Great news, your AI Consulting persona is…
The Investor
Your business savvy and the network you’ve built throughout your career will help you dive right into making sales – and we’ll help you skill up rapidly on the tech side, including determining when and where you might want to hire a coder or techie to help with clients projects.
As an investor, you bring advanced business skills to your AI consultancy and likely have years of experience winning clients’ trust and making major sales. However, you’re also well aware that you’re not a “techie” or coder, so you want to skill up on AI while also potentially hiring a team to help you deliver projects once you get rolling.
You’ll start with the AI Consulting Service Matrix, a menu of services that you’ll be able to offer to future clients. It’s likely that you’ll feel comfortable selling some of these services right away, since the sales process is no sweat for you. And even if you don’t dive right into Scoring Your First Gig, the service menu will inspire you and you’ll likely have dozens of new ideas in your first few weeks about what you can offer to clients.
Then, you’ll want to dive into our AI Skills and Tech Stack section to skill up on AI – even if you don’t want to get to a “super techie” level, these AI skills will ensure you can deliver trainings, help clients with strategy, and hire advanced tech folks down the road if you choose not to do the more advanced stuff yourself.
Your biggest challenge will be transitioning from a less-technical career to one that’s centered on the most cutting-edge technology. You’ll be leveraging the business and sales skills you’ve developed over many years in your career, but also constantly exploring new things, and figuring out the proper balance between “do it yourself” and “hire help” in this new ecosystem.
Join the Slack Channel:
Join your fellow #investors on Slack!
Where to Start:
First – Create Your AI Consulting Services
Because you’re coming in with excellent business skills or corporate experience, we recommend starting with a quick overview of the AI Consulting Service Menu. This will give you an idea of what you’ll be able to provide to clients, and you’ll be able to start brainstorming your menu right away.
Even though you won’t have the tech skills to start delivering the more complex services right away, odds are that building a draft of your Service Menu will spur a ton of ideas and help you create a simple roadmap for the next few months.
Then – Launch In 7 Days
To see what other consultants are doing (with far less business experience than you already have), start with our lesson on Real-World AI Consulting Businesses (that you can build right now). Then work through the lessons in the “Launch in 7 Days” projects until you get to Score Your First Gig.
You should try to sell AI 101 trainings to your existing network of personal and business associates right away, following the structure of the Score Your First Gig lessons. Also listen carefully for clients who ask for more — it is likely that one or two folks in your network will be ready for bigger projects in the near future.
If you struggle with your Exclusivity Statement, that’s OK. Start with something very general (just use location rather than industry and qualifier, for example) and try to make the early, low-cost sales to prove you can do it, as described in Score Your First Gig. We even have detailed example videos, slides and a proposal template for what your “First Gig” – usually an AI 101 training – will look like.
Next – Specialize Your AI Skills & Tech Stack
Then, dive into our lessons on AI skills, tech tools and the new AI economy to help you skill up on AI. A great goal would be to build your first AI workflow, and we have TONS of tutorials to help you build projects for yourself, your clients, or just to start creating a portfolio of cool ideas and experiments.
Here’s a secret – you can do everything you need to deliver valuable, high-quality projects to clients without coding. The way we see it, if you can get good at a tool like Photoshop or Excel, you can rock your client’s world as an AI consultant.
To lock in your tech skills, build your first workflow by following our Build It Together: Document Automation series.
Keep in mind that you only need to do the intro and Core Workflow. The remaining lessons are a bit more techie, so you should skip them for now.
Result: Your first workflow that could be sold to a client in the future!
After That – Meet 100 Solid Leads
Now, it’s time to start reaching out to people outside your “warm” network. Follow the Meet 100 Solid Leads project to learn how to create your online presence, build a prospect list and reach out to them with gentle, powerful, human “cold outreach” that gets their attention and gets them excited to hop on Zoom with you to talk about how you can help them enhance their businesses with AI.
Explore the Full Curriculum
Once you’ve completed your customized Investor starter path, explore the 100+ in-depth lessons in our full curriculum — we guide you through every step in building a thriving consultancy.
What to Focus On:
- Level up your AI and tech skills while understanding that you don’t need to be anywhere close to a coder or expert to start helping others. You are already ahead of most people just by being an AI enthusiast
- Pick one or two services (most likely from our Training list) for your initial service menu, then get out there and start talking to real people
- Get “out of your head” fast – hearing real questions and comments from real prospective clients is 100x more valuable than waiting to learn more
Common Challenges:
- Many investors can quickly envision a ton of different ways that they can help people they know (in their personal or business networks) build solutions with AI. However, because they’re relative novices on the tech side, it can sometimes be difficult to determine which projects are “easy” and “hard” from a tech standpoint. We’ll help you get a handle on all your service ideas and order them from “straightforward” to “super complex” so you can take action accordingly.
How to Win Big:
- Once you have made some initial sales, you’ll likely benefit from hiring or partnering with a coder or tech-savvy professional to help you implement some of the more complex “software build” types of projects, since you can likely envision and sell those, but you do not currently have the ability to build them alone.
Not an Investor?
You might also be a Strategist (more advanced tech skills) or a Producer (less advanced business skills). Or, you can retake the quiz.