Great news, your AI Consulting persona is…
The Executive
You’ve already got the business experience (and/or an existing client-service company) to ensure you can dive right into selling AI consulting services to new and existing clients.
We’ll hook you up with a service menu that you can plug directly into your current business, help you (and your team) skill up on AI, and ensure you have everything you need to launch a new line of service to future-proof your company.
As an executive, you’ve already built a client-service business and have identified that AI is the future – so your goal is to add AI consulting as a new line of service to your existing business. You may already have a team to help you – whether employees, contractors or a mix of both – and you have plenty of experience making sales to clients in tangential industries, such as web design, software development, marketing, finance, and other client-service industries.
Your challenge is crafting the service menu that will meet your clients’ needs, be relatively easy for you and your existing team to deliver, and dramatically improve your profitability and bottom line.
You’ll start by building your AI consulting service matrix, where we’ll walk you through a simple and powerful process for identifying up to 12 project types that you can plug directly into your current business. Then, we’ll help you pitch AI projects to your current clients, define or clarify your niche, and build a prospect list so that you and your team can rapidly expand your business into the new AI frontier.
Along the way, you can brush up on our human connection sales strategies, and learn how to use AI to dramatically improve the efficiency of processes you’ve probably been doing for years, such as writing proposals and case studies. In short, you’ll plug an entirely new (and already thoroughly tested) set of service offerings into your existing business, then we’ll help you optimize your business to thrive in the “lean and mean” AI-powered future.
Join the Slack Channel:
Join your fellow #executives on Slack!
Where to Start:
First – Create Your AI Consulting Services
Because you’re coming in with excellent tech skills and an existing business (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.
Next – Launch In 7 Days
Then, we recommend launching fast by pitching basic AI training and/or strategy sessions to your current clients, or “dormant” clients who worked with you in the past but haven’t used your existing set of services recently. (If you have trouble finding these types of existing contacts, you can also use your personal network to find your first gig.)
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.
Then – Meet 100 Solid Leads
Then, it’s time to start reaching out to people outside your “warm” network. Follow the Meet 100 Solid Leads project to 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.
While you’ll be able to lean on your existing business skills (for example, you probably already do sales calls with clients for non-AI projects), we’ll also provide you with a wealth of resources to sell more effectively, tighten up your processes and run the leanest, meanest consultancy in town.
After That – Specialize Your AI Skills & Tech Stack
If you’d like, you can take a detour from business and level up your AI skills a bit more – or team up with the other “techie” folks on the IWAI team and in our student community to talk shop and experiment with the most cutting-edge tools. Our AI Skills & Tech Stack lessons will give you the framework you need to make great recommendations to your clients, and to level up so you can build even more complex tools as you grow your business.
Then dive into building some real, ready-to-sell client projects, following the guides in our Build It Together series:
Explore the Full Curriculum
Once you’ve completed your customized Executive 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:
- There is a shockingly large amount of revenue just sitting there waiting for you in your list of past clients and business contacts. Before you do any “cold” outreach, work through your entire list of dormant clients, former associates and current business contacts and offer them basic AI training or strategy services.
- Don’t worry about changing your whole business positioning yet — your AI consulting services can just be an extra page on your existing business website for now. Expand / refocus after you hit $100k in AI consulting revenue.
Common Challenges:
- If you have a team at your existing business, don’t worry about training everyone to be an AI consultant for now. Consider AI consultancy to be a one- or two-person “side project” until you get to $50k in revenue, and then you can start transitioning other team members over to the new line of business.
- If you have a full project load right now, you may need to put in extra time beyond your normal workweek to get rolling with AI consulting — it’s worth it, because you’ll likely be achieving much higher effective hourly rates from your new line of services in a matter of months.
How to Win Big:
- Score your first gig (or 10 gigs!) from your current client network, then…
- Expand into more advanced strategy and implementation services after you’ve mastered the art of giving a great AI training, then…
- Onboard your team (if you have one) or consider where you might hire help to scale up, while keeping your business as lean as possible.
Not an Executive?
You might also be an Engineer (less advanced business skills) or a Strategist (less advanced tech skills). Or, you can retake the quiz.