How to Sign Your First AI Client (Zero Content or Cold Outreach)

How to Sign Your First AI Client (Zero Content or Cold Outreach) Speaker 1: The easiest way I found to land your first AI services client does not require an existing audience and it does not require creating months of content. It is running a free monthly meetup in your city or town called AI for Business geared towards non-technical business owners. Now, I recently hosted one in Charlotte. About 30 people attended. Roughly half of them fit my ideal client profile and it created multiple sales conversations and referrals. In this episode, I'm going to show you how to secure the venue, how to fill the room through local partnerships, teach something useful, and turn that trust into paid AI assessments and AI concierge engagements without giving everyone a hard pitch. Let's build your first event. The biggest opportunity right now is establishing yourself as a local expert in your city or town by hosting what I call an AI for Business meetup. This is the method that will generate clients, partners, referrals, speaking opportunities. This will generate so many opportunities for months to come and completely negates the need to do cold outreach or create content of any kind. So what is the opportunity? It is, like I said, host an AI for Business meetup once per month. This is a free meetup that you can host in your city or town, usually at a local co-working space, to help you become the go-to AI person in your town. Now, I did this recently. I hosted the first one in Charlotte, North Carolina last month. We had about 25 to 30 people show up. About half of these people were my ideal client. They were business owners who are non-technical, who are interested in learning about AI, but they don't necessarily want to do it themselves. I have multiple ongoing sales conversations with some of the people that attended that very first event. Now, clients are going to come in two ways from this type of event. There's going to be people who attend the meetup, who are your ideal client, who want to buy, and then there's going to be people who attend the meetup, Who are also in the AI niche, who are able to refer you people and clients that will never come to the event, right? They'll just refer you people from their network because you're the guy hosting the event. So that's really the two ways you're going to get clients from this. What I found is that actually I'm getting more referrals from people who were at the event than I got actual leads of people who were there. Now you're going to get both, but your mileage may vary depending on where you're hosting the event and how many people show up. And again, this method requires zero existing audience. I'm gonna show you how you can partner with other people in your community to drive leads to this event or drive signups to this event. You don't have to create content to do this. You don't have to do any cold outreach. If you have a little bit of hustle and a long-term mindset, this is the highest ROI play for driving leads on autopilot every single month that I can possibly think of. Now your ideal client in this case, who's going to show up to your meetup? It's going to be non-technical local business owners who want someone to guide them on all things AI. So that's who we're targeting. That's why we call the meetup AI for Business because we're specifically targeting business owners, entrepreneurs, small business owners who are non-technical. I don't know about you, but in my city, in Charlotte, there's a lot of AI meetups for developers and for technical people. There's not anything at all for non-technical people, which is why I think this meetup is going to continue to do so well for me. And chances are, you watching this in your city or town, there's probably AI meetups for technical people. There's probably not anything geared towards the everyday business owner. Now, these are people who hang out in local business Facebook groups, they hang out at the Chamber of Commerce meetings, they're in local networking circles, and as you start to put on this event, once you get to your second, third, fifth, sixth month of doing this event, word is going to spread because the people that show up are also well-connected locally and they're going to start to invite their friends. These are also the type of people who, many of which are old school, they're not going to necessarily buy from an Instagram ad or a Facebook ad or from watching somebody's YouTube video. They're so much more likely to buy from somebody they met in person, aka you, not from a cold email. So if you are the one hosting the event, you're the guy, right? You are the one who commands the room and have the most authority. They're going to be so much more likely to buy from you because they've met you and they know you and they've seen you in person versus somebody they've just seen on social media. Now the problem in this case that we are solving by hosting this event is everybody in the world of AI services is hiding behind a screen. It's really easy to do that because of how much AI can help us with things like content and cold outreach and all these other traditional methods for getting clients. Everybody selling AI wants to hide behind a screen, right? And that is your opportunity. Most people selling AI services are just blasting out cold emails and DMs. So, so many of these local owners are just tuning that out. And by doing this in person, you automatically create that authority frame. Most local business owners are overwhelmed by all the noise and AI and they don't trust these internet quote-unquote experts who they've never shook their hand. Maybe they like their content, but AI experts are a dime a dozen these days. There's so many of them. Nobody in town, I can guarantee you, regardless of where you live, there's probably nobody in your city or town who has claimed the position of local AI authority, right? That's exactly what I am trying to do in Charlotte. I want to establish myself as the guy when it comes to AI in Charlotte. Because not only am I going to get clients from that, like I said, I'm going to get business partners, referrals, speaking opportunities, just audiences that you normally wouldn't get access to, all because you decided to host a local event and you hosted it for six months straight or more, right? And again, in-person builds trust. So much quicker than cold outreach. Cold outreach simply can't duplicate the trust that you can build in person. You can build more trust and rapport in 30 seconds face to face than you can with six months of content or cold emails or DMing somebody back and forth. You just can't beat in person, which is why I'm so bullish on this model. Now, what is the offer? What are we actually selling people that attend this meetup? So the meetup's the front door. The AI assessment and the AI concierge offers are the house, right? So again, the meetup's the front door. We get them in the door, and then once they're in the house, we can sell them the assessment and the AI concierge. So again, the front end is the free monthly AI for Business meetup. With a live screen share demo. At the meetup, we're going to be sharing our screen. We're going to be teaching one simple concept for 15-20 minutes during the middle of the meetup. We're going to not use any developer jargon, no mention of APIs or MCPs or anything crazy like that. We're going to keep the concepts super basic, super high level so that anybody in the room who's non-technical can get value out of the 15-20 minutes that we're going to spend actually teaching. Now, once we've done that, they're going to trust us because of that. We've gotten their e-mail address or their phone number either at the door or via Meetup link registration that they filled out before, and then we can market to them. We can follow up with them directly via e-mail or via text message and offer them an AI tools assessment, which is one of my favorite offers. If you've watched this channel for any amount of time before, you've heard me talk about AI assessments. But what an AI tools assessment is at a very high level is when we sit down with a business owner for 45 minutes, have a conversation with them to pull out their bottlenecks and the things that they're doing manually in their business, and then the deliverable is a report containing three to seven off-the-shelf AI tools that they can implement immediately to reclaim five to 10 hours per week or more. Now we charge $999 for that assessment. It's a no-brainer. I've sold 20 of them this year. Small business owners love them. And what that does is it opens the door for the next offer, the next thing that we can sell them, our back-end offer, which is our AI Concierge Retainer, where we're charging anywhere from $1,000 to $2,000 per month to do done-with-you consulting with the small business owner. So if we sold them the assessment, The assessment tells them the what they can do. AI concierge sits down with them and helps them implement. So as an AI concierge, we are helping them implement what we found in the assessment. We're also helping them use Claude co-work and build Claude skills to automate a lot of those manual tasks in their business. Now, if you want to learn more about how to sell AI assessments or AI concierge in particular, I'm personally making over $1,000 an hour as an AI concierge right now. That's not an exaggeration. We have a community inside school called AI Operator Academy. Where right now we have over 120 people in there. Every single person is making money selling AI services with a specific focus on AI assessments and AI concierge. So if you want to learn more about those business models, you like how they sound, you want to make money with them, join AI Operator Academy. If you don't land your first paying client within 90 days, we literally refund 100% of your money. So you have nothing to lose and it's the straightest line path to getting that first customer. You can go to AOA.community or hit the link in the description or the show notes to join us inside AI Operator Academy. If you want the actual prompt, so what I did to put this whole AI for Business meetup together, I spent like 30 minutes crafting a super detailed prompt that I gave to Claude. The result, the output from that prompt is Claude came up with the whole meeting structure, the whole marketing plan, basically every deliverable to facilitate this meetup. I'm going to put that in the description as well as just like a free download. You can literally just download the prompt. That I gave to Claude that builds the entire event and marketing plan for you. So we're going to go into that in a little more detail here in a second, but that's pretty much turnkey as a free download. Now, if we talk about the pricing and the margins on what we're selling, the people that show up to the AI for Business meetup, if we're selling the assessment for $999, it's going to take us roughly two hours to fulfill on average, so we're making about $500 an hour. Now, for AI Concierge, we are charging anywhere from $1,000 to $2,000 per month for that service. That service gets the client two 45-minute calls per month with us to do the implementation. So it's an hour and a half of calls per month. So if we're charging $1,000 a month, we're making $667 an hour. If we're charging $2,000 a month, then we're making $1,333 per hour. So that's how the math works out on those offers. If you sell two assessments and one concierge client from one meetup, that means that you made anywhere from $3,000 to $4,000 in one evening. And every month that you host this meetup is gonna compound. You're gonna get more attendees, you're gonna get more referrals, you're gonna build more authority. This is one of those plays where I liken this strategy to SEO in the sense that with SEO, Done right? Are you going to get an uptick in leads in month one? Sure, you probably will. But it's going to be 10 times more in month six. It's the same with this meetup, right? Are you going to get leads from your first meetup? Sure, you probably will. But month four, six, 12, 15, it's going to be like 100 times bigger. So I want you to have that long-term mindset in mind. Now, how do we get the first client, right? We are going to do a few different things to fill the room for our first meetup. First thing you're going to do is you're going to run the event prompt in Claude, the one that I gave you earlier. So you're going to go to the description or the show notes. You're going to download that. Free prompt template, literally copy and paste it into Claude, and that is going to give you the pitch that you're going to pitch to the coworking space where you're going to host it. It's going to build out your run of the show, so it's going to build out your schedule for your meetup. It's going to build out your marketing package, and it's going to build out the Facebook posts that you're going to copy and paste into local business owner Facebook groups to get people in those Facebook groups interested in signing up for your meetup. So step two is going to be to do exactly that. You're going to post inside local business owner Facebook groups, but you're going to lead with value. It's never going to be just a straight pitch for signing up for your free meetup. So you can pause the video right here, take a screenshot of this. Of this template here, I'm going to talk it out loud so the folks on the podcast can take a note if they'd like. But all you're going to do inside these Facebook groups is you're going to say something like, hey, Charlotte business owners, I've spent all year testing AI in my own business and the time savings are real. So I'm hosting a free AI for Business meetup where I'm going to be screen sharing exactly how I use it. No tech background needed. Quick question, what's the one thing you wish AI could handle in your business? Drop it below and I will cover it live at the meetup. I'm going to put a link to the meetup in the comments. Something like that, right? And you can take that script and give it to Claude. And if you run the prompt that I gave you, Claude is going to give you three different variations of that message so that you can post them in multiple different Facebook groups in your city. And you're going to get probably 10 to 15 registrations just from doing that in three to five Facebook groups. And then from there, We're going to get the rest of our attendees from another method, which I'll share shortly. So again, you can put the event link in the comments of that post, not the post itself, so that you can dodge any no promotional rules that a lot of these groups have. Step four, and this is really what took my first event to the next level and got about 30 people to show up, is you're going to partner with one of the owners of these local Facebook groups as a co-host, right? So you're going to be able to access their audience. You bring the expertise, they bring their audience. So for example, One of the things that I'm doing for this month's meetup, there's a guy who runs a 38,000 person Facebook group in Charlotte. Everybody in the Facebook group is a business owner. So what I did is I approached this guy and I said, hey, we're running this AI for Business meetup. I've already secured the space. I've already prepared the material. I want you to co-host it with me. All you need to do is show up and tell people in your network. And he was like, sure, I'm down, right? So this is a guy who has access to 38,000 local business owners. So by making that simple partnership pitch and making it a no-brainer for him, we're probably going to have 50 people or more at our next meetup. So that's a hack, is to partner with somebody who owns a local business owner Facebook group and leverage their existing audience to drive attendance to your meetup. And now the step five. So at the meetup itself, when everybody's kind of winding down and about to walk out the door, you can just command the attention of the room and close with a super simple CTA, otherwise known as call to action, offering the paid assessment for a personalized report for those business owners, right? So what that might look like is as you're winding down the event, you can just get everybody's attention, say, hey, Everybody, thanks so much for coming out. We really enjoyed this meetup. We're going to be hosting next month's meetup at a similar time. I will send those details here next week. But before we go, I just want to offer the opportunity for anybody here who wants a personalized assessment of their business where I sit down with you and tell you exactly where AI fits into your existing processes to save you time or make you more money. I'm happy to do that. This is a paid assessment, but if you're interested in that, I'm happy to have that conversation. Feel free to reach out to me or I'm going to be following up with each of you individually after the meetup. So I will talk to some of you guys soon and we'll see you next month. Something like that. So from there, within 24 hours, you'll just send a text message to everybody that showed up because you had their contact information, because you collected it at the door, or you created a meetup registration link through like meetup.com, and you just text them and say, hey, did you enjoy the meetup? We enjoyed having you. Anything I can help you with when it comes to AI? And then start the conversation that way. Right, so there's a few things that could go wrong, a few pitfalls that I want you guys to avoid. So first thing that could go wrong is you have low turnout at event one. Now that's going to happen. Some people watching this are going to host their first event and two people are going to show up or five people are going to show up or nobody's going to show up. And if that's the case, don't worry. One, that doesn't mean that you should quit. If anything, that means you should go even harder for next month. But the fix is to co-host with a group owner, like I said earlier. So co-host it with a local group owner, whether that's a Facebook group owner or somebody who runs a local mastermind or meetup or even like a realtor, right? When I did actually my first one January of this year, I partnered with a local realtor who invited the other realtors in her office and some of her clients. So we had about 12 people show up to that one, all of which she drove, right? She brought them all there. And then, so partner with a local group owner and post in five to 10 Facebook groups, not just one. Some people listening to this are going to be tempted just to post in one big Facebook group and hope that that drives like 10, 15, 20 signups, but really you've got to post in five or more groups. The second thing that could go wrong is you pitch too hard. Alright, we don't want to pitch too hard. We don't want to come off as pushy. So the fix in this case is to teach first and then do just a 30 to 60 second call to action at the end. So when you teach first by doing that 15 to 20 minute presentation that I mentioned earlier, you're going to build so much more trust with the room so that at the end of the meetup, when you ask, when you pitch that call to action for somebody to book a call with you, you can sell on the call, right? You don't have to sell so hard in the room itself. For the actual presentation, the teaching portion, this past event, all I did was talk about how to build Claude skills for 15 minutes. Super simple concept, high value, people love it. Now the third thing that could go wrong is you host once and you quit, right? So do not do that. You're going to be shooting yourself in the foot. You're going to go through all this effort to set up your first meetup and then not carrying that momentum forward is a huge mistake. So the fix is to lock a monthly date, right? Because referrals are going to compound with reps. I already got a few referrals for my first one. Imagine how it's going to look in month four. I'm probably going to get, you know, four to five to 10 times more. So we, for my event, we've locked the monthly date. The last Thursday of every month is going to be the date that we shoot for. And that's that. And we're never going to miss the month for the next five years is most likely what we're going to do. Now, your next step as the viewer, think about it. You could have a room full of local clients 30 days from now. If you just do exactly what I said in this video, if you download the free prompt in the description and in the show notes, run it through Claude, Claude will literally do 90% of the heavy lifting for you. All you need to do is schedule the space and post in the Facebook groups. It's not that hard, guys, so I really want you to do that. This week, run the event prompt, pick a date, post in three local Facebook groups. Those are your action items. DM one local Facebook group owner about co-hosting. Again, you could get all of that done in like 30 minutes. It's just most people aren't going to take action, which is why the opportunity is so big. And if you want to learn how to make money selling AI assessments and AI concierge, kind of like I mentioned earlier, Then I want you to join the AI Operator Academy community. You can go to aoa.community or go to the link in the description or the show notes. We will help you make money selling AI services. We will get you your first client or next client in 90 days or less, or we give you 100% of your money back so you have nothing to lose. Hopefully we'll see you inside the community and I'll be back with another episode soon.