The Startup Ideas Podcast - The $1,000/hour Solo AI business (Full Course)

Episode Date: July 15, 2026

In this episode I sit down with Corey Ganim to unpack what he calls the simplest way to earn money with AI in 2026: a $999 AI Tools Assessment for small business owners. Corey lays out his entire four-phase system, from a probing discovery call through an AI-assisted analysis in Claude, a stupid-simple client report, and a review call that turns roughly half of clients into implementation buyers. We walk through his full upsell menu, seven client-acquisition methods that run on zero capital and zero audience, and his AI Concierge retainer that earns him about $1,000 an hour. Anyone listening leaves with a copy-and-paste playbook they can adapt to their own city or industry. Checkout Corey’s AI Audit Template: https://startup-ideas-pod.link/ai_audit Timestamps 00:00 – Intro and the episode promise 03:48 – The full playbook preview 06:39 – Phase 1: the discovery call 08:27 – Phase 2: AI Analysis 12:11 – Phase 3: The Report 22:24 – Tool and Model Selection 23:39 – Phase 4: The Review Call 26:15 – The Upsell Services 35:52 – Finding Customers 49:16 – The AI Concierge retainer 58:46 – Final Thoughts Key Points The core offer is a $999, 45-minute AI Tools Assessment that prescribes 3–7 off-the-shelf tools, backed by a full-refund guarantee tied to finding at least five reclaimed hours per week. Fulfillment runs in four phases: discovery call, AI analysis in Claude, a templatized report, and a review call that converts about half of clients into implementation work. The report stays deliberately simple, with an executive summary, an effort-versus-impact matrix, quick wins, a four-day quick-start plan, and a clear ROI slide. The upsell menu spans process redesign, automation builds, knowledge systems, custom workflows, and full implementation, with lifetime value reaching $3K–$10K or more. Seven client-acquisition methods run on zero capital and zero audience, from local meetups and door knocking to agency partnerships and office hours. The AI Concierge retainer ($1,200–$2,000/month for two calls) creates recurring revenue at roughly a $1,000 hourly rate. The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/ The Vibe Marketer - Resources for people into vibe marketing/marketing with AI: https://www.thevibemarketer.com/ FIND ME ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/ FIND COREY ON SOCIAL Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@coreyganim X/Twitter: https://x.com/coreyganim

I've got an AI business idea for you, and the best part is you don't need to have an audience, you don't need money to get started, and you don't even need to know how to code. You know how every small business owner right now is super stressed that they're falling behind with AI? Well, my friend Corey Gannon built a whole business around solving exactly that. And today, he gives his whole playbook away for free. You meet a business owner. You spend 30 minutes finding their biggest time. drains and he prescribed AI tools that fix it. It's kind of like a doctor writing a prescription.

He charges $999 and it opens the door to way bigger work that he ends up charging thousands of dollars for. The one thing you do need to know is you obviously need to understand AI and that's the part he walks you through step by step. He shares how the service works. He shares the upsells that get him to $1,000 an hour. He shares seven ways to get clients starting from nothing. It's all here. It's under an hour. It's a free course for how to start this business. And even if you don't want to start this particular business, this is going to get your creative juices flowing around how to start a productized service agency with AI. Enjoy the episode. What's up, Corey? By the end of the episode, what are people going to get out of this? So, Greg, we are going to show the people literally the simplest, I think the best startup idea of 2026. This is a way that anybody can make money. with AI. And the beauty of this model and people are going to think that this is like click

baity or sensationalist, but I promise you, you don't even need to know how to use AI to make money with this model because all we're doing is we're prescribing tools that already exist. We're not building anything. We're not implementing anything. This is something anybody can do. And then towards the end of the episode, I'm going to share kind of the follow up offer to this that I'm using to make $1,000 an hour as like an upsell to this offer here. So I think this is going to be really accessible for folks. Okay. And you're not just going to give the idea, right? You're going to give people the steps so they can actually copy this workflow and actually build a similar idea, right? We're going to give them the full playbook. So we're going to explain the entire offer,

how it works, how to fulfill it. We're going to give them the exact template that they can literally download and plug and play with their own clients. We're going to show them six things they can upsell after this assessment. And then we're going to show them seven ways that they can get clients, none of which require any capital or any audience. So we're pretty much going to destroy every single objection that somebody might have when it comes to this business model. So we're going to make it super simple for everybody. The last objection that is going to happen is they're going to say, Corey, like, are you mother Teresa? Why are you being so nice? What would you say to that? I mean, this is literally, so, and people say that all the time, they're like, oh, if you're actually

making money with this model, why would you be giving away all the sauce? And it's like, dude, think about how many businesses exist in the United States of America. There are millions, right? Every single one of them without fail needs to use AI in some capacity. And think about how many of them are actually using AI at all, aside from just prompting chat GPT. Maybe 5% of companies are using any AI tool other than chat GPT. So when we are giving away the playbook, it's because there is so much opportunity.

if everybody watching this podcast or listening to this podcast went and implemented this model, there would still be opportunity left over. That's just how much of a blue ocean it is right now for this type of stuff. All right. Let's dive in. So let's dive in. So let's talk about the model itself, right? What is it that we're selling? So this is what we call our AI tools assessment.

So in a nutshell, this offer is when we're meeting with a small business owner. So our clients are typically small business owners who have anywhere from, you know, two to 20 employees. That's kind of the sweet spot. 500K to 5 million a year in revenue, kind of a sweet spot there. And the offer is, hey, we're going to sit down with you for 45 minutes and we're going to do a little kind of like a structured interview. And in that interview, we're going to pull out some bottlenecks and some pain points that you're experiencing in your business. And then based on that conversation, we are then going to prescribe three to six. off-the-shelf AI tools that you can implement immediately to reclaim five to 10 hours per week.

And by the way, if we can't find at least five hours per week in opportunity where AI can help, then we're going to give you 100% of your money back. So literally, the only thing you have to lose is a client is 45 minutes of your time, right? That's worst case. Best case, you get at least five hours a week back in your week every single week. And the average client saves about seven, right? So that is the offer in a nutshell. Any questions so far? I mean, I don't even need that offer. And I was like, oh, yeah, I'll sign me up.

You know, like, that's how good that was. That was like, you know, I think when you're crafting an offer, you know, they say craft an irresistible offer, right? So I think like that that certainly sounds irresistible. Yeah. And think about it, right? Because every business owner out there that you talk to when it comes to AI, they either, they're They're too busy in the weeds, right? They're working 40, 50, 60 hours a week so they don't have time to learn this stuff. They're afraid their competitors are getting ahead of them. So they just bury their head in the sand. And they just never take the time to learn this stuff.

And again, the reason this is such an accessible business model to people who are even new to business is because we're just prescribing tools. We're not like building an automation. We're not having to learn Claude code. We're not coding anything. We're just literally telling them, hey, you have a, a problem with you have this problem? Great. I went and researched an AI tool that fixes that problem. Here is the name of that tool. Like that is literally all we're telling them. Right. And we charge $999 for that assessment. And, you know, I've sold so far in 2026. I've sold about

15 of these assessments. And 50% of people actually want you to implement it for them, which leads into the upsell menu that we'll discuss later on in the episode. So again, $9.99. Some people might listen to this and be like, oh, that's it. It's like, well, that's just the foot in the door, right? We, the lifetime value of an AI assessment client ends up being, you know, three, five, 10K or more. So we'll get into that. But let's get into the weeds of like, well, what do, like, how do we actually, how do we fulfill this assessment and how do we actually, you know, deliver this to the client? So it's four different phases. We'll go one phase at a time. Phase one is the discovery call, right? So this is where we're on either a Zoom call or

a Google meet with the client. And the key here is we just want to make sure that we're recording the call. Usually I just have my fathom note taker in the call. You can use Otter. You can use fireflies, whatever. Just have an AI note taker on the call. And all we're doing on this call, right, is we're just asking questions. We're pulling out problems. We're not pitching anything. So we're asking them questions like, okay, walk me through your day yesterday. What do you tend to do in a typical business day? What are tasks in your business that you dread doing? Where does your work pile up? What are things that you've tried to automate in the past and failed? And my favorite question is if you could wave a magic wand and basically delete any process in your business,

what would that process be? And a lot of times, Greg, you'd be shocked. The answer is email. They're like, oh, God, if I just never had to answer an email again, I'd be a different person. It's like, well, that's solvable to a degree using AI. So that is, that's a discovery call. And when it comes to the discovery call, every time I do a discovery call, I have to bite my tongue because it's like most business owners have a lot of the same problems. And they'll be kind of giving me one of their problems. And right away, I'm like, oh, I know exactly what tool they need. And I have to bite my tongue and force myself not to prescribe on the first call. The first call is only for probing. So that's what we do on the discovery call. And then we've got the AI note taker taking notes. We've got that transcript,

which can move us into phase two. So phase two is where we use AI to analyze the transcript, right? So we take that transcript that our AI note taker produced from the discovery call, and we literally just give it to Claude. Now, we've built a skill inside of Claude that takes that transcript and run some really deep research to pull out the pain points and go out onto the internet and find the exact tools that can fix the pain points that the business owner mentioned. But you could get away with a pretty simple problem. right feed in the transcript prompt clod something along the lines of hey i just had a call with the business owner attached is the transcript of our conversation i need you to go on the internet and research off the shelf SaaS or AI tools that can fix those pain points like it's this prompt

is pretty much that simple and what claude is going to do is clod is going to catch patterns that you might have missed in that transcript and it's going to pull out pain points that you didn't think were solvable, but Claude is actually going to be able to find a tool that can solve it, right? And what we do during phase two, kind of the quality assurance step of phase two, we don't really just take Claude's output at face value and then move into phase three. We're going to review the actual output, right? So for example, there's been times where we'll run this analysis and maybe the client, one of their pain points is they don't have a way to follow up with their prospects because

they don't use a CRM. And then Claude will go and prescribe like Salesforce. And so, you know, the quality assurance step is you look at that and you're like, well, this is a four person landscaping business. They don't need Salesforce. So I'm going to sub in a different CRM solution that's more appropriate for a small business. Does that make sense as far as like sometimes you got to make a judgment call and sub tools in and out? Yeah. For phase two, like how important is how important is how important is.

is things like evals and context to make sure that the actual output is, you know, not 100% there, but 95% of the way there. Yeah. So that's where it comes down to like once you've done a few of these assessments, you can, you can take the transcripts from ones that you've done and the finished reports from ones that you've done, which is phase three, and feed those back into the skill. So the Claude knows what good looks like, right? So that's the thing.

with this assessment business, the first probably two or three that you do, the AI analysis is going to get you, you know, 60 or 70% of the way there. Like, you're definitely going to have to make a few judgment calls and substitutions when it comes to the tools. But by the time you turn this into a skill and you're on your fourth, fifth, or six assessment, the skill is going to be pretty dialed in. And there's plenty of times where I can run phase two and it's literally copy paste. Like I'm like, yep, these are good. I agree with all these. We can move on to phase three. Now, with that said, during phase two, there's two really good resources that I use and that I encourage people to use when they are researching AI tools.

One of those is Futurpedia.io, which is a really big, you know, tools directory, AI tool directory websites. They're actually just acquired by HubSpot. Another one is there's an AI for that.com. So both of those websites are just big AI tool directories. They have thousands of different tools on those websites. and a lot of times they're tagged by by industry. So it's like, hey, I need, you know, my client is a realtor, right? I need AI tools for realtors.

You can go to there's an AI for that.com and sort by, you know, real estate tools, for example. So that is phase two in a nutshell. Does that make sense? Yep. Awesome. So moving on to phase three. And now this is the part that we've iterated on the most. So phase three is where we actually.

generate the report. And this is the client facing deliverable. This is what we send to the client. And this is what we sit down and review with the client during phase four. So when we first started doing these assessments, we used a tool called gamma, gamma, gamma, app to build the report inside of gamma. Gamma is great. I have nothing wrong with gamma. But once claw design came out, we just found it was a lot easier to build this report in clawed design. So that's what we use nowadays. And I'm going to show you guys the template and we'll give you a you know the ability to download that as well and use it in your own business in a second but from a high level again this report it was built in cloud design it's templatized so we can pretty much plug and play any new clients information and that template

contains a few pieces we've got an executive summary where we list out the main pain points the main solution that they can expect to achieve if they you know implement our recommendations we've got a priority matrix that we call the effort versus impact matrix. So that's just kind of our framework for showing them, hey, this report focuses on the implementations that are both high impact and low effort, right? Stuff that's easy to implement, but absolutely moves the needle. We call those quick wins. And that's why these are off the shelf tools.

Like you can literally just sign up for the tool, start and, you know, start using it. And then you've gotten the benefit out of it. then we move into the actual recommendations themselves so hey these are the actual tools we recommend you said you had pain point x here's tool y that solves it right and we just kind of go down the list that way then we go into a four-day quick win plan or sorry quick start plan and the idea behind this is so when i show you guys this report it's pretty simple like pretty easy to understand but there's still clients who are going to be overwhelmed looking at this report right they're going to be like, oh, this is great, but like, where do I start? I don't know where to start. So I freeze and I

don't do anything. So that's the idea behind the four-day quick start plan is, you know, that is our way of telling them, hey, on day one, you do this very simple action. It'll take you five minutes and then you've got the benefit of that tool. Day two, same thing. Day three, day four. So if they just follow the four-day quick-start plan, which again, should take them no more than 10 minutes per day, then they will get the vast majority of the benefit of the report just in four days. And then lastly, we've got the financial impact slide. So that is where we quantify the exact benefit, the exact ROI that they are going to get out of this report, right, where we tell them in numbers, hey, you paid me $999. Well, you're going to get X dollars per month back as ROI from this report every month from implementing these tools.

And so I'll show you, Greg, what that template actually looks like. So again, we built this here in Claude Design. It's pretty simple. And guys, for the folks in the audience, right, we wanted to open source this and give this away to you guys. You all can go to audittemplate.ai and download this exact template and you can plug and play directly into Cloud Design. So again, we start off with a little title slide, super simple. You fill in your client name, date, business type, primary focus. then we go into the executive summary.

So again, this is where we highlight just like the, really the main one or two pain points. There's only enough space for that. The main outcome that they're going to achieve from implementing the tools in this report. A summary of the hours they can reclaim each week. So remember, our guarantee is at least five. So this number, 99% of the time is going to be in the range of five to 10.

Like I said, our average client, this number is seven hours per week that they can reclaim. And then we list the primary focus of this report. Now, I'm going to take a second to explain what that means because when it comes to any AI tool or implementation or automation or anything we're doing with AI, it's got to pull one of three levers for it to be worth our time. It's got to make us more money, which is effectiveness. It's got to save us time, which is efficiency, or it's got to increase the quality of

our product or service, which is quality. So basically, we look at it. all the tools that we prescribe and we say, okay, you know, the majority of these tools, are they going to, which of those three levers are they going to pull? And then that's what we put into primary focus. So right off the bat, the client can look at this executive summary slide, know exactly what they're going to get out of it in terms of primary focus and know exactly how much time they're going to get back based on, you know, the hours they can reclaim each week. So you're with me so far, Greg? I do, I am. It's just, what I like about this is, you know, it's the first time I've ever

ever seen this, but it's so, it's, it's like stupid simple. I don't mean that in like a, it is mean way. I mean that in like, it's so simple that anyone could see this and be like, great, this is my pain point. I would like to save time, you know, the outcome of making my product is better, you know, and important to me. So I think what's really cool about this and your whole, and really like the framework for this whole, I mean, people listening to this, they don't, you don't necessarily need to start this exact business, right? But one takeaway I have is create an extremely stupid, simple output. Yep, as simple as possible. Again, because a confused mind doesn't buy, even though these people are technically already your clients, a confused mind doesn't

implement. And therefore, a confused mind doesn't get the ROI and a confused mind doesn't upsell. Right. Yeah. So we want to make, like we've, I'm telling you, we've, on just this report piece here 12 different times to try to make it's like, okay, how, what can we delete? What can we simplify? What can we rearrange to make the ROI so freaking clear and to make it so easy to implement? So that's the executive summary slide. Then we jump into, like I said, the effort versus impact matrix. So this is just our framework. I don't think we invented this by any means, but it's just a way of, you know, explaining to the clients. Like I said earlier. We focus on this report focuses on the, um, these solutions that are both high impact.

They move the needle and low effort. They're easy to implement, which is that top left quadrant, which we call quick wins. Next, we summarize the quick wins. So on this slide, here we have, we literally just have a line that says like, you know, the one liner of their pain point. So it's like pain point summary and it points to tool. Right. So for example, it might say, um, you know, five hours a week in email points two. Sanebox, which is probably our most prescribed tool for getting out of email, right? Taking notes by hand in meetings points to fathom.a.I. So this is just like the summary of the tools that we're prescribing.

And then the next slide, which is recommended solutions, this is the slide that we, this is where we deep dive on the actual tools and the solutions that we're recommending. So when we get into phase four, which is, you know, the review call, We spend probably 50% of the review call with the client on this slide. And this is where we're showing them, again, name of the tool, pain point that it solves, the cost of the tool, the setup time, and how much time it's going to save them. Right. So this is where we're literally like, hey, this is your pain point. This is the tool.

It costs $10 a month. It's going to take you 30 minutes to set up and it's going to save you two hours a week. Any questions, right? And then it's boom, boom, boom, on to the next. So again, we're like a doctor. We're just prescribing. A doctor that needs no qualifications whatsoever to do this business model. So that is the recommended solution slide.

And then again, we get into the four-day Quick Wins plan. I think I already elaborated on that. So we'll go too much deeper. And then this is the what comes after Quick Wins slide. And I actually didn't have that in my diagram. I'll touch on this real quick. This is where we kind of tee up any upsell opportunities. right so going back to the effort versus impact matrix you'll notice the top right quadrant

we have it called major projects so these are those solutions that we you know from the discovery call we identified but there's not really like an off-the-shelf tool that can just fix it right away these are the these are the implementations that are both high impact they move the needle but they're high effort right it's more than just hey install this tool it might be hey we need to build a dedicated agent for this. Or, hey, you actually need a knowledge base here, right? Or something long those lines. So we take those major projects and we put those into the what comes after quick win slide. So this is where we're teeing up the upsell for the client. Because when we start talking about these, naturally the next question is, oh, well, can you help us do that? Right. So we're kind of

planting that seed in their mind early. Then we've got the financial impact slide where we show them the true monthly net ROI, which is their weekly time returned multiplied by their hourly rate minus their monthly tool cost, right? And the average cost of the tools that we prescribe for clients is about $60 a month. So again, on average, they're able to save seven hours a week in return for $60 a month. That's an insane ROI. And most business owner's time is worth hundreds of dollars per hour. In many cases, thousands of dollars per hour, You're talking about a monthly net ROI that is always in the four-figure range, always, sometimes in the five-figure range. And that's if they implement what we're telling them here.

And then lastly, this is just our next steps, which is usually just, hey, you know, implement the four-day quick win plan and book your review call, which is phase four, which we'll get into next. So any questions on the actual report itself, Greg? I just, I got to think that a lot of the recommendations are going to be using like the big boys, you know, know, like Anthropic, Google, Open AI. So how often are you actually recommending more niche tools? And am I wrong about that? You know? Yeah. So you'd be surprised. I mean, there are so many software tools out there. And that's a funny thing too is like a lot of what we're recommending are literally just SaaS tools. Like there's no AI involved at all. Right. It's just a SaaS tool that the business owner didn't know existed. A lot of times that's what they need because they just

didn't know it existed. Now, many times to your point, it's like, oh, well, you know, you're doing XYZ workflow. That's clearly a bottleneck for you. The best solution is just to turn that into a Claude skill, right? And so a lot of what we prescribe is, you know, Claude skill for this very specific workflow. Realistically, it might take them 20 to 30 minutes to build. But most business owners have never built a Claude skill, which leads itself perfectly into our AI concierge upsell. which is what we'll get into later on in the episode, which is like literally tailor-made for that exact use case. And we'll talk about that here shortly.

So phase four is the review call, right? This is where, so, you know, we've done the report. We've done the discovery call. Usually we email the report to the client before the review call, just so they have time to review it before the call. And then we get on another Zoom with them, usually about 30 minutes. And this is where all we're doing is we're screen sharing the report. that I just showed you.

And we're just walking them through each recommendation. Like I said, hey, you have this pain point. You need this tool. And then we ask the three closing questions. We say things like, well, of these recommendations, which is the most urgent for you? And then, hey, do you want to do this yourself? Or would you like my help in implementing some of these solutions? And then lastly, what's your timeline?

Like, are these pain points like killing you? Or is this something that, you know, you could live another 60 days with these issues in place. Right. So by asking those questions, Greg, 50, sometimes even 60% of the time, these people want implementation. They're like, hey, this is great. These are awesome. You know, but I have no idea how to build a Claude skill. Can I just hire you to coach me on it? Or can you just come and build it for me? Right. And that is the entire assessment flow beginning to end, which leads us into the upsell menu, which we'll talk about next. So any questions on the, the assessment flow that we just talked about.

I mean, I think the beauty of just audits in general is like you're getting paid to upsell them more services, you know? So what you could be doing once you are, you know, once you have a very solid system and once you're, you know, you believe in the service and all these things and you're ready to scale, you could take $200 of that $1,000 and put that into meta ads. and start acquiring customers, you know? And then you're creating the holy grail of, you know, self-liquidating funnels where you're basically getting paid to get people to buy your service.

And it's a beautiful, beautiful vending machine. Exactly. Yep. And that's why, again, ever since, like, doing this business and really focusing on these assessments, I've become, I've become, You know, I'm a big believer in assessments as like a, you know, a tripwire offer, a foot in the door offer, whatever you want to call it. Because, again, your client is literally paying you to uncover opportunities for them to pay you more. Like, that's what a good audit does.

So let's talk about next the, you know, the expansion menu, the upsell menu, whatever you want to call it. I've got here in my diagram, 999 is just the door, right? It's totally just the foot in the door. So it's like, all right, we've got a, we did an assessment for a client. we showed them what was possible. What is it that we can sell them next? Well, there's five, really six different things that we can upsell them after the fact. One of them is what we call a process redesign or sometimes called process optimization.

And this is something that I have sold to clients before. We've sold this a couple of times. The ones we've sold, I think we sold one for 3K and one for 3,500. But this is where like literally all we're doing with a process redesign project is we are just fixing a broken process. We're not automating it. We're not implementing AI. We are just taking a process that is 16 steps and making it seven, right? So for example, one of our process redesign clients, this was an e-commerce seller that had a workflow where he was monitoring his ad spend on Amazon every week. And it was taking him about 10 hours a week. And what he came to us and he's like,

guys, I just want to automate this. I just want to hand this off to AI and be done with it. And were like, whoa, like before you automate this, we've got to fix this process first. If we just go and throw AI at your existing process, it is going to fall apart. So again, we signed him on a deal to literally just fix the process. And we process mapped the current process as it stood today. And then the deliverable was the future state process. Hey, here's the blueprint. Here's what the perfect process is going to look like. And by the way, if you want us to automate the new process, That's a separate engagement. Does that make sense?

For sure. Yeah. Crystal clear. So that is a process redesign. Now, the next thing on our upsell menu is just like your simple everyday automation build, right? And this is your like your Zapier flows or your make.com flows or your in-8-n flows. This is ideal for processes where there's a very cut and dry input. There's a very cut and dry output, usually just like one to three steps.

where, you know, a clawed skill or like a clawed workflow a lot of times is overkill. So I'll give you an example. We had a client for a simple Zapier build where their wedding venue rental business, their operations manager, every time they got a new client, she had to go into Asana and duplicate a bunch of Asana items, like a project, you know, deliverables, tag people. But it was the same process every time. And so we were like, well, we could, let's just go into Zana. here and make that a zap, set it up one time. And guess what? As you scale, as you grow your business,

that's a process that's going to scale with you. And we charge them, I think, like $1,500 for that. And I think she was spending maybe 30 minutes a week on that on average, which doesn't sound like a lot, but this is a business that's growing pretty well. So, you know, 30 minutes a week today is going to be two hours a week a year from now. So pretty useful build for them. And again, that's like you don't need to be a genius to know Zapier. Anybody could build that after watching, you know, two hours of YouTube videos. So that's another option there. Or just asking Claude what to do, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And like theoretically, that could have been a Claude skill. But that was, that was actually early on. Like, I mean, skills were a thing, but we just, we weren't that deep

into that world at that point. But yeah, that, I mean, 90% of the time, the answer is a Claude skill, I will say. And so, uh, the other thing on the upsell menu, and this is one of my favorites is what we call a knowledge system. And so I'll give you an example of a knowledge system that we built. So one of our clients is a business broker. He sells businesses. And he'll get, you know, six to eight listings per year because these are high dollar value, low volume deals. And every time he goes to list a new business for sale, he said, this is his words. He gets four to 500 emails from interested buyers all asking him the same five questions. Like, hey, what's the EBITA? Hey, you know, how long have they been in business?

Like literally the same questions. And he's like, Corey, I'm sick of it. Like I'm spending all my time answering these same five questions. What can we do to where AI can help with that process? And I was like, well, why don't we just build a custom GPT that's trained on the marketing package for that specific listing? And instead of giving out your email to interested buyers, we send them the link to the custom GPT. So we did exactly that. We literally took his most recent listing, trained a custom GPT on it, and then gave the link to both the seller of the business to verify that everything was accurate as well as potential buyers. And just last week, he emailed us and said, hey, thought you might want to see some feedback from both sides of the deal in this case.

Both the seller and the buyer said something along the lines of, hey, this was like the most interesting experience we've ever had when it comes to buying or selling a business. You're way ahead of the game. So it made him look really good, right? And it pulled two levers that we mentioned earlier of ROI. Efficiency. Now he's not having to answer 500 emails. He's having to answer zero. And quality.

His buyer and his seller now have a much higher quality of service, right? So that's one of my favorite examples. I use that all the time. And that's an example of a knowledge system there. And custom workflows is. Custom workflows, again, is very self-explanatory. This is when you're just going in and building, you know, hey, a business has a proprietary process that's very specific to how they do business. Almost always that's a flawed skill, right?

I have prompts here. This is a little outdated. It's skills plus, you know, reference files that you set up for the business. You, you know, you train their team on it and then you let them plug and play. And then there's even, you know, you could even bake in a recurring revenue component there because businesses operations change all the time. Like, hey, you can pay me three grand to come in and build a set of skills for your customer onboarding process, for example. But what happens six months from now when you get a new tool or that process changes, right?

You could be paying me monthly or quarterly or however often we set that up to maintain that for you and to update that skill as your process has changed. So that's really all a custom workflow is. Yeah, that's one thing I notice about all these is they're one-time fees. So have you ever considered it's $400 a month or $1,000 a month and you get X, Y, Z deliverables? Yeah. So we have. And that's actually something.

So I saved my favorite upsell for the very end. And that is one that I'm currently implementing today to get recurring revenue. So we'll talk about that. And for sure, like for all the ones that we mention, you can get super creative. And for example, you know, if you find a client that has a big need for not. knowledge systems, you could build a retainer out of it. You could say like, hey, for three grand a month, I will build you up to two knowledge systems per month, right? Or, you know, whatever. You can get super creative. Or for another client, hey, for two grand a month, I will build you up to three

automated workflows per month. Right. So you can build a retainer around any way that you see fit. It really just depends on how big is the client and what does their needs look like. And also like, it's easier to sell monthly if you've built trust and confidence with them. So sometimes you have to do a little, like show them. You have to show them, hey, I could build a skill here. Oh, it's starting to work. Okay. You want more of these? Well, you know, for a thousand dollars a month, I can give you two of these. You know what I mean? Yep. Well, and that's the beauty of the assessment too, right? Like, we're not pitching these cold. Like, these are people that are already clients. So it's a lot easier to pitch a $5,000 clawed skills pack to somebody who just paid you $1,000, then it is to pitch that

to somebody that is like cold traffic off a Facebook ad, for example. Right. And another just side note, I forgot to mention this, but one thing that I love to do, now I usually don't lead with this, because I don't want to do this if I don't have to, but a really good way to get an upsell over the finish line and get a prospect off the fence is if you already did an assessment for them for $999, you could say, hey, how about I just credit the $999 that you already paid me towards the implementation, right? So instead of 5K, it's 4K. So basically the assessment's free. Like that works so well. And what I really like to do is mark up the upsell an extra $1,000 and credit the assessment towards it regardless. So that way, I'm still making the same amount of money,

but psychologically, they feel way better about it because they're like, oh, I'm getting $1,000 off. Or, oh, that assessment is great. Actually, you're making a dollar more because you're Yeah. Technically it's profitable. Yeah. Yeah.

Yep. But that's like one of my favorite strategies for sure. Cool. And then, so lastly, we've got like a full implementation. So that's what I consider any number of, any combination of things we already mentioned on this list. Like, hey, maybe a client needs, you know, two processes fully redesigned. They need a couple of clawed skills and they need you to build them, you know,

zap your workflow. That might be a $8,000 package, for example, right? So full implementation is kind of all the above. So the big question people are going to have is, okay, this sounds great, but how do I actually find customers to sell to if I don't have an audience, if I don't have capital? I'm way ahead of you. So that's exactly what we're getting into next. And that is hands down, not even close, the most common question I get by far. So we're going to go into seven methods that people can implement.

to find clients, again, that require no capital, require no audience of any kind. And these are all, like, I think these are pretty unique. Like, these aren't just the ones that you're going to hear about from anybody or that the claw is going to tell you. So the first, and this is one that I am actively implementing, I have an AI meetup in my town that I'm hosting scheduled for July 29. And this is where, just like I said, you go and you host a local AI for business meetup, right? That's how you position it.

So the idea here is, you know, if you host this meetup, you go to a co-working space, you partner with them, you say, hey, I'm going to bring 30 local business owners into your space to get exposure for your space. Can I have your conference room for an hour for free? Right. So you can kind of go and barter with a co-working space. And the idea is you're the one putting this meetup together. So you're automatically perceived as the expert. And what we do is we show up, network for 10, 15 minutes, we give a 20-minute presentation. literally about how to use Claude, right? Like that seems to be the hot topic that most business owners,

it's like simple enough for them to understand, but advanced enough to kind of wow them, if that makes sense. And then we, you know, we work the room and we collect contact information from everybody at the door. And we follow up within 24 hours offering the assessment. So that's something that I kind of akin to this strategy to SEO. Like, are we going to get a client at our first event on day one? maybe, but more than likely the clients from this are going to come, you know, from our third,

fourth, fifth, sixth, event. Same way with SEO. Is that going to drive clients on month one? Probably not. But on month five, six, 12, 16? Absolutely. So my plan for the AI meetup is to turn this into like a local event, really an event brand, where I'm the leader, I'm running this every single month and it's going to bring a lot of local

business owner leads into my ecosystem for this offer. next we've got door knocking right and i know people hear this and they they're they shut off they cringe they're like oh my god i can never guys first of all door knocking is the single best way to learn sales period full stop second i had a guy dm me on instagram a couple weeks ago saying corey i heard you on another podcast i heard you talk about door knocking i went to 30 local service businesses in my town i asked to this i asked to speak to the manager or the owner Of those 30, I set up five meetings. And of those five meetings, two of them became clients.

And I'm like, that's literally how it works. He's the only person. There was like 150,000 people heard me talk about that on that podcast. He's the only person that did it and it worked. And because it works, right? Like this is a method where if you need a client today, you go knock a door. If you need a client this week, you go knock a door, right? This is like the opposite of the AI meetup in the sense.

that the results are pretty much immediate. But again, nobody's going to do it. Like if somebody listening to this goes and knocks a door and gets a client from it, because it works. Send me a DM or send Greg a DM and tell us that you did it because I'd love to retweet you, spotlight you. This is the type of stuff I love. Like these people that knock doors are built so different.

I've knocked hundreds, if not thousands of doors in my life and it's great. Next is LinkedIn DMs, right? And these are not the cringe, like AI, spam, slop, DMs. that you get probably every time you log on LinkedIn. These are the ones where you're targeting, again, local business owners in your city or town, and you're probing. You're asking about pain. You're asking about how are they currently using AI in their business?

We're not pitching in Message 1. That's the quickest way to never get any success from cold DMs, right? So again, I might go find, you know, Joe, the owner of the HVAC company who's on LinkedIn, and I might send them a message and say, hey, Joe, my name's Corey. I'm, you know, I probably live somewhere down the street from you. I'm very curious about how you're using AI in your business. Would love to give you some free feedback on ways that I think you could implement AI. Like, it could just be that.

And do it in video too. Like, why not just take your phone out and be like, just yap for 30 seconds? I love the idea of like, I probably live down the street from you. That's a really good hook. Yeah. And I think on LinkedIn, I think you can send voice messages on LinkedIn too. You know, looms work well for this. Again, I love these methods because these are all things that 99% of people will not do.

So the competition for these methods are so low. And the people that do do them will do them for three days and then quit. So this is the stuff. If you hang in there for seven days, you're in the top 0.001%. Right. Now, the next method is doing free audits or free assessments for the people in your network. So everybody listening to this podcast knows other business. owners, whether it's from their gym, from church, you know, other parents of their kids, friends,

right, whoever, all it takes is a quick text message to that person and say, hey, I'm getting into the AI services world. I'd love to spend 15 minutes with you completely free of charge and just show you one way that AI could benefit your business. Would you be open to that meeting? Right. And the mini audit as kind of a lead magnet is something I preached a bunch. If we can kind of dangle that carrot in front of people, hey, I'll show you one way AI can help you. I'll prescribe one tool that you could use that's AI powered. Well, and if you want the full assessment, right, that's the upsell. Yeah.

So that's a really good way to get in the door. One way to frame that that makes it irresistible to people is you just say, worst case scenario, you learn one or two tools and learn how to use them that you never heard of. Best case, you have a partner who can, you know, build skills and, do all this AI stuff that you've probably, you know, been on your to-do list, but you haven't gotten to it. So if you like frame it as the worst case, they learn something, then I find that's super, super impactful. Yeah, that's a really good point. It's like, I love, I love that line of,

especially when doing cold outreach. It's like, hey, at the very least, you're going to get XYZ. Exactly. And as long as XYZ is not, you know, XYZ is usually like a pretty decent. outcome for them, then they're going to be like, you're right, I have nothing to lose. Awesome. So next up, we've got agency partners, right? So again, most people listening to this, you probably have an insurance agent. You probably have an accountant. You probably know a marketing agency owner or a coach or a consultant.

Guys, all of these service professionals, think about how many clients they have that are also your ideal client. And also think about how many of those clients are coming to them. asking them questions about AI. And if they don't have a way to answer intelligently or they don't have someone to refer them to, it makes them look bad. So by simply going to these professionals and saying,

hey, I'm in the AI space. I would love to help out any of your clients that have any AI related questions. I will happily send you a referral fee if I end up working with anybody that you send my way. Pretty much that simple, but the key there is follow up, right? You're not going to get like an A1 referral partner

from one out. outreach attempt, usually it takes following up every two to three weeks saying, hey, any of your clients ask about AI lately? Would love to act as a resource. Happy to meet any time. Every two or three weeks, you're going to get referrals if you just keep that up. You can even, you can even say like, hey, we can do like a co-branded workshop together where, say you're a tax accountant. It's like how do you use AI to be more, you know, optimize your finances. And it's like brought to you by Corey and the tax accountant firm, you know? So they're staying top of mind.

They're producing value for their customers. And you're getting access to their customer base. 100%. And, you know, what I love about this is if you were smart, you would combine Method 5, agency partners with method one AI meetup you would go and find and this is what I did for my first meetup that I ran back in January I partnered with a local realtor who was super plugged in she knows everybody in Charlotte right and I went to her and I said hey let's do an AI for business meetup in your office you can invite your clients and your other realtors and it can be basically a big

free AI enablement session for them and she loved it and we did it and I got a client out of it so that works really, really well. Cool. Next, this is one of my favorite methods. There's a guy in my community, Dennis, who's crushing it with this. He did one of these this week. So this is your, this is the AI office hours play. So this is where you go and you approach a co-working space and you say, hey, you've

got, you know, 20, 30, however many people in your co-working space, I would love to just come into your space once a week for an hour and just, offer myself as a resource to your tenants. Any AI related questions they have, I will be just sitting there working on my laptop, and they can just come up to me and ask any AI questions they have, right? This works so well because it's a win-win for everybody involved.

The co-working space gets a huge value ad that they can offer to all their tenants. The people in the co-working space obviously get value because they've got an AI expert that they can come and just get free consulting with for an hour, and you get value because you're literally plugging directly into your ICP. Everybody in that office is probably a potential client for you. And if you do a good job and help them and answer their questions, naturally they're going

to want more. They're going to want to hire you. And a perfect example of this, like I said, a guy named Dennis in my community hosted one of these this week. And he took it a step further. So he reached out to, I think, like 10 different co-working spaces, got two of them to agree. And before the first one that he hosted this week, he door knocked a bunch of local businesses and restaurants and said, hey, can I have some free gift cards to give away at this

co-working office hours as a way to, you know, get more people in your door? He got $175 of free gift cards from local businesses that he used as a carrot to get people to show up to office hours. he got 11 people to show up to the first office hours, two of them he has follow-up calls set up with. And I guarantee you at least one is going to be a client. So that's a way to combine office hours with door knocking and just generally being a beast. Right. Like I love that initiative so much. So that works really, really well.

And then lastly, oh, go ahead. Yeah, no, lastly. I mean, post your win. I mean, pretty self-explanatory, right? You're basically, as you're going about life, you're just documenting either by creating short videos, posting on X, images, stuff like that. And you know, you're just trying to build in public, as they say. Exactly. Yeah.

And again, not to go too deep into this one. But the one point I want to make here is, you know, a win doesn't need to be, oh, I saved this person 40 hours this month. Like a win is literally, hey, this person texted me a question about Jad GBT. I gave them a really good answer. And this is, this was their question and this is what I said. Like a win to you is probably a lot less significant than you realize. And people can benefit from a lot of, you know, any sort of AI expertise or, you know, quote unquote wins that you might have. And I think, I mean, people listening to this know about building in public and why it's important. I think what's hard about it is, especially in the early days, like you just don't have

that much, you don't have that many wins. You don't have that much to say, quote unquote. So you have to you know manufacture a little bit of it and just and just think okay how can I create content that's highly valuable for my ICP and it might be for example

you know the one chat GPT prompt you need to see today you know and that's what it is and you're just like for you know 90 days I'm going to I'm going to release a prompt that I think is super valuable and the results I'm going to create a

keros and I'm going to stick to it. And hopefully by the end of the 90 days, you know, as I'm getting clients, as I'm doing assessments, as I'm building this, you know, business, I start getting real results, right? I start getting real texts from people being like, I implemented this. And then that's when you can layer on some of that stuff. Right. 100%.

So those are these seven ways to find clients. And then last but not least, this is my very favorite upsell of them all, right? And we'll kind of go through this rather quick, but it's an impactful offer. This is what I call my AI concierge offer, right? This is done with you consulting. And this is a method that I'm currently using to make over $1,000 an hour consulting with business owners. When I came up with this offer, again, I didn't know if anybody was going to buy this.

So I started just telling everybody I talked to about it. Of the first six people that I told about this offer, I closed five of them and generated where I was at 8K MRR in the first 10 days. And I kept raising my price for everybody that said yes. And people kept saying yes. So there was clearly a demand here. And I'll explain to you exactly what that is. So the offer, right, this is how we create monthly recurring revenue because it's a retainer

where the client pays you every single month. So the offer in a nutshell is I'm doing two 45 minute calls per month with the client where I'm literally just on a Zoom call with them, they are sharing their screen, and I am helping them use Claude Co-work and build Claude skills. That is it, right? So again, from the assessment, the assessment might have uncovered opportunities for them to build skills

or workflows for them to automate. It's such an easier upsell to say, hey, well, if you want me to do it with you, I can be your in-house AI concierge. And twice a month, we can do working sessions to build this stuff together. And that's, you know, when I started at 12, the first person I quoted at 1,200 a month, the next two at 1,500 a month, the 4th at 1,800 a month, and then the 5th at 2,000 a month. And so that's my current client roster. And think about it. If you're, if they're paying you 1,500 a month for 2, 45 minute calls, your effective hourly rate is $1,000 an hour. Right. So that's how, I mean, I'm not a big fan of trading my time for money, but for $1,000 an hour I'm willing to do it. I think most people would agree.

Yeah. I think one interesting strategy here is on your website, on your landing page for this offer, what you can do is say like four spots only at $800 a month and then it goes to $1,200 a month and then four spots there and then

it gets to $1,600 a month. So you want to when you're thinking about creating any offer in a service-based business, well in product businesses too, but specifically with services, there needs to be some sense of urgency or else people really don't do anything.

The beauty about this business is there is some inherent built-in urgency in the sense that AI is on everyone's minds right now. But you still need them to pull the trigger to hire you specifically as that person. Sometimes it's because they're like, Corey, he's

the best. Or sometimes it's like, you know, Corey, I met him at this meetup and like I trust him. But sometimes it's, you know what, $800 a month feels like a fair price for these sets of deliverables, I'm going to go do this and I don't want to pay $1,200 a month. So that's just a little tip for people. 100%. And something I've said repeatedly is that, you know, I have a lot of other stuff going on other

than just this AI concierge offer. So I have five clients right now and I'm legitimately capping it at six. So you better believe every time I get on a sales call with people, I tell them like, guys, I'm taking one more client for this offer. And I have two other. calls this week with people interested. So like if you say no today and one of them says yes, I promise you I'm not working with you until one of my other people turn. And like you have to hold that obviously has to be legitimate scarcity, which it is for me. So that's just a really good point. Now, so again, the offer two 45 minute calls a month. All we're doing is is building Claude Skills. That's literally all we're doing. In between calls, another piece of the offer is they get unlimited

Voxer access to me with a 12 business hour response time. Now, what I want to specify here is that it sounds like a lot. I say, well, shit, they're probably going to be hitting you up 24-7. Guys, you get almost no messages. Like, it's shocking. It's very, very high perceived value. Because when you're pitching somebody, they're like, oh, great, I have this guy on call to answer any questions I want any time. The reality is, of my five clients, only three of them have message me and they have message me once each over the last about two and a half months. So the Voxer workload is virtually zero, but very high perceived value. So that's the offer, right, in a nutshell.

What do we actually do in the sessions? Like I said, the bulk of the sessions is spent teaching them how to use Claude Co-Work, helping them build Claude skills. Now, the only thing that differs is on the very first call because most clients have not ever use Claude Co-work before or if they have, they never like set it up properly. We actually built a Claude plugin that we give to the client that just walks them through a guided onboarding. So on that first call, I tell them, I'm like, hey, this first call, we're not building

anything. We're setting the foundation. I'm going to send you this plugin. I'm going to handhold you through this onboarding. And on this onboarding, we are going to connect your tools. We are going to create your context files. we're going to create your global instructions. I'm going to show you what a scheduled task looks like, and I'm going to show you what a skill does.

That's all we're doing on call number one. So that way, every call after that is 10 times more effective because we've built that foundation. And again, every call after that, all we're doing is we're looking at their workflows and saying, okay, you know, you're currently doing onboarding like this. We're going to run what I call AOA on every one of their tasks, audit, optimize, automate. So audit, show me how you do it today. They walk through it. Optimize.

Let's cut the fat. It's 13 steps. Let's make it seven. Automate. Let's turn it into a Claude scale. And it's rinse repeat for every one of their workflows as long as their client. Does that make sense? Yeah, for sure.

So that is what we cover in the sessions. And then what makes it feel like a premium engagement? Well, before the first call, we send them a Google form, which is an onboarding form, which is almost like an additional mini audit. But the point there is we ask them more pointed questions, right? We're saying, you know, what 90 days from now? What would make this engagement feel like a win? And that's when they give you a very specific answer.

And Greg, of my five clients, I think four of the five, we have already achieved their 90 day win and it's been about 60 days. And really, for a few of them, we did it in less than 60 days. And then you remind them. You're like, oh, hey, then you remind them. You know, you're like. you know, hey, when we first started working together, you said this would be success and like we exceeded that and then you can upsell them again. You know what I mean? Yeah. What's more

there's all, that's the thing about upselling is there's always there's always an upsell to the upsell to the upsell to the upsell. You know what I mean? Like and you know, you could say, well, I want to focus like I already have all these product offerings. I can't deal with more product offerings. Maybe, but maybe you, you know, if it is working super well, you can be like, you know what, I'm dropping two of my clients or I'm going to wait, you know, maybe you don't want to drop your clients, of course, but like you wait until two churn. And once they've churned and you have more bandwidth, you're like, okay, I'm going to put a $10,000 an hour package together or $100,000 an hour package. And, you know, you can always go upmarket, up market, up market,

and make it more and more premium as things go on. People forget that. People forget that in services businesses, that there's always a more luxury, luxury, luxury experience that a certain ICP is going to want. And by focusing on this group of people, you're kind of missing out on those. That being said, you have to take it one step at a time, right?

You can't do all at the same time and expect to have everyone. 100%. Yeah, and focus is key. And that's why for most people, what I tell them is, you know, do the assessment because that's relatively easy to fulfill and then choose one of the upsell options that we mentioned, right? I recommend AI concierge, but you might say, oh, I want to specialize in knowledge basis, right? So I do an assessment and knowledge systems, right? We do an assessment and then we build knowledge systems.

Or we do an assessment and then we build Claude skills. So again, that's the offer in a nutshell. What makes it feel premium, like I said, that that. pre-engagement form. And then we've actually got a one pager in Notion where all of their, all the whole client engagement lives. And in particular, we have an inventory of everything we've accomplished together during the engagement. So that is what's staring them in the face that says, hey, we did this, this, this and this, this month. Okay, yeah, I'm going to keep paying Corey $1,800 because these things are impactful. So that Notion Hub is always updated after every call.

I email it to them after every call. We make it front and center. And that is the AI concierge engagement. And that is, that's the full stack, man. That's everything. We just gave it all away. I appreciate it. The one thing I think that people need to reflect upon after understanding the stack is how can you make this unique to you? So if you live in a particular geography, if you understand a vertical better than anyone else,

how can you niche this down and then niche it down to more so that when people are coming to you, about this, it feels like you're the person for that. I think that's a really big important thing because there's thousands of people, and we talked about this in the beginning, yes, there's thousands of people starting things like this and the pie is infinite. But what's going to attract the right client, it's going to help you retain clients, what's going to help you make it easier and feel like fishing with dynamite is going to be if you just focus on a particular ICP, a particular ideal customer profile, you focus on attracting them, you know, just really focus on them and you're not just like, hey, I'm doing AI transformation.

Like come come work with me. Right. I think either being the go-to guy in an industry or being a go-to guy in a geographic area, Right. Yeah. So again, I'm in Charlotte. I'm sure I would be doing very well if I was the, the AI guy in Charlotte, right? And that's partially why I'm doing the in-person meetups.

At the same time, if I had, say, 10 years experience in financial services, well, then I would probably be smart to brand myself as the AI guy for financial services or the guy who does AI assessments for financial services. You're going to be able to charge more and you're going to be able to, you're less prone to pricing pressure. when you've niche down like that and you have the expertise to back it up. Corey, thank you so much for coming on the pod. I'll include links for where you can follow Corey on social and learn more about this business model. Corey, I know I know you listen to the pod, so it's cool to have you on for reals. And this has been fun. I learned a lot.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Greg. Really appreciate it. Later.