The business model

0:00 >> So, right [music] now, everyone thinks the AI world belongs to the young tech geniuses who've been coding right from the womb. But that couldn't be further from [music] the truth. So, this is the complete AI consulting course, and it's going to allow 39year-old Bob to get ready for that wedding, 62-year-old Aisha have that lavish retirement, [music] and 47year-old Maggie send her kids to college. You don't need to be techsavvy, you don't need [music] to be grinding 12 hours a day.

0:46 Just follow this course and change your life forever. But before we go any further, let's break down this [music] AI business model. The AA automation space is worth 22.16 billion. The creative agency space is worth 276 billion. The SAS space is worth $370 billion. But the consulting space is worth $1.06 trillion. We are going to be discussing what a huge opportunity the consulting industry is, what is an AI consulting firm exactly, why it's the best model for everybody, and the three AI business models compared.

1:11 And then finally, how you can go ahead and start your own AI consulting business. So right now, the $1.06 trillion market is consulting. AI automation, which is what the vast majority of people think about when they think about AI, is only worth 22.16 billion as of recording this. And then you can see just it is a Psized compared to almost every other market. Even the marketing agency market is about 750 million. So consulting dwarfs every single market out there and it is the biggest and most slept on opportunity in the AI space right now.

1:58 So the old world equivalents of consulting companies like Bay & Company, McKenzie, Deote, PWC and for context each of these companies does north of $20 billion a year in revenue. Between the big four consultancy practices, they do over $300 billion a year in revenue. That's not the value of the company. That is the money they make per year in total revenue. Then you got creative agencies like Oggov, Publix and Macan. These are the companies that are responsible for branding and marketing for some of the best known companies and brands that you know in the world like Coca-Cola etc.

2:20 And they're like the old school marketers and brand builders. Think of Madison Avenue, right? Then you've got the newer guard which are these AI automation agencies. Companies like InfoZ Morningside and Accenture. These guys are doing what most people think about when it comes to AI which is they are taking um the current AI tools and getting developers as well and then basically building solutions for businesses to automate tasks within the companies. This is a very developerheavy segment.

2:42 Now you can have a look at the market and just see how drastically it's growing. So this is for context that you probably have never even considered. Now AI consulting and AI consultant is already got more market or or more search volume than management consulting which just to be clear McKenzie that does over $20 billion a year is predominantly a management consulting firm and more people are now looking for AI consultants and AI consulting than management consultants.

3:28 And you can see just how stable management consults been for over 5 years and then out of nowhere you can see the drastic growth of AI consulting and AI consultants that businesses want cuz to be clear they need to adopt AI. This is not a decision. This isn't like oh we can opt in opt out type thing right this is if they do not opt in they are going to get crushed by the competitors that do opt in.

3:53 So the reason this is the best model for everybody is you to be a consultant be an AI consultant you need absolutely no technical expertise right so to be an AI automation uh agency or company you need to be at least some degree technical whether you're using tools like nan or make or whatever or you're doing custom developed solutions you have to be technical to deliver them you got to know what you're doing right when within a consultant you just need to know how to identify the problems and the bottlenecks within a business that can be solved by AI AI, you don't actually need to do any of the technical implementation.

4:17 The next thing is you probably have industry expertise, vertical expertise, sector expertise, skill expertise that ordinarily you've not been able to do anything with. So you might have been in healthcare, manufacturing, supply chain, whatever for the vast majority of your career. Now you have something you can use to actually give you a moat when you are an AI consultant. So if you've been in manufacturing or supply chain for 15 years, you are now someone who's been in those industries for 15 years and you are now an AI consultant and you know how these sectors talk.

4:39 You know the inefficiencies within their businesses and then you can go in, speak the language and basically become the AI consultant for that sector. And this also is a model where you could do it part-time or you can do it full-time and grow your a billion dollar business. Essentially, there will be 100% AI consultant firms that are multiple billions of dollars. We already have a track record like I said of major consulting firms doing tens of billions of dollars a year.

5:00 I think Deote last year did $80 billion in revenue. Okay. So AI consulting companies we're in the business of identification. Okay. So we're using things like AI audits, AI training and workshops. We then transition into implementation which to be clear we do not have to do and then maintenance of those implementations. You've got AI creative agencies. So these are things like Ogleby where you've now got the creative element on top and these are doing things like branded videos, user generated content, social media ads, social media content and they're in the business of creation.

5:44 So previously when you had a lot of assets you needed created, you needed influence and stuff that a lot of that candidly is now going to be gone because you're going to be able to use AI to make much better content faster and at drastically uh larger scales. And then you got the AI automation agencies which are in the business of reduction. This is like emails, autoresponders, voice agents, um, knowledge based, chat bots, anything like that.

6:06 Basically, they're building uh the systems to replace workflows that humans are currently doing. So, for example, like this is a message I got just the other day where Raman was saying, "Hey, do I do AI training for people?" Josh and Bones also did AI training that turned into a 10K audit and then turned into a 12K implementation. Elliot here was a a ex SEO who managed to close a 2K audit on his first day by going back to one of his previous clients.

6:29 Alexandra here is a bit more technical. She signed a 40k contract from a free audit where she did the the audit for the company and then they actually wanted all the implementation. And then did 7k audit into the implementation into the maintenance being 100k total contract. So you can see with AI consultancies you can basically get paid for all those different elements. Okay. Some benefits with AI consulting is you're selling clarity, right? You're untangling this web of confusion around AI.

6:53 So you don't need to be technical. You want industry expertise. Okay? So that's like us doing company. You got AI creative agencies where they sell output. So you got companies like Arcads where they specifically focus on user generated content for social ads. You got Poppy.ai that focuses more on written content. So like scripts and um written ads and written social posts. And they're really good at that. And then for AI automations, they sell the system which like Accenture and that's what they do.

7:15 They build the systems to replace staff within the business because of their workflows currently being done manually things like that. Right? So this is we're selling the clarity. We then do specific implementations based on the clarity uh of the audit and then we get result certainty. Now the reason result certainty is so important is right now 95% of AI projects actually fail to deliver on the promise and this is for a few reasons that I want to discuss.

7:38 So there's a ton of AI hype. Everyone right now is like, "Oh, AI can do absolutely everything." And it can't. It currently has a like a a world in which it operates very well. And then outside of that, it starts to get pretty ropey. Okay. So there's the the big hype train, but then these two are the most important. So one is they do edge cased implementation. And what I mean by that is they can technically do something with AI, but it's it's a complicated workflow and there's a lot of break points because AI maybe isn't quite ready to get there.

8:24 So they might implement this solution and it kind of works and it does the thing and then what happens which is the third and actually the biggest reason is they don't maintain the implementation. So a big reason AI implementations fail is there is no maintenance post implementation and this is what I tell everybody is once you are implementing you should always have a maintenance contract in place whether they are you know they all work on Microsoft office or all these different tools they will have a managed an MSP a managed service provider who will maintain all of their IT solutions.

8:47 So if anything breaks they call up this MSP and they fix the problem they maintain it so that the client actually gets the solution that they paid for aka that implementation and we do those implementations through a partner network. We don't actually have to do them ourselves. Okay. So this is the four stage client transformation blueprint. So first we actually diagnose their specific problems. There's a great saying which is people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.

9:09 Now the AI audit process is the diagnosis. Okay. When we have diagnosed their specific problems, we will prescribe a solution to that specific problem. We aren't putting them in a bucket of a product that we want to sell, which is what a lot of people do in the AI automation space. They go, "Hey, we know how to build AI chatbots. Now, we just need to find someone to buy our chatbot." That is exactly the wrong way around and not what you should be doing.

9:33 You should be auditing these businesses, getting paid for that, then prescribing solutions that you know are going to work, and then you are going to be maintaining those solutions. So the implementation and the result they wanted is essentially a guarantee and then after that you also have the option to do additional consulting because in your in their eyes you will be a figurehead of the like essentially cutting edge AI consultant in their sector. This is why having that sector expertise is a real massive moat because you know how they speak you know the things that they want to implement.

10:19 know their process and their workflows they're currently going through and when new AI comes out and new stuff that AI can do, you can actually give them continuous recommendations. So what ends up happening is you go back from this consulting back to prescription and then maintenance and it kind of once you've done the initial diagnosis, you know how the company runs you it's basically going to be using prescription, maintenance and consulting to get more and more recurring revenue coming your way.

10:40 So, let's break down a traditional consultancy versus an AI consulty versus a productized service. And I'm actually going to use my last consulting practice that I sold in February of 25 because it's a great example. So, we were a sales consultancy for VC back startups. And it was a traditional consulting practice where it was all human input. So, we were generating the leads. We were doing all the fulfillment of making the sales script, making the market material, all that stuff and then actually delivering all the consulting calls.

11:03 when uh I acquired my stake in that business, we actually became an AI first consulting practice where all the acquisition and all the fulfillment was then handled by AI and then the only thing we actually had to do was turn up to consulting calls and we ended up between a couple of us having like north of an 80% profit margin on that business. So even higher than this and basically the only thing you have to do is duplicate the workflows and build the templates and stuff like that when a client comes in and the acquisition we also hired handled with the air and then we just turned up to the consulting calls and you can easily we were we were north we were nearly a million we're like 850k per head in that business and the final uh variation would be a productized version of that where a big part of that process also was sales call reviews.

11:50 So now we're getting to a point where AI can actually analyze sales calls and give feedback at scale. And that is how you turn this business, my my previous consultancy into a productized service where actually all the call reviews are then actually being handled by AI2 and you'd have 80 90% plus margins and then you just have a few consultant calls and you'd be well north of a million dollars ahead and the only thing you worry about is um is acquisition of more clients to scale up.

12:12 Okay. So these this is kind of the flowchart of what an AI consultancy really looks like uh when you're wanting to uh to get involved. So your your industry expertise becomes specific identification of industry bottlenecks. You've got automated workflows means when you are bringing in clients for your business but also delivering for them you have speed on your side. So you have the ability to execute very very very quickly and that also gives you a massive edge.

12:35 You're not taking months to deliver projects. You are doing them much much faster than that. And then because you are maintaining any implementations you do do, you have better outcomes because the implementations that are done are maintained. Therefore, they get the result they want. So you are part of the 5% that are successful. And I can tell you from experience, every single one of my implementations that I have done with my team has been successful because we require maintenance post implementation.

12:57 It is not an option we we give. We say this is a requirement for two reasons. Good Mr. Client. We say one we want to make sure that if anything breaks that we are there to fix it as soon as humanly possible and two AI is evolving so fast exponentially faster than IT solutions. This thing then gives you a unique value prop. So again you're in supply chain healthcare manufacturing you're in administration this is different for every single person because you have designed it properly.

13:20 You have these two you have maintenance and you have workflows right and this puts you in an absolute blue ocean with traditional companies. There is absolutely no competition. No one right now is doing AI consulting which is exactly what these traditional companies want. So there is just untapped demand. There is genuinely worldwide hundreds of millions of companies. I have a client of mine who is in Egypt who closed a 5k audit for a company in Egypt because they need to adopt AI.

13:42 I've got people in Spain, France, Canada, America, England all doing this because there is so much demand for this because people do not understand how AI fits within their specific uh company and that is why we start with an audit process first. So let's actually go through this. So the audit again is the identification of the issues. We then automate the processes we we can. So this is what we're selling. So this is our business. We are then automating the processes we can which is um the acquisition side.

14:27 So with cold outbound or or media like ads or content and then we are delegating the additional tasks. So in AI consulting the biggest uh bottleneck of providing the solution is actually the interview process which you don't want to be handled by AI because that is actually where the uh personal relationships and rapport is built and then we can take all this information and actually start developing products around it. So you start developing your own products that you could sell and you get more scale.

14:48 Now, there will always be an element of consulting that has a human touch point within it because it is a relationship game, but you can get to build some pretty damn sick products which basically take this this automation and then just juice it up to another level. Okay, so this is this is really what it looks like from a revenue model for consulting practices in this day and age. So, the audits anywhere from 5K to 50K.

15:12 I've got people who I've worked with and trained as well who've charged deep into the six figures just for an audit because the companies are so big. had clients do audits on IPOed companies, three and a half thousand staff and they're hundreds of thousands of dollars for an audit. Then we've got the implementation anywhere from 5K to 500K be a million plus like this is such a broad range because it really depends on the company. So that's like Accenture and obviously done in company us this is where we do the implementation from the discovery during the audit process and then the big and most important one really is actually the maintenance because we ensure that they're happy with this uh the implementation and that's company like brick as well.

15:34 Now, Brick, for example, does $20 million a year, and all they do is their average um client pays them $3,000 a month. They do $20 million a year, and they just work with traditional companies. Uh and and this is all they focus on, right? Is maintaining solutions that have been implemented. And yeah, like I said, they do 20 million. So, here's a flowchart for you for your decision- making on how you could go ahead and set up an AI consulting practice right now.

15:59 So if you've only got industry expertise, you can just go ahead and start one because you don't need to be technical. So it's absolutely fine. That is your go to market strategy. You're going to be reaching out to your networks, people in your industry, vendors, things like that. And we'll touch on that shortly in a second like give you the actual road map. If you are only technical, you are going to need either partner up with somebody who does have industry expertise because they will have that mo, they will have that understanding, they will have those relationships.

16:22 You can hire that person instead of partnering with them or you will need to learn that sector. Now, this is obviously going to be the slowest. Um, so I would potentially, if you're wanting a middle ground, you could hire, you're obviously going to have to pay someone a bunch of money, but then you are going to learn industry very, very quickly and some of the use cases, and then you potentially become that industry expert very fast, but you're paying for it.

16:44 You are going to want to target traditional industries. For my myself, it's consulting, it is engineering, and manufacturing. They're like the the ones that I focus on cuz I come from the engineering background. And that is your go-to market strategy. And again, if you are both, it is just a fast path to cash cuz you can make money from the consultant side and you make money from the technical side. Okay, so it's just it's just an absolute home run.

17:06 Now we know how the entire model works and how profitable it can be. But