# 178 Don't start an AI automation agency in 2026 (do this instead)

# 178 Don't start an AI automation agency in 2026 (do this instead) Speaker 1: If you're thinking about starting an AI automation agency, stop what you're doing and watch this first. The offer ladder that I'm about to show you is how I'm actually making money selling AI services right now. And it looks nothing like the agency model that everybody out there is pushing. It actually starts with a free tripwire offer that converts 30 to 50 percent of people into a paid engagement from From there, the paid engagement upsells into what we call the AI concierge, which pays you over $1,000 an hour. And then there are four a la carte builds that you can stack on top of that. So I'm going to walk through the entire offer ladder step-by-step with the exact pricing at every level. You can literally take the transcript of this video, hand it to Claude and have it build this business plan for you. So I hope you enjoy and let's jump right in. So the AI offer ladder has three components. We start with a mini assessment for free, then we upsell to a paid assessment, then we can upsell into AI concierge. So we're going to go through each of these components one by one, starting with the free mini assessment. So what is the free mini assessment? This is a 15 minute miniature version of the paid assessment where the entire goal is to identify one pain point or one bottleneck that the client has, and then we prescribe one Off-the-shelf AI tool that they can implement immediately to fix that pain point or that bottleneck. Now, we just give them one because we want them to have a taste because the full paid assessment shows them anywhere from three to seven tools that can fix three to seven bottlenecks they have. So this is a miniature version of that. Now, when it comes to the mini assessment as well as the paid assessment, we focus on three potential levers of ROI. So effectiveness means it's going to make them more money, efficiency means it's going to save them time, quality means it's going to improve the quality of their product or service. So with both the free mini assessment and the paid assessment, we focus on one of these three levers and we tie whatever tools we're prescribing to them back to one of these three levers. So how does it work? With the free mini assessment we do, it's a two meeting offer. So in the first meeting, it lasts about 15 minutes. It's purely a discovery call. We're asking them questions about, you know, what tasks in your business are repetitive? Where are you seeing friction? We anchor the ROI. So how much is your time worth per hour? And then we ask them the best question, which is if you could wave a magic wand, what is the one thing in your business that you would fix? And that helps us determine which one tool that we can prescribe to them in the second follow-up call. So before the second follow-up call, we're actually going to go and research the bottleneck. So we're going to take the transcript from the first call. We're going to research it. We're going to find the Pain point that they mentioned, it's both high frequency and high friction. And then we're going to go and find an off the shelf AI tool that can fix that problem. And we use tools like futurepedia.io, or there's an AI for that.com. Those are both two AI tool directory websites. That essentially give us a list of tool, AI tools by industry. So we can go pick tools from those websites to make it easy. And now before we continue, guys, if you want this Excalidraw drawing, this entire diagram that we're going through here, I'm going to put it in the description. And in the show notes, if you're listening to this on the podcast, download it completely for free. You can literally hand this diagram to Claude and have it build your business plan for you completely free. So go get that in the description or in the show notes. Now for meeting two, this is where we actually prescribe the fix. So, this is where we give them the name of the tool that we went and researched in between calls. We tell them the cost of that tool, whether it's free or whether it's a monthly cost, and then we give them the first step. So, hey, you said that your biggest pain point was in sales. Here's a CRM solution that's AI powered that can really help you with your sales efforts. First step is to go to this website and download it, right? It's literally that simple. That's what we're prescribing in the free assessment. Now, if it is a common problem that they're having that we identified from the discovery call, usually we prescribe an off-the-shelf tool, right? Something we find on Futurepedia or there's an AIforthat.com. If the problem that they have, the main pain point is a judgment problem, meaning it's not necessarily something that a tool can fix, usually we prescribe Claude Cowork. And then if it's a unique workflow that's proprietary to their business, we prescribe a Claude Skill. Now again, we're not building them the skill as part of this free assessment. We're not setting up co-work for them as part of this free assessment. We're just making them aware of what the solution is. So it's like, hey, we've identified your customer onboarding flow as being your biggest bottleneck. That really should be a Claude skill that you can run in Claude co-work. And that's literally all you're telling them as part of the free assessment. So now they're aware of the solution, but if they want your help in implementing it, that's an upsell. So at the end of the free assessment, we ask them simple questions. Do you want to hand this off to someone? Do you want me to do this with you or do you want me to do this for you? So we just kind of gauge their appetite for how much of our help they want in terms of a paid engagement. 30 to 50% of those clients that you do a free assessment for say yes, hey, I either want you to do it for me or I want you to do it with me or I wanna just hand it off entirely. So 30 to 50% of those free assessment clients are gonna turn into a paid client, all right? So what do we do next? Well, we can upsell. After we've delivered free value, we upsell the full audit, which we sell for anywhere from, you know, usually right around $999. So step two in the offer ladder is the paid assessment. And sometimes I say assessment, sometimes I say audit. It's the same thing. Assessment just seems a little less invasive. So usually I try to say assessment instead of audit. People don't like to be audited. So when we do the paid assessment, it's the same exact process. The only difference is instead of 15 minutes, usually we're interviewing them for 45 minutes and we're pulling out three to seven pain points or bottlenecks instead of one. Now, in the beginning, I did the 45 minute interviews for the paid assessments myself. We actually created a voice agent that we call Annie, where the client can call a phone number, talk to Annie for 30 minutes, and Annie is going to dig into their pain points just like I would as a human. Now, again, I don't recommend you build a voice agent to do this if it's your first assessment, even on your fifth assessment. You should do 3 to 5 to 10 paid assessments yourself first before building a voice agent to do this part of the assessment for you. Now, for members of our AI Operator Academy community, we actually give them access to Annie. We give them a skill that builds their version of Annie for them pretty much automatically. So our community members have voice agents that are doing this for them. If you're interested in the community, you can check out the link in the description or in the show notes. But just know that if it's your first three to five to 10 assessments, you should be doing this part of the assessment. Yourself, which again is asking them questions for 45 minutes to uncover additional bottlenecks more than we found during the free mini assessment. So once we have that transcript of that call, we build the actual report. So we take the transcript, we feed it to AI, and then we have AI build us that report. Now, we used to build the reports in Gamma, now we build the reports in Claude Design. I've given away the report template that we use as well, so I'm also going to put the link to that in the description and in the show notes. You can get the exact report template that we deliver to clients for these paid assessments. All you have to do is drag and drop it into your Claude Design and it'll import straight into Claude Design. So again, we let AI analyze the transcript and figure out the main pain points as well as go out and research tools that we can prescribe to the client to fix those pain points. So AI is basically building the entire report for us. And that report itself consists of six different parts. So one is the summary, kind of the executive summary. Two is what we call the effort versus impact matrix. So we show them, hey, these are all your opportunities on a matrix of effort versus impact. This report focuses on the solutions that are both high impact, low effort, right? And we call those quick wins. So like we said, those are these off the shelf tools that we can implement immediately. So, the third slide tells them the exact tools that we're prescribing as well as the cost of those tools. The fourth slide lays out a quick win plan. So, this is where we show them, you know, hey, day one, you can do this. Day two, you can do this. Day three, you can do this. Day four, you can do this. It's a four-day quick win plan that they can implement easily so that they don't get overwhelmed by the full report. The fifth slide is upsell opportunities. So those are any opportunities that we identified from the initial discovery interview that are heavier lifts than just an off-the-shelf tool, right? Maybe they need a dedicated agent. Maybe they need somebody to build a knowledge base. Maybe they need a full Zapier automation. That is what we lay out in the fifth slide so that they can see, hey, these are some bigger opportunities that you could potentially partner with us to help build for you. And then the last slide is where we quantify the actual ROI that they're getting from the assessment. So we basically take their hourly rate times the amount of hours that these tools are going to save them per week. Minus the monthly cost of the tools to give them their full monthly ROI. Most of our clients save anywhere from five to eight hours per week just by implementing the tools that we recommend in this assessment. We're only charging $1,000 for the assessment. Theoretically, they're getting a massive ROI just if they implement the tools that we lay out in this report. Again, I'm going to put the report template in the description in the show notes so you guys can download the exact Report template that we use, hand it to Claude Design, input your client information, and you're good to go. And then we deliver the report. So we send the report within 48 hours. We try to be quick with the turnaround. And then we schedule a 30-minute walkthrough conversation with the client to walk through the report with them. This is a screen share call where I'm sharing my screen. I'm showing them the report going line by line, slide by slide. Hey, you said you have pain point X, you need to get tool Y, here's how much it costs, here's how much time it's going to save you. That's all we're doing is we're walking through the report and that is where we are potentially bringing up the upsell opportunities as well. That's where we're saying, hey, of all these things that we're showing you here on this report, are you going to implement them yourself? Do you want my help? That's where we can upsell the next feature in the offer ladder, which we call our AI concierge model. Before we get into AI concierge, how do we price the assessment? Well, when I first started doing the assessments, I did them for free to get a few testimonials. Then I charged $200, then I charged $500, now we charge $1,000. This is 100% pure margin. The only cost That you're going to incur to fulfill this offer is going to be your Claude subscription at $20 a month. So it's pretty much 99.9% net margin. I actually recommend you do your first two or three for free and then immediately jump to charging $1,000 an hour or not $1,000 an hour, $1,000 for the report, right? This was me testing the market, going from free to 200 to 500 to 1,000. We found that when you charge $1,000, people take it seriously. It's low enough where most businesses can easily afford to pay it, and it's high enough where they feel like it's at a price point that actually is valuable. So that's my recommendation in terms of what to charge. Next, from the assessment, we can upsell AI concierge, which is my main offer right now. That's what I'm making the majority of my income from. Which is a done with you consulting offer where it's essentially a monthly retainer and we'll explain exactly what that offer is and how to fulfill that. So as an AI concierge, the offer in a nutshell, it's a 45 minute call that you're doing with your client twice a month. It's done with YouConsulting. On these calls, we are literally, the client is sharing their screen and we are helping them implement ClaudeCowork and build ClaudeSkills. That's all we're doing. We're essentially identifying the biggest bottlenecks from the assessment and then we are turning those bottlenecks into ClaudeSkills and handing them off to ClaudeCowork. I started by charging $1,200 a month. Now I'm charging $2,000 a month. Again, if I'm doing two 45-minute calls per month per client, which is what I'm doing, my effective hourly rate, if you're charging $1,500 a month, your hourly rate is $1,000 an hour because that's $1,500 for an hour and a half of your time over the course of a month. So I'm going to explain that model in detail. When we do an AI concierge engagement, so let's say we did an assessment with a client, they want to do the AI concierge engagement, what do we do first? We send them an intake form in JotForm. So this JotForm intake form essentially is another mini assessment. So we did the full assessment with them earlier. This is just a way for us to get, you know, in their words on paper, the exact pain points they're experiencing, their bottlenecks. We have them list out some different processes within their business, and we have that all done through JotForm. And it's a hard requirement before we do our first AI concierge call. So if they don't fill out the job form, we don't do the first call. We have to have that in order to be able to jump on the first call so that we can hit the ground running on the first call and not have to spend the first 30 minutes of the first call figuring out where to start. After they do the job form, then we jump into the actual calls themselves. So we do, like I said, two 45-minute calls per month. These are live working sessions where we build with them. And on these calls, we're running our AOA framework on every one of their bottlenecks. Now, AOA stands for Audit, Optimize, Automate. So when we run AOA, we take a specific process that they're doing manually and we first audit it. We watch them as they share their screen, watch them do the process manually as it exists today. And then we optimize that process next. We look at the process and we say, well, hey, it's 15 steps. It only needs to be nine, right? So we cut out the fat during the optimized step and then we automate. So we usually just turn that into a Claude skill and set it up as a scheduled task in Claude co-work. That is AOA in a nutshell. That's this entire engagement is identify a bottleneck from the assessment. Run AOA on it, turn it into a skill, set it up as a scheduled task, repeat for every one of their bottlenecks. And we do that during every working session as long as they're a client. Now because the calls with the client are one every two weeks, We want to give them some support between calls because if we just did a session today and tomorrow they have a question about AI or something we're building, we don't want them to have to wait another two weeks for our next call. So we give them, as part of this offer, unlimited access to us via a tool called Voxer. Voxer is just a walkie-talkie app that they can send us voice messages or text messages through without us having to give them our phone number. When we give them access to us via Voxer, our guarantee is, hey, we're going to respond to you in 12 business hours or less via Voxer. Again, people might see this and think, well, I don't want to give somebody unlimited access to me. You'd be shocked how few messages you actually get on Voxer. This is the part of the offer that is high perceived value. They essentially have an AI concierge in their pocket on call 24-7. Realistically, you're going to get two messages per month from the average client. The volume is virtually zero, but the client sees this as a very valuable thing to have in case they need it. Now, the other big mechanism, another big part of this offer is the Notion Hub. So this is where in Notion, the client has a dedicated workspace that has all the information about their engagement in one place. So they've got the link to myVoxer. They've got the link to schedule our next session. They've got the link to all our call recordings, the call summaries from our AI note taker. We've got the top three takeaways from each call, the action items from each call, and a full manifest of everything that we built during the engagement on each call. So that's where we list out all the skills that we built, all the context files we built, all the workflows we automated. And the Notion Hub serves as a renewal mechanism so that the client, all they have to do is look at the Notion Hub and say, wow, on our last call, we built these four things and these were the biggest takeaways. Wow, we're getting a lot done. We're really moving the needle. Okay, yeah, I'm going to renew next month because look how much progress we're making. So that's the purpose of the Notion Hub. It's simply a renewal mechanism. Now we have two Claude skills that we've created that fill out the Notion Hub in 30 seconds, as well as draft a follow-up email to the client after each engagement. The skills take the call transcript as input. It reads the transcript based on what we covered in the transcript. It fills out the NotionHub and then sends them a follow-up email reiterating the top three takeaways, again, with the goal of them seeing the value and wanting to renew. Our AI Operator Academy members get this full, they literally get the AI concierge business in a box. They get the two Claude skills, they get the Notion Hub template, they get the full JotForm template, they get literally everything required to plug and play this business model in like five minutes. And then in terms of pricing, we already talked about pricing for the AI concierge model. I would never charge less than $1,000 a month. For this offer, because it's very high touch, it's very hands-on. So if you're charging $1,000 a month, you're making, what, $750 an hour on average. If you're charging $1,500 a month, you're making $1,000 an hour. And if you're charging $2,000 a month, which is what I'm currently charging, then you're making, I think that's, what, $1,250 an hour. Personally, I'm capping this at six clients. I have five clients right now, but if you're starting off, charge $1,000 a month, get two clients at $1,000 a month, then charge $1,500 a month until you have two clients at that price, then charge $2,000 a month or more. If this is all you're doing, you could easily support 10 to 12 clients. I just have a lot going on, so I'm capping it at six. Those are the three main models. That's the offer ladder in a nutshell. But let's touch on a couple of additional a la carte projects, a la carte builds that you could sell to a client that fall outside the scope of the three that we just talked about. So these are all things that I've sold to clients. They're just not my main focus right now. So after we've done the paid assessment, right, The beauty of the assessment is it uncovers all the opportunities for us to sell additional things to that client. So from the assessment, let's say the client is not willing to pay us for AI concierge, but their onboarding process is super jacked up. Maybe it's a 15-step onboarding process, and we know that we can implement AI to take it from 15 steps down to seven. We could just sell them a standalone process optimization package where the deliverable is we take your 15-step process, we infuse AI and we cut it to eight, for example. We've sold those before. We usually sell those for anywhere from $3,000 to $3,500 is what we've sold them for. But you could charge up to five grand for this process optimization because it buys them back so much time. It's a very needed service fixing processes and infusing processes with AI. Second thing you could build is a simple automation build with something like Zapier or make.com. So this is one of the first things I ever built for a client. We had a client that in their new client intake process, they were using a project management tool called Asana. One of their highest paid employees for every new client they onboarded had to go into Asana, duplicate the project layout, basically duplicate a bunch of work for each client by hand manually. So we built a simple Zapier automation that when the new client signs the contract, it automatically duplicates those things for them in Asana. So it saved them on average 30 minutes per client, which might not sound like a lot, but they're onboarding 10 clients a week. So essentially, 40 clients per month times 30 minutes is how much time this build saved them. And we were able to charge, I think, like two grand for that. We probably should have charged more. But you get the idea. There's a lot of one-off little processes that we can just automate that one process and charge the client $1,000, $2,000, $3,000, $5,000 to fix that one process. Now, another thing we can upsell, this is one of my favorites, is a knowledge system or a custom GPT. This could be anything from a second brain, which you guys might have heard me talking about before, Down to a simple custom GPT. And what this looks like, we actually sold one of these to a client recently. A client of ours is a business broker. He lists about six to eight businesses for sale per year. Every time he has a new listing, he gets about 400 emails on average from interested buyers, all asking the same questions. So instead of him getting 400 emails every time he lists a business for sale, We built him a custom GPT trained on the marketing package for that listing. So instead of him giving out his email, he's able to give them the link to the custom GPT. They're able to get the answers to their questions from the custom GPT. So he went from getting 400 emails per listing to getting about 10. And we got feedback from him literally today where he said, he got feedback from both the seller, the listing, the seller of the listing and the buyer, both of them saying, hey, this is a really good experience. Like we've never seen another broker doing this before and this is really streamlined. So this is like proof that those solutions work. They're super valuable. They save your client time and they increase the customer experience for the person on the other end. And we charged him $3,000 for that build. And the last potential a la carte build that you can create is a speed to lead agent, really any specialized agent, right? I just like speed to lead because it's a great example. Speed to lead agents are AI agents that watch a particular Inbound lead source, whether it's email, WhatsApp, social media, whatever. And when a lead comes in, that agent can respond to that lead in five minutes or less in a very personalized manner, getting them closer to the conversion event, whether that's booking a call or filling out an application or whatever. So let's say, you know, a lead comes in, a speed to lead agent would see that lead. And it's not a generic AI canned response or an auto responder that says, hey, we'll get back to you in 24 hours. If a lead comes in that says, hey, I'm interested in your In your catering service, a speed lead agent is going to say, hey, thanks so much for reaching out. I understand you're interested in our catering service. I see you're located in Charlotte, North Carolina. We've had a ton of clients in Charlotte. Let me give you some of our information about those specific packages that you inquired about. And by the way, when you're ready to book a call to talk to our team, here's a link to book a call. And not only is the agent going to respond in that very personalized manner, the agent can follow up with that lead to nurture them to get them to eventually book that call. So speed to lead agent is a great example of an agent that drives revenue. Remember the three levers that we mentioned earlier? Effectiveness, efficiency, and quality. Speed to lead agent is a perfect example of an effectiveness agent, a build that's actually going to make the business a ton of money. So that is the AI offer ladder. In a nutshell, you can download this entire diagram as well as the paid assessment form or the report template that you can feed to Claude Design and get the exact template that we use. In the link in the description below and if you're interested in AI Operator Academy, which is our community where we give our community literally all the resources here. It's a business in a box for selling assessments and AI concierge that you can plug and play and have your business up and running in minutes. The link will be in the description and the show notes for that as well. So thanks for watching and we'll be back soon.