me because I was like, hmm, that's interesting because he's probably not the only one who thinks that. So there's probably a business here, but obviously it's not scalable in the sense.
Starting point is 00:01:32 that I can't just be driving around to different offices all day and doing that. So what's another way we could do that? And that led me to coming up with this AI audit product, which, again, I'm sure we'll get into the weeds of what that actually entails and how people can implement it. But instead of following people around, we literally just do a Zoom call for 45 minutes, take the transcript, essentially feed it into Claw, research a few different AI tools that people can implement to solve some of their pain points and then deliver it in a report and then do a follow-up call and then upsell them on a number of different services. So,
Starting point is 00:02:06 like, in a nutshell, it's that simple. I love how, like, this business started on that one conversation because you're like, if one person would pay a thousand bucks for this, there's got to be more. For your friend, did you literally follow him around or did you not even start with that? Did you quickly learn that's not even necessary? Yeah, so I didn't even start with that. But it was, I swear, it was like such a light bulb moment. Like, I remember it so vividly, him saying that. And, like, at first, I kind of brushed it off and then I'm driving home. I just, like, could not shake that thought. And I'm like, all right, if this guy who's super successful is offering me to, you know, pay me
Starting point is 00:02:40 so I can tell him how to learn AI, there's got to be people all across the spectrum of business owners who need this exact same thing. In talking to probably 50 to 100 different business owner sense, that has absolutely been the case. Like, 99 out of 100 people need the service. All right. You're speaking my love language here. What about in lieu of a 45 minute Zoom call, would it be more or less effective slash efficient
Starting point is 00:03:05 for them to just have a normal workday and just loom the whole thing, like screen record the whole thing? So a couple of ways I want to go with that. And I think what I'm going to kind of tell you next, I think you're going to love it. But that's actually what we did first, right? Because this audit, we actually call it an assessment because it's just a little less aggressive. Intimidated? Yeah, yeah. People hate getting audited, but they don't mind doing an assessment. So that was actually the first iteration of the assessment is when we were kind of piloting this out and doing some some of these for free to get feedback, which I recommend anybody do, we asked people, we said, hey, can we add you to our LUM account as a user? And then all we ask you to do is when you sit down to do a deep work session, hit record, work for 60, 90, 120 minutes, and then that'll pipe it right back to us. and then we can take that screen recording and, you know,
Starting point is 00:03:58 essentially do the assessment based off that. And what we found is that was just asking too much of people. They hadn't used loom before. It's too foreign. Yeah, it's too foreign. Hopping on a zoom is part of our daily routine as it is. So whatever, one more Zoom. But this is like, all right.
Starting point is 00:04:14 What? Yeah, we found it was way too much friction. What if I spent 30 minutes on Reddit? Like, do I need to pause it? Like, are you going to judge me? There's all kinds of variables in there. So I can see why that wouldn't work. Okay. And so just not to jump too far ahead, but as you can probably imagine, the bottleneck in the
Starting point is 00:04:31 initial iteration was, well, I can't be following people around all day at the office. The bottleneck in this iteration is, well, there's only so many Zoom calls I can do in a given day. Now, the current iteration is a voice agent with a phone number that the business owner can call and have a 20 to 30 minute conversation with this voice agent, which is like shockingly good. Like, we've tested it thoroughly. you'll talk to this voice agent and you're like, wow, I literally feel like I'm talking to a human. And the voice agent, her name is Annie. She's the one doing the assessments now. She's asking the questions. And when they hang up with her, it pipes right back to our other AI agent who then analyzes the transcript and builds the report. So you don't even do the Zoom calls anymore.
Starting point is 00:05:13 Not anymore, right? That's our most recent iteration as of like the last couple of weeks. Do you basically say call this number at your convenience 24-7 doesn't matter and just answer the questions. Correct. Yeah. So that's the way we have it set up now is that they just call a number. Yeah. They can talk to it at two in the morning if they want. And yeah. Are those questions standardized or does the AI like adjust on the fly based on the answers? Yeah. So when we originally, when we did the first assessment, we just had a very general question bank. And then what we've noticed is that obviously everybody we do these four, they're a little difference. And so we've done probably eight or nine different industries now. And so we've kind of taken that. And so we've kind of taken that.
Starting point is 00:05:53 and combined it into a master bank so the voice agent can pick the questions that make sense for that industry, starting general and then kind of moving more specialized throughout the process, which is how I did it when I was doing it. Can we try it? Yeah, we can call it right now. All right, let's see. Let's call it right now. Hi there.
Starting point is 00:06:10 I'm Annie from Return My Time. Thanks for hopping on. This is a quick chat to learn about your business and what your day-to-day looks like so I can spot the best places AI can give you time back. Are you ready to get started? Yeah, Annie. Let's get started. Awesome.
Starting point is 00:06:24 What's your name? My name is Chris. Nice to meet you, Chris. So tell me, what do you do in your business? I am an e-commerce entrepreneur. I sell things on Amazon. How long have you been selling on Amazon? Almost nine years.
Starting point is 00:06:39 Nine years. Wow. You've seen all the Amazon waves? Do you run this solo or do you have a team helping you? I have two warehouse employees and I have four virtual assistants. Oh, nice. That's a solid setup. What tools or software are you and the team using day to day to run the Amazon business?
Starting point is 00:06:57 So we're using the full Google workspace suite, sheets, docs, etc. And then we're using a tool called Smart Scout. Perfect. That gives me a good snapshot of your stack. What's the biggest headache in your workday right now? I would say finding new suppliers is our biggest bottleneck. Yeah, that makes total sense. And so, Chris, she'll go on for 10 or 15 minutes.
Starting point is 00:07:18 Yeah, we can, I think I've got a good glimpse of it. Okay, yeah. Yeah. So that's kind of the gist. And like, as you can see, right, I've talked to a lot of different, you know, answering services or bots before. And I feel like she is one of the more human-like ones that I've come into contact with. And of course, she'll just kind of go on with that line of questioning for 10 to 15 minutes or up to 20 minutes and really dig in on those pain points. And she's not going to prescribe any tools or any solutions on the call. That's not her job. She'll then take that transcript, like I said, and then pipe it over to a different AI agent that we built. specifically to create those assessments. And how did you build that voice agent? Yeah. So my business partner, Nick, he is the technical brains. I know he built the voice agent on the back of retail.aI,
Starting point is 00:08:06 which I think is R-E-T-E-L-L-L-L. Yeah. Yeah. And then the actual processing the transcripts and building the report, he's built a series of multiple skills to go and do each step of the process one at the time. Listen, I need more people like this to interview on my podcast. So if you know of someone with a side hustle or a business that's unique and cool and super profitable, email Molly, M-O-L-L-L-Y at co-founders.com. That's one word co-founders.com. Molly at co-founders.com, tell her
Starting point is 00:08:36 your story and we'll give you 100 bucks if we end up interviewing them. I'm sure you're probably familiar with skills, but maybe we could define that for the audience if they haven't heard of that. Yeah, just like a, it's like a literal skill that an AI agent can perform. Maybe it's like opening Chrome browsers or scraping something or emailing people, right? Yeah, a skill is essentially like an SOP, a standard operating procedure. So it's like the recipe that you build one time and then you hand it to the AI agent and then the agent just follows that recipe the same way every time. Right.
Starting point is 00:09:08 So for example, in our assessment process, we have a skill that takes the raw transcript and cleans it up and formats it appropriately. And then it might go and search through thousands of different AI. tools on the internet to find the specific ones that meet the pain points from from the client now with that said right because i know we're going to talk about how someone can copy this idea and do it themselves you don't need this like complicated layer of agents you don't need to build all these skills from scratch if you're starting out you can literally take the transcript of your conversation with the client give it to clod tell it to go find a couple off-the-shelf tools that meet their needs and it'll do
Starting point is 00:09:49 it'll do it just fine, right? And then ask how to install those off the shelf tools, right? Exactly. Cool, this sounds interesting. Never heard of it. How do I do it like this? Exactly. I mean, we still do that to this day.
Starting point is 00:10:00 Like it'll, you know, we built a pretty intricate setup to go and do this research, but sometimes it'll send me, it'll prescribe a tool for the client. And I'm like, hmm, that's never heard of that tool. Like, what does that do?
Starting point is 00:10:11 So then I'll just ask, Claude, explain it to me. Like, how would they actually implement this in practice so that I can get a good feel for what the tool does? when I'm going into the follow-up call with the client, and I can confidently pitch it as a good solution to their problem. Okay. So a thousand bucks from your friend.
Starting point is 00:10:27 He's a busy mortgage broker. Are you able to show us what you provided to him? Was it generated by Claude? Yeah. So this particular report, it's not generated by Claude. So what the agent does is it outputs a Doc X file, so basically just a Word Doc file. And then we can upload that.
Starting point is 00:10:46 So we use Gamma, which is essentially like an AI document and slideshow creation tool. So I'm happy to share my screen and show you assessment example because this is going to be where a lot of the juices is, especially for anybody that wants to replicate this. And so just as a heads up for people too, right? So this template here that we've got in Gamma, if somebody wants this template,
Starting point is 00:11:09 which they can literally download, upload themselves, and start creating these assessments for themselves, they can go to audit template.AI and get a free, I'll just literally send you a free copy of this template here. So you can start doing. Beautiful. And so audittempletatai. Yep, exactly.
Starting point is 00:11:27 Okay. So inside gamma, anytime we want to do a new assessment, we just upload the Doc X to the template, and it just uses AI to generate it perfectly like this every time. So, you know, I'll kind of run through each section at a high level. So we start off with an executive summary, which is just kind of reiterating the pain points that they mentioned during the conversation. This is the outcome that they could receive by implementing our suggestions, which in this case
Starting point is 00:11:55 was eight hours per week that they could reclaim from, I think it was only four or five tools that we recommended during this report. So again, I'm not going to go super deep. I'm just going to cover it at a high level. But the second slide here is what we call the effort versus impact matrix. So this is where we take everything, every pain point that they gathered during the conversation, the AI will go and map on a matrix from effort versus impact. And so this report is designed to focus on what we call the quick wins,
Starting point is 00:12:30 which are the pain points that are both low effort and high impact to implement. So like stuff that we can just literally install a tool and it fixes it. And then here, the recommended solutions, this is the media. of the report. So again, in this case, one of the pain points that they have is like, hey, we're having a lot of Zoom calls and Google meets and meetings with our team, but it's like nothing ever comes from them. And I mean, Chris, to me and you, like the thought of not using a meeting co-pilot, like a fathom, yeah, no-taker, like a fathom or a fireflies, like that's so foreign to me. But we got to remember that like 97% of people still aren't using these tools.
Starting point is 00:13:08 So this was such a no-brainer recommendation. It's like, hey, well, use fathom.a.i, and it's going to automatically join your meetings. It's going to capture the transcripts. It's going to extract action items. And guess what? It's free, right? I use it. And I'm on the free plan.
Starting point is 00:13:23 I've never had to pay for it. Now, again, I'm not going to go through everyone because I think you understand the concept. But the biggest one for this particular client, which to me, I was super proud of because this was a slam dunk use case. So this client is a, they manage wedding venues, like wedding rental venues, right? And they've got kind of a portfolio of them. And they have a board of directors that they have to report to. And so this particular person runs operations. And every week, in fact, on Saturdays, she's having to take two hours a week on Saturdays to put together analytics reports for their marketing by hand because she's so busy during the week. She can't do it during the week. And so
Starting point is 00:14:05 what we found is that she was going into Google Analytics, meta ads, Google ads, all the different platforms, copying that information into a spreadsheet, and then taking the information from the spreadsheet and putting it into a PowerPoint. And we found a tool called Dash This, which literally isn't even an AI tool. It's just an off-the-shelf SaaS tool that plugs into those analytics tools and just puts the information into a dashboard. So it cuts out the PowerPoint and the Excel spreadsheet step and it costs $42 a month and it's going to save her two hours a week. This right here is going to save her eight hours a month. I think most business owners out there would trade $42 a month to get eight hours back. Right. So these are the types of kind of like tools and
Starting point is 00:14:49 recommendations that we're given to people here. So when you generate this report, do you just send it to them or do you hop on a call and walk through it with them? Yeah. So that's what I was saying earlier. So we always send it to them in advance. So typical turnaround time is going to be within 48 hours. we send over your report and then you'll see when we get to the bottom there's a place for them to book a 30 minute follow up call. So we give them the report beforehand for them to review and then we jump on a follow up call with them where like I said earlier, I'm literally screen sharing by screen just like I am with you right now and we're walking through it just like I am with you right now. Okay, so a thousand bucks for this first one. Was your friend happy?
Starting point is 00:15:26 So we're charging a thousand bucks now. Actually, when I first started, we did the first two or three for free to get testimonials and to really work out the kinks of the whole process. After free, it was $200 an assessment. After 200, it was 500. And now we're charging $1,000. And the feedback all along the way at every price point is like, wow, I wish we would have known about these tools six months ago. This is great. What else can we do together? Which is, you know, I'm sure what we'll get into shortly, all the upsell opportunities that come from this. They're paying you to be upsold. Exactly. Right. Because if you, you know, if you, and that's what we realized too is that like, well, when we were charging $200, of course, like they got value out of it.
Starting point is 00:16:09 But to the client, it was like, oh, it's $200. Like, how good can it be? Right. It was one of those like perceived value things of a $200. Right. But now that we're charging $1,000, clients are way more, they're just way more bought into, you know, looking at it and paying attention to the suggestions. And we're taking a lot more seriously when it's time to discuss an upsell because they've already invested. at $1,000, well, now we might as well, you know, take this thing to the finish line and see what we can do next.
Starting point is 00:16:36 If you have a legitimate reason for charging them, say, 3,500 for doing something bigger after this, it's a much harder, like a bigger jump to go from 200 to 3,500 than it is. So you're almost shooting yourself in the foot later on by being cheap early on. Like, you just shoot yourself in both feet, so to speak, right? Exactly. If you charge 1,000, then like 3,500, it's not, it's still in the ballpark. Right. What's an example of a common upsell? So you charge a thousand, they pay it, you show them the audit.
Starting point is 00:17:06 How much are you going to charge for what type of service? Yeah, and I'll show you essentially our upsell menu. I'm happy to do that. Let's do it. Yeah, and I just want to finish out kind of what's in the assessment here real quick, too, just to kind of put a bow on it for people. So after we go through the recommendations, then we've got what we call a four-day quick win plan, where we just try to make it super, super simple for people to implement. what we suggested, right? Because a lot of times people get this and they're still overwhelmed. So it's like, hey, day one, all you got to do, set up fathom and connect it to your calendar.
Starting point is 00:17:40 Done, right? So the quick win plan is designed to just bring it down to the ground level and make it super easy for them to implement. And then when it comes to upsell opportunities, that's what this section is all about. What comes after quick wins? So this is kind of where we're planting that seed in their mind of like, well, hey, this report gives you all the quick wins. But what's in this? section, this stuff is a little bit of a heavier lift. So this is what the bulk of the conversation comes down to when we're talking about like, what can we do next? Right. So in this case, we recognize that they're not using a CRM. This is a seven figure business that is literally not using a CRM. So hey, how about we set up a go high level CRM for you and connect it to your other tools,
Starting point is 00:18:23 right? That's easily a three to five thousand dollar proposal, right? And then how about we create a clawed skill that captures your brand voice so that a lot of your social media content isn't generic, which is one of the pain points they mentioned in their interview, right? And you can go on and on. So that's what that section is. And then we quantify the financial impact of like, hey, you're getting eight hours per week back if you implement our suggestions. We just assume the monthly rate is $100 an hour. But for most business owners, it's a lot higher than that. In this case is, I think $3,200 minus the monthly tool cost of what we're prescribing here of $59 a month. So we try to make it super simple that like, hey, if you just do what we say, it's worth it.
Starting point is 00:19:09 If I were you, I would take the slide, duplicate it and put it at the very top as well. Seriously. No, right as you were saying that, I was like, oh, that's, I know what he's going to say. And I'd need to do that. Because it's a hook. It's like, all right, how, you know? That's really good feedback. And so if you want to go into all of the upsell opportunities,
Starting point is 00:19:27 So inside of Claude, I kind of put together this little diagram today. So here at the top is like a high level of the whole process. If somebody wanted to just copy exactly the way we do things, but if we want to get into the actual upsell menu, so one of the things that you can upsell is what we call process optimization work. So, you know, naturally for during this assessment, we're going to uncover a lot of things that people just want to automate. Right.
Starting point is 00:19:55 They're like, hey, this thing's eating up. 10 hours a week. I just need to automate it. I just need to hand it off to AI and be done with it. But what we find is that, well, this process is taking you 10 hours a week because it's 15 steps and it should be seven steps. So we're not just going to automate the current process. That's going to be, you're just going to be speeding up inefficiency. First, we got to fix the process, right? And that's going to be one engagement in another itself. And we've successfully sold process optimization engagements for three to $4,000 at a time just to fix one process. And then to actually go and automate it or add AI to it, that's a whole separate engagement,
Starting point is 00:20:36 which might be another three, five, 10K. Does that make sense? Yeah, I mean, as a Zapier junkie, like a certified Zapier junkie, I think some of these things, I could knock out in like 15 minutes. You could, but the business owner who's still a lot of value. Right. Like that's after a decade. of tinkering with Zapier. Like my Zapier account is way old, you know?
Starting point is 00:20:58 So like that decade of experience allows me, allows you to charge $1,000 an hour for something. Exactly. You know? You're right. And so that's just kind of the first place we go. A lot of times process is broken. We got to fix it first. That's going to be, that's a $3,000 to $5,000 upsell all day, right?
Starting point is 00:21:16 Second thing, exactly like you said is sometimes they just need like a two-step zap created. or like a make.com automation implemented. In that case, right, one to three K is pretty standard. Actually, for this exact client that I just showed you, the redacted assessment for, the wedding venue business, we did a build for them $1,500, a Zapier automation to essentially format their Asana projects in a certain way every time they got a new client
Starting point is 00:21:45 because their operations manager was having to come in and spend 30 minutes per client to set up this Asana project. built him a Zapier automation, $1,500, done, saved him a ton of time and they loved it, right? So that's another one. And then this one, this is actually, we're in the middle of one of these projects right now. We've got another one in the pipeline is a simple knowledge system. So another client that we did an assessment for, he is the owner of a business brokerage. He does five to seven listings per year, right?
Starting point is 00:22:19 Because these are bigger deals. That's a lot of money. Yeah, it's a lot of money. He's killing it. But every time he goes to list a business, he's getting 200 to 400 emails just in the first week from potential buyers to all tire that business well. It's a tough business. Yeah. But so not only tire kickers, but of the 400 questions, 95% of them are the same 10 questions. So I just like real estate. Yeah. I mean, my wife's a real estate broker and every call is just her answering questions that's in her freaking listing.
Starting point is 00:22:52 Exactly. Come on. Yeah. Guys, tkowners.com. That's my community where people are building businesses. I do AMAs, Q&As every week live. You can ask me anything you want. You can have accountability partners.
Starting point is 00:23:04 It's about a thousand people in there building, starting growing businesses. Check out TKO as in the corner office. TKowners.com. And that's why I told him. I'm like, Ron, you are the owner of this company. Like you have no business answering all these questions. Let's just create a custom GPT that we train. on your SIM, which is essentially the marketing package for the listing, we create a custom GPT
Starting point is 00:23:27 trained on your SIM and we just give that to buyers so that that can handle 95% of the Q&A workload and only 5% of the questions make it into your inbox. And he loved it. And we built that for him and it's saving him a ton of time. So that's another example of what we call like a knowledge system, right? Super honestly pretty easy to build. but the key there is in the system prompt. For example, you know, don't give the listing company's phone number out.
Starting point is 00:23:57 And, you know, don't give this specific financial data out. Make sure you only give this, right? But once you've done the system prompt one time, we can go and sell that to him for every listing he ever has again. You see what I mean? Yeah. Now, you've mentioned brokers a few times, real estate, business brokers.
Starting point is 00:24:14 Are there certain industries that this sale, both the audit and the upsells, work, better for because with any service in any industry is going to work better or worse. What kind of patterns have you noticed? Yeah, that's a good question. So I don't want to say that like it doesn't work well in one industry versus another because we've had clients across the board. Like we've had, again, realtors, business brokerages, wedding venue operators.
Starting point is 00:24:41 We have one recently who owns a barber school. It's just, it's all across the board. I mean, my honest answer would be if you, if you have a team, and you're not just a solo operator and you're you know you've got your hands in a lot of different pots in your business it's probably going to be at least the assessment is probably going to be a good fit for you right and i'd say if you're in the if you've got like five to 50 employees then the assessment's a no-brainer and there's probably going to be at least three to five upsell opportunities across you know some of these different buckets here okay i think the the golden question is
Starting point is 00:25:19 How do you find customers here? Yes. How do you find customers? That's a great question. So I've got you covered there. So I actually wrote an article on X a couple weeks back. I think the title of the article was seven ways to sell AI services if nobody knows who you are. So these are seven ways that anybody can sell AI services.
Starting point is 00:25:43 Followers or no followers, right? So the first, and this one is such a no-brainer, but nobody is going to do it is to host a local AI meetup in your town, right? You go on Luma, you go on meetup.com, and you literally just say, hey, AI for small business meetup. And I did exactly that. Not like a presentation, not a seminar, not a sales pitch. But I think it's important that you are the authority.
Starting point is 00:26:10 You're the guy that put this thing together, like the organizer of it. That automatically makes you the de facto smart guy in the room, right? Exactly. And a lot of people hear that and are like, oh, well, like, I'm not an expert. I've only been learning this stuff for like two weeks. And chances are that's 13 days longer than every other person that's going to be in attendance. Right. So I did exactly that.
Starting point is 00:26:31 I reached out to actually the realtor that sold me my house and asked her. I said, hey, because I know she's well connected in the community. I'm like, hey, do you want to either partner on this free AI event or can I, you know, do it inside your office for your team? and she was more than happy to help me facilitate that. So I did a free AI meetup inside of her office. And many people that attended were brokers and honestly the broker in charge in her office. And that did exactly what you said, Chris.
Starting point is 00:27:01 I just did a free little 20, 25 minute presentation, pure value, no pitch at all, captured emails at the door of people that were there. And we did an assessment for her. And it turned into revenue. So that's something that anybody can do. It just takes a little bit of promotion, a little bit of hustle. That's it. I guarantee you I could pitch some sort of workshop or some sort of actual paid event
Starting point is 00:27:25 at their office. I can virtually guarantee they'd go for it. Yeah. So that one's a no-brainer. AI meet up in your city. Now, the next one, and Chris, I know you'll appreciate this, is to doorknock some local businesses. Again, something that 99.9% of people are never going to do.
Starting point is 00:27:46 But it's like door knocking a business to try to talk about AI in 2026, do you realize how easy of a conversation that is versus door knocking a business and trying to sell them like insurance or, you know, even home services because of how everybody is thinking about AI right now? Like you're not even showing up trying to sell something. You're just trying to show up and have a conversation about how they are or aren't using AI in their business. And as always, we lead with value. And if it turns into a sales conversation, so be it. Right.
Starting point is 00:28:20 But that's a really easy way to get your foot in the door, especially if you're new and especially if you're only charging, you know, 200 bucks for an assessment or 500 bucks for an assessment if you're starting up. Would you agree? Yeah. Yeah. 100%. What about the free audits? Can you speak to that? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:28:36 So, and like I said earlier, this is kind of how. we started off in trying to prove this concept and get some testimonials. So I'm a part of this just like local CEO peer group here with there's like 11 or 12 guys, all different industries. Most of them are older, right? They're not very in tune with AI, but they're all successful business people. And I reached out to all of them and I said, hey guys, I'd love to do a free audit for two or three of you guys.
Starting point is 00:29:02 Are you open to that? And of course, they were like, well, yeah, obviously, why wouldn't we be? So we did exactly that. We did the audit. We delivered it to them. They saw the value. They gave us a testimonial. And that was that.
Starting point is 00:29:14 So from there, the free audit doesn't need to be the end of the line. You could then tactfully upsell those people because you know them. It's somebody in your network, a warm contact most likely. Who's to say you don't do a free audit and then turn around and do a, you know, $1,500 Zapier automation build, right? To start with them. You know what I mean? Yeah, I love it.
Starting point is 00:29:36 What about office hours? Yeah. So that's another one that, again, anybody could do. And you don't need to be an expert. You just need to be one step ahead of the average person, which isn't that hard these days. So you could go to a co-working space or kind of like I did with the AI meetup, like go to any of the realtor offices in your town. You know how many realtor offices if you went to them and said, hey, can I just host a free weekly or monthly AI office hours in your office where I literally to show up and sit there and work on my computer.
Starting point is 00:30:09 And if people have AI questions, I just answer their questions. Like, they're all going to say yes to that. And, you know, you're either going to get audit clients out of that. The brokers in charge at the office might want to talk to you about doing workshops. I mean, the very worst thing that would happen if you did that is you get a lot of really good contacts who know a lot of other people in the area, right? Yeah. Like virtually no downside, especially if you're just getting into this game.
Starting point is 00:30:36 Are there any other like tips or tricks or lessons you had to learn the hard way that you could pass advice on to people to help them avoid that? That's a great question. So I would say really specializing in one upsell to start. And that's something we are still trying to get better at is like, you know, when you get into this business and you're doing the assessments, you start to see a hundred different things that you could potentially upsell for a client. But what I find is when you're a jack of all trades, you get spread really thin.
Starting point is 00:31:06 So again, if you're starting off, get really good at the assessment. And then let's just say your main go-to upsell is like a custom GPT. So that's kind of what you're looking to upsell every time. That doesn't mean that you say no to other upsell opportunities, but that's kind of your bread and butter. And that's what you do really good at. And that's what you product ties. So that would be my advice is just don't try to get spread too thin
Starting point is 00:31:31 and don't bite off more than you can chew, especially in the early days. I would even take it a step further and say, like, find the upsell that's most closely tied to either revenue or savings for them. Yes. Revenue specifically. Right. The one that's less nebulous. But like this one will make you X more dollars per month or save you X more dollars per month. And a really good one there.
Starting point is 00:31:55 And this is actually the very first AI engagement that paid engagement I ever did is a speed to lead AI agent. Right. So what you find is that. A lot of service businesses, particularly, they're not picking up the phone fast enough, right? Leads are coming in. They're getting emails from leads at 10 p.m. or 2 a.m. or at a time when they can't answer the phone or the email. And if they don't answer within 10 minutes or sometimes even less, that leads going somewhere else.
Starting point is 00:32:23 So the very first AI solution I built for somebody was a within make.com, which you can do the same in Zapier, an AI agent that when somebody submits a form. on their website, it responds, but in a personalized manner, not just like, hey, we've received your form, you know, we'll get back to you. It looks the person up. It tailors a response to them. And then it can have a conversation back and forth with them to get a call scheduled with an actual salesperson. And in this case, get a tour scheduled for a wedding venue, because it was that same wedding venue business that I mentioned. Because they're salesperson all day, she's doing tours in person. So they have leads coming in on the website
Starting point is 00:33:06 and she's been doing tours all day so she can't get back to them until six, seven, eight hours later. So when we implemented this speed to lead agent, it's trained on all their FAQs and everything about their property, they started booking more tours immediately. And it was directly tied to revenue because their average deal size is 11 grand.
Starting point is 00:33:25 And they know that if they get somebody on a tour, they have a 40% close rate. So it's so easy to quantify, oh, if this speed to lead agent, gets me, you know, one, if not two more tours a month, it's going to make me an extra 11 grant is really what it comes down to. When you take the transcript of the call or of the Zoom call or the voice agent call, what is the prompt you give to Claude to get that output, the audit output?
Starting point is 00:33:52 What I will say for the audience is that they don't need to get crazy with the prompt. They can literally say to Claude, hey, I've attached the transcript of a conversation I had with the local business owner, your job is to go out on the internet and find any AI tools or just any software tools that they can implement that are off the shelf that can fix the pain points that you've identified from the transcript. Like, it can be that simple. And there are some websites, I think Futropedia is one of them. Also is one called There's an AI for that, I think.com that are literally just directories
Starting point is 00:34:28 of thousands of AI tools. So you could just tell Claude, hey, go search Futurpedia and find some tools that solve the pain points that this client has based on this transcript. You see what I mean? Yeah, yeah. I never heard of Futurpedia. Well, Corey, is there anything that we should have covered that we didn't cover, anything we missed?
Starting point is 00:34:47 This has been excellent. I think we touched on all of it. No, I mean, the one thing I'll leave everybody with is, again, you don't need to be an AI expert to do this. You just need to be one step ahead of your average client, which is literally, you studying the stuff for like seven days. And then you can easily go out and sell it. So that'd be my best tip. Just get after it. Okay. Well, thank you, Corey. Is there, uh, where can everyone find you? Yeah. So they, the best place is on my podcast called build with AI, which is on YouTube and on any
Starting point is 00:35:15 podcast platform. I do live AI builds and tutorials twice a week. And that's going to be the best place. Okay. Thank you, Corey. Thank you, man. Hey, guys. If you're still listening to this, it's probably because you haven't had a chance to take your AirPods out. You're still mowing the lawn. You're still driving. What have you. If you're still here with me, I would really, really love and appreciate a five-star review on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcast. It would mean a lot. If you want to go the extra mile, share this episode with a friend that might have an interest in starting a business. It would mean a ton. Hope you have the best day of your life today.

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