I'm morally against trading my time for money.
But I always told myself I'd make an exception if I could charge at least $1,000 an hour. The problem is, pitching someone a $1,000 consulting call is a brutal sell unless you have a crazy amount of credibility.
So whenever I get stuck I like to reframe the question by asking "What needs to be true for XYZ?"
In this case, "What needs to be true for me to make $1,000 an hour consulting on AI?"
The answer became my AI Concierge offer. Two 45-minute Zoom calls a month where the client and I build AI solutions for their business together. I went from zero to $8,000 in monthly recurring revenue in 10 days, from 6 sales conversations.
The reason this offer works is simple.
Business owners are drowning in the business instead of working on it. 3 or 4 manual tasks eat most of their week, and the needle-moving work gets dropped the moment they get swamped.
Most of them have already tried ChatGPT or Claude and stalled. But they never got traction because they never fixed their broken processes before automating them.
That's why I run every engagement through my AOA framework:
Audit, Optimize, Automate.
Watch them perform the process on a screen share. Cut the fat (most 15-step processes only need 9). Then turn what's left into a Claude skill.
When you automate a broken process, all you do is speed up inefficiency.
And no, you don't need to master their business first. Just this week I ran AOA on a client's onboarding workflow. The audit surfaced 24 steps. We automated 22 of them. Onboarding went from roughly 40 minutes per client to about 90 seconds, and she onboards five new clients a month.
I didn't need to know her industry because the framework did the work.
The offer has four pieces plus pricing. Here's the build:
Step 1: Send an intake form before the first call.
I use Jotform because it connects directly to Claude, so Claude builds the form for me. Ask what manual processes eat their week, what tools they use, what they've tried to automate and failed, and the one process they'd pay the most to never do again.
Step 2: Run two 45-minute strategy calls per month.
These are working sessions. They share their screen, you tell them where to point, click, and type, and you run AOA on one manual process at a time, turning each into a Claude skill they own.
Step 3: Give them Voxer access.
Voxer is a walkie-talkie app. Promise a response within 12 business hours, then answer in 30 minutes to overdeliver. Clients rarely use it, but the perceived value is massive. It kills the two-week gap between calls.
Step 4: Build a shared Notion hub.
One client-facing page: scheduling link, Voxer handle, and a call log with recordings, top three takeaways, action items, and every skill built. Come renewal time, they see exactly what they're paying for. This is why none of my clients have churned.
Step 5: Price it right.
Never below $1,000 a month. Every time you close a client, raise your price $250 to $500 for the next pitch. Cap your client count and use the cap as real scarcity.
6 clients at $2,000 a month is $12,000 for nine hours of calls. My $2,000 client works out to $1,333 an hour. All from an intake form, two calls, a walkie-talkie app, and a Notion page.
Hopefully this inspires you guys to look at your expertise (whether it's in AI or something else entirely) and charge MORE for it than you thought possible.
- Corey
P.S. I turned this entire system into a free step-by-step guide called the AI Concierge Playbook. Each step from the intake form to earning the renewal, it's all in there. Grab it here.
A few notes/tweets/cool things sourced from the AI community.
1)
Clean your "context dust".
2)
25 cool GrokBot use cases.
3)
GrokBot complete guide.
Thanks for reading the Corey's Notes newsletter. I'd appreciate it if you sent it to a friend that might find it interesting.
Be sure to check out t he Build With AI podcast on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. If you're a non-technical entrepreneur who wants to learn how to integrate AI into your business, you'll love it.
Be back next week.
-Corey
