The Easiest Way to Actually Make Money With AI⏐Ep. #292

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Koerner Office – Ep. #292

The Easiest Way to Actually Make Money With AI

Host: Chris Koerner
Guest: Corey (AI consultant, co-founder, "Return My Time")
Date: April 17, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Chris Koerner and guest Corey dive deep into a specific, actionable way to make money leveraging AI right now: offering AI audits (or "assessments") for small businesses. Corey lays out a simple business model that nearly anyone can implement with minimal expertise, providing a step-by-step look at productizing, selling, and upselling practical AI solutions. The conversation is filled with real-world how-tos, client anecdotes, and a blueprint for listeners eager to launch a high-margin side hustle or consulting practice around AI.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The $1,000 AI Audit—Explained

(00:33, 01:10, 02:09, 07:22)

• The core offer is an "AI assessment" for small businesses, priced at $1,000, where Corey (or now his AI voice agent) interviews owners about pain points and business processes.
• The process:
  1. Initial Call: A 20-30 minute call with a highly competent AI voice agent ("Annie") asking tailored, industry-specific questions.
  2. Analysis: The recorded conversation is passed to another AI agent, which creates a structured report with suggested tools and improvements.
  3. Delivery: The report is shared with the client, typically within 48 hours, followed by a walkthrough call and upsell pitch.

Quote:

"You don't need to be an AI expert to do this. You just need to be one step ahead of your average client, which is literally you studying this stuff for like seven days." – Corey (00:01)

2. Evolution of the Audit Process

(03:12, 04:25, 05:01, 07:22, 07:55)

• Started with offering in-person shadowing for $1,000/day, which wasn’t scalable.
• Tried asynchronous video (Loom) but found it created too much friction for busy clients.
• Landed on live Zoom calls, and then on-demand phone calls with a voice agent, removing bottlenecks and enhancing client convenience.

Quote:

"We just set it up so the client can call at 2 in the morning if they want... Annie will guide them through the whole thing." – Corey (05:24)

Demo Moment:
Live sample interaction with AI voice agent Annie, exhibiting how naturally she asks about pain points and how the system works. (06:09–07:22)

3. Delivering the Report & Upsell Structure

(10:24, 11:26, 14:52, 15:26, 16:36, 17:09, 19:09-20:39, 21:06-23:46)

• The AI-generated report includes:
  • Executive summary outlining pain points and potential time/cost savings.
  • Effort vs. impact matrix, highlighting "quick win" AI tools to implement.
  • Detailed tool recommendations (e.g., Fathom AI for meeting notes, DashThis for analytics automation).
  • Quantified time and cost savings.
  • A step-by-step 4-day implementation plan.

Quote:

"When we deliver this report, people are always like, 'Wow, I wish we would have known about these tools six months ago!'" – Corey (15:26)

The Upsell Playbook:

• After the initial assessment, typical upsells include:
  • Process optimization: Fixing inefficient processes first, then automating with AI. ($3,000–$5,000+)
  • Custom automations (Zapier/Make): E.g., streamlined Asana project workflows. ($1,000–$3,000)
  • Custom knowledge systems: Training a custom GPT on FAQ/docs to automate client responses (e.g., for business brokers). ($3,000–$5,000+)
  • Revenue-driving AI agents: E.g., "speed to lead" agents to instantly respond to new business inquiries and qualify leads. (33:53)

Quote:

"They're paying you to be upsold." – Chris (16:00)
"If you charge a thousand, then, like, 3,500. It's not... it's still in the ballpark." – Chris (16:55)

4. Practical Ways to Get Clients

(25:22–31:35)

• Corey’s top methods (from his viral X article "7 Ways to Sell AI Services if Nobody knows who you are"):
  1. Host a free local AI meetup via networks like Luma or Meetup—be the organizer, automatically becoming the authority, even with minimal expertise.
  2. Door-knock local businesses for an AI conversation—much easier now than selling insurance/services in years past.
  3. Offer free audits to peers, collect testimonials, and upsell after value is proven.
  4. Hold office hours at coworking spaces or in relevant offices (especially realtor offices), fielding AI questions freely and networking.
• Underscored: You only need to be “one step ahead” of your clients in AI to provide value and land paying work.

Quote:

"Chances are, that's 13 days longer than everybody else in the room." – Corey (26:18)

5. Specifics, Lessons, and Key Tips

(30:45–31:53, 33:42, 34:48)

• Specialize in just one or two upsells to start for efficiency and reputation.
• Pick upsells closely tied to client revenue/savings for best impact.
• The “speed to lead” AI agent use case: automating fast, contextual responses for service businesses, directly increasing sales conversions.
• Prompting Claude (AI) for audits: Just feed the transcript, ask it to locate relevant tools from directories like Futurepedia/There’s An AI For That.

Quote:

"You don't need to get crazy with the prompt. Just tell Claude: here's the transcript, go find any AI or software tools that solve these pain points." – Corey (33:53)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• The true simplicity of AI consulting:
  "You don't need to be an AI expert. Study it for a week and you're ahead of 99 out of 100 business owners." – Corey (00:01)

• Reframing the ‘audit’ to ‘assessment’:
  "We actually call it an assessment because it's a little less aggressive. People hate getting audited, but they don't mind an assessment." – Corey (03:12)

• Demo with 'Annie,' the AI voice agent:
  Live, natural-sounding call—Chris: "That's incredible." Corey: "She's one of the more humanlike out there." (06:09–07:22)

• On pricing and perceived value:
  "When we were charging $200, how good can it be? At $1,000, clients pay attention and are more receptive to upsells." – Corey (16:01)

• On how easy it is to stand out locally:
  "Door knocking a business to talk AI in 2026—how easy a conversation is that versus selling insurance?" – Corey (27:30)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:33 — Chris introduces the concept of the $1,000 AI audit business model
• 01:10–02:09 — Corey shares the lightbulb moment and product genesis
• 03:12–05:37 — Iterating from real-life shadowing to asynchronous video, to Zoom/voice agent
• 06:09–07:22 — Live demo of Annie, the AI voice agent
• 10:24–11:26 — How to create/deliver the assessment report (free template at AuditTemplateAI)
• 14:52–15:26 — Price evolution, client feedback, and importance of premium pricing
• 16:36–23:46 — Common high-ticket upsells and real client examples
• 25:22–31:35 — Seven actionable ways anyone can find AI audit clients locally
• 30:45–31:53 — Lessons learned: specialize and tie upsells to tangible business value
• 33:42–34:48 — How to prompt Claude for client-ready AI audits

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Actionable Takeaways

1. Start today—even with basic knowledge:
   Study the latest AI tools for a week, then use Corey's script to offer assessments to business owners in your network.

2. Use the free template provided:
   Corey offers his exact Gamma template for the AI assessment report at AuditTemplateAI.

3. Focus on high-margin, time-saving recommendations:
   Simple tools like Fathom AI, DashThis, and custom GPTs can create massive value for non-technical businesses.

4. Network locally with minimal competition:
   Free meetups, door-to-door outreach, and ‘office hours’ are effective and underutilized.

5. Price for value, not time:
   Charging more leads to greater buy-in and easier upsells.

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Find the Guest

• Corey’s Podcast & Tutorials: "Build with AI" on YouTube and all podcast platforms.
• Get his Report Template: [AuditTemplateAI] (website details shared in episode)
• Contact for unique business stories: Email [e-mail] for podcast guest suggestions (get $100 if chosen).

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For listeners hungry to make money with AI and serve local businesses, this episode’s detailed walkthrough is both an inspiration and a paint-by-numbers guide.

Transcript

[Corey]

99 out of 100 people need the service. That's a 3 to $5,000 upsell all day. And a lot of people hear that and they're like, oh well, like I'm, I'm not an expert. You don't need to be an AI expert to do this. You just need to be one step ahead of your average client, which is literally you studying this stuff for like seven days and then you can easily go out and sell it. I did exactly that. So these are seven ways that anybody can sell AI services, followers or no followers. So the first, and this one is such a no brainer, but nobody is going to do it.

[Chris]

All right guys, today we're going to zoom in. I talk a lot about AI consulting this and implement AI in a small business. Is that yada yada yada. But let's just talk about doing AI audits for small businesses. That's it. And getting paid a thousand dollars to do it. And all you're doing is prompting Claude and using a voice agent to interview a business owner about his business. That's it. That's all we're talking about today is selling AI audits to small business owners for a thousand dollars with basically no cost. It's almost pure profit margin. I found a guy on Twitter who does exactly that. He's very good at it. He tells us how to get customers. He has a seven step process for finding customers that we'll get to at the end. And it's very real, very tactical. You're going to love it.

[Corey]

I was at lunch one day with a friend of mine who was like, Corey. He's like, I would literally pay you a thousand dollars just to follow me around for a day in my office and just tell me where I can be using AI. And that was like a huge light bulb moment for me because I was like, that's interesting because he's probably not the only one who thinks that. So there's probably a business here. But obviously it's not scalable in the sense that I can't just be driving around to different offices all day and doing that. So what's another way we could do that? And that led me to coming up with this AI audit product, which again, I'm sure we'll get into the weeds of like what that actually entails and how people can implement it. But instead of following people around, we literally just do a Zoom call for 45 minutes, take the transcript, essentially feed it into Claude, research a few different AI tools that people can implement to solve some of their pain points and then deliver it in a report and then do a follow up call and then upsell them on a number of different services. So, like, in a nutshell, it's that simple.

[Chris]

I love how like this business started on that one conversation because you're like, if one person would pay a thousand bucks for this, there's got to be more for your friend. Did you literally follow him around or did you not even start with that? Did you quickly learn that's not even necessary?

[Corey]

Yeah, so I didn't even start with that. But it was, I swear it was like such a light bulb moment. Like I remember it so vividly, him saying that. And like, at first I, I kind of brushed it off and then I'm driving home, I just like could not shake that thought. And I'm like, all right, if this guy who's super successful is offering me to, you know, pay me so I can tell him how to learn AI, there's gotta be people all across the spectrum of business owners who need this exact same thing. And talking to probably fifty to a hundred different business owner sense, that has absolutely been the case. Like 99 out of a hundred people need the service.

[Chris]

All right, you're speaking my love language here. What about in lieu of a 45 minute Zoom call, Would it be more or less effective, slash efficient, for them to just have a normal workday and just loom the whole thing, like screen record the whole thing?

[Corey]

So a couple of ways I want to go with that. So. And I think what I'm going to kind of tell you next, I think you're going to love it. But that's actually what we did first. Right. Because this audit, we actually call it an assessment because it's just a little less aggressive. Yeah, yeah. People hate getting audited, but they don't mind doing an assessment. So that was actually the first iteration of the assessment is when we were kind of piloting this out and doing some of these for free to get feedback, which I recommend anybody do, we asked people, we said, hey, can we add you to our LOOM account as a user? And then all we ask you to do is when you sit down to do a deep work session, hit record work for 60, 90, 120 minutes and then that'll pipe it right back to us. And then we can take that screen recording and, you know, essentially do the assessment based off that. And what we found is that was just asking too much of people. They hadn't used Loom before.

[Chris]

Too foreign.

[Corey]

Yeah, it's too foreign.

[Chris]

And it's part of our day daily routine as it is. So whatever. One more zoom. But this is like, all right. What? Huh?

[Corey]

Yeah, we found it was way too much friction.

[Chris]

What If I spend 30 minutes on Reddit? Like, do I need to pause it? Like, are you going to judge me? There's all kinds of variables in there, so I can see why that wouldn't work.

[Corey]

Okay. And so just not to jump too far ahead. But as you can probably imagine, the bottleneck in the initial iteration was, well, I can't be following people around all day at the office. The bottleneck in this iteration is, well, there's only so many zoom calls I can do in a given day. Now, the current iteration is a voice agent with a phone number that the business owner can call and have a 20 to 30 minute conversation with this voice agent, which is like shockingly good. Like, we've tested it thoroughly. You'll talk to this voice agent and you're like, wow, I literally feel like I'm talking to a human and voice agent. Her name is Annie.

[Chris]

She.

[Corey]

She's the one doing the assessments now. She's asking the questions, and when they hang up with her, it pipes right back to our other AI agent, who then analyzes the transcript and builds the report.

[Chris]

So you don't even do the zoom calls anymore?

[Corey]

Not anymore.

[Chris]

Right.

[Corey]

That's our most recent iteration as of like the last couple of weeks.

[Chris]

Do you basically say, call this number at your convenience 247 doesn't matter. And just answer the questions correct?

[Corey]

Yeah. So that's the way we have it set up now is that they just call a number? Yeah, they can talk to it at 2 in the morning if they want. And.

[Chris]

Yeah. Are those questions standardized or does the AI like, adjust on the fly based on the answers?

[Corey]

Yeah. So when we originally, when we did the first assessment, we just had a very general question bank. And then what we've noticed is that obviously everybody we do these for, they're a little different. And so we've done probably eight or nine different industries now. And so we've kind of taken that and combined it into a master bank so that voice agent can pick the questions that make sense for that industry, starting general and then kind of moving more specialized throughout the process, which is how I did it when I was doing it.

[Chris]

Can we try it?

[Corey]

Yeah, we can call it right now. All right, let's see. Let's call it right now.

[Annie]

Hi there. I'm Annie from Return My Time. Thanks for hopping on. This is a quick chat to Learn about your business and what your day to day looks like so I can spot the best places AI can give you time back. You ready to get started?

[Corey]

Yeah, Andy, let's get started.

[Annie]

Awesome. What's your name?

[Corey]

My name is Chris.

[Annie]

Nice to meet you, Chris. So tell me, what do you do in your business?

[Corey]

I am an E commerce entrepreneur. I sell things on Amazon.

[Annie]

How long have you been selling on Amazon?

[Corey]

Almost nine years.

[Annie]

Nine years. Wow. You've seen all the Amazon waves. Do you run this solo or do you have a team helping you?

[Corey]

I have two warehouse employees and I have four virtual assistants.

[Annie]

Oh, nice. That's a solid setup. What tools or software are you and the team using day to day to run the Amazon business?

[Corey]

So we're using the full Google workspace, suite, sheets, docs, et cetera, and then we're using a tool called Smart Scout.

[Annie]

Perfect. That gives me a good snapshot of your stack. What's the biggest headache in your workday right now?

[Corey]

I would say finding new suppliers is our biggest bottleneck.

[Annie]

Yeah, that makes total sense.

[Corey]

And so, Chris, she'll go on for 10 or 15 minutes.

[Chris]

Yeah, we can. I. I think I've got a good glimpse of it.

[Corey]

Okay. Yeah.

[Chris]

That's incredible.

[Corey]

Yeah, so that's, that's kind of the gist. And like, as you can see, right, I've talked to a lot of different, you know, answering services or bots before, and I feel like she is one of the more human like ones that I've come into contact with. And of course, she'll just kind of go on with that line of questioning for 10 to 15 minutes or up to 20 minutes and really dig in on those pain points. And she's not going to prescribe any tools or any solutions on the call. That's not her job. She'll then take that transcript, like I said, and then pipe it over to a different AI agent that we built specifically to create those assessments.

[Chris]

And how did you build that voice agent?

[Corey]

Yeah, so my business partner, Nick, he is the technical brains. I know he built the voice agent on the back of Retell AI, which I think is R E T E

[Chris]

R L T E L L. Yeah, yeah.

[Corey]

And so. And then the actual processing the transcripts and building the report, he's built a series of multiple skills to go and do each step of the process one at a time.

[Chris]

Listen, I need more people like this to interview on my podcast. So if you know of someone with a side hustle or a business that's unique and cool and super profitable, email Molly M O L L Y co founders.com that's one word. Co founders.com mollyofounders.com Tell her your story and we'll give you a hundred bucks if we end up interviewing them.

[Corey]

I'm sure you're probably familiar with skills, but maybe we could define that for the audience if they haven't heard of that.

[Chris]

Yeah, just like a, it's like a literal skill that an AI agent can perform. Maybe it's like opening Chrome browsers or scraping something or emailing people. Right?

[Corey]

Yeah, it's a skill is essentially like an sop, a standard operating procedure. So it's like the recipe that you build one time and then you hand it to the AI agent and then the agent just follows that recipe and the same way every time. Right. So for example, in our assessment process, we have a skill that takes the raw transcript and cleans it up and formats it appropriately. And then it might go and search through thousands of different AI tools on the Internet to find the specific ones that meet the pain points from the client. Now with that said. Right, because I know we're going to talk about how someone can copy this idea and do it themselves. You don't need this like complicated layer of agents. You don't need to build all these skills from scratch. If you're starting out, you can literally take the transcript of your conversation with the client, give it to Claude, tell it to go find a couple off the shelf tools that meet their needs and it'll do it just fine. Right.

[Chris]

And then ask how to install those off the shelf tools.

[Corey]

Right, exactly.

[Chris]

This sounds interesting. Never heard of it. How do I do it? Yeah, like this.

[Corey]

Exactly. I mean we still do that to this day. Like it'll, you know, we built a pretty intricate setup to go and do this research, but sometimes it'll send me, it'll prescribe a tool for the client and I'm like, that's never heard of that tool. Like what does that do? So then I'll just ask Claude explain it to me, like how would they actually implement this in practice? So that I can get a good feel for what the tool does when I'm going into the follow up call with the client and I can confidently pitch it as a good solution to their problem.

[Chris]

Okay, so 1,000 bucks from your friend. He's a busy mortgage broker. Are you able to show us what you provided to him? Was it generated by Claude?

[Corey]

Yeah, so this, this particular report, it's not generated by Claude. So what the, the agent does is it outputs A Docx file. So basically just a word Doc file. And then we can upload that to, we use Gamma, which is an essentially like an AI document and slideshow creation tool. So I'm happy to share my screen and show you assessment example because this is going to be, this is going to be where a lot of the juice is, especially for anybody that wants to replicate this. And so just as a heads up for people too, right? So this template here that we've got in Gamma, if somebody wants this template which they can literally download, upload themselves and start creating these assessments for themselves, they can go to Audit template AI and get a free. I'll just literally send you a free copy of this template here so you

[Chris]

can start doing beautiful Audit Template AI.

[Corey]

Yep, exactly. So inside Gamma, anytime we want to do a new assessment, we just upload the Docx to the template and it just uses AI to generate it perfectly like this every time. So I'll run through each section at a high level. So we start off with an executive summary which is just kind of reiterating the pain points that they mentioned during the conversation. This is the outcome that they could receive by implementing our suggestions, which in this case was 8 hours per week that they could reclaim from. I think it was only four or five tools that we recommended during this report. So again, I'm not going to go super deep, I'm just going to cover it at a high level. But the second slide here is what we call the effort versus impact matrix. So, so this is where we take everything, every pain point that they gathered during the, during the conversation the AI will go and map on a matrix from effort versus Impact. And so this report is designed to focus on what we call the quick wins which are the pain points that are both low effort and high impact to implement. Right. So like stuff that we can just literally install a tool and it fixes it and then here the recommended solutions, this is the meat of the report. So again in this case one of the pain points that they have is like, hey, we're having a lot of zoom calls and Google Meets and meetings with our team, but it's like nothing ever comes from them. And I mean Chris, to me and you like the thought of not using a meeting copilot note them. Yeah, not Taker like a Fathom or a Fireflies. Like that's so foreign to me. But we got to remember that like 97% of people still aren't using these tools. So this was such a no brainer recommendation. It's like hey, well, use Fathom AI and it's going to automatically join your meetings, it's going to capture the transcripts, it's going to extract action items. And guess what, it's free, right? I use it and I'm on the free plan. I've never had to pay for it. Now again, I'm not going to go through every one because I think you understand the concept. But the biggest one for this particular client, which to me I was super proud of because this was a slam dunk use case. So this client is a, they manage wedding venues, like wedding rental venues. Right. And they've got kind of a portfolio of them and they have a board of directors that, that they have to report to. And so this particular person runs operations and every week, in fact on Saturdays, she's having to take two hours a week on Saturdays to put together analytics reports for their marketing by hand because she's so busy during the week, she can't do it during the week. And so what we found is that she was going into Google Analytics, meta ads, Google Ads, all the different platforms, copying that information into a spreadsheet and then taking the information from the spreadsheet and putting it into a PowerPoint. And we found a tool called Dash this, which literally isn't even an AI tool. It's just an off the shelf SaaS tool that plugs into those analytics tools and just puts the information into a dashboard. So it cuts out the PowerPoint and the Excel spreadsheet step and it costs $42 a month and it's going to save her two hours a week. This right here is going to savor eight hours a month. I think most business owners out there would trade $42 a month to get eight hours back. So these are the types of tools and recommendations that were given to people here.

[Chris]

So when you generate this report, do you just send it to them or do you hop on a call and walk through it with them?

[Corey]

Yeah, so that's what I was saying earlier. So we always send it to them in advance. So typical turnaround time is going to be within 48 hours. We send over your report and then you'll see when we get to the bottom, there's a place for them to book a 30 minute follow up call. So we give them the report beforehand for them to review and then we jump on a follow up call with them where like I said earlier, I'm literally screen sharing my screen just like I am with you right now. And, and we're walking through it just like I am with you right now.

[Chris]

Okay, so a thousand bucks for this first one. Was your friend happy?

[Corey]

So we're charging a thousand bucks now? Actually, when I first started, we did the first two or three for free to get testimonials and to. To really work out the kinks of the whole process. After free, it was $200 an assessment. After 200, it was 500. And now we're charging a thousand. And the feedback all along the way at every price point is like, wow, I wish we would have known about these tools six months ago. This is great. What else can we do together? Which is, you know, I'm sure what we'll get into shortly. The. All the upsell opportunities that come from this.

[Chris]

They're paying you to be upsold.

[Corey]

Exactly.

[Chris]

Right.

[Corey]

Because if you, you know, if you. And that's what we realized, too, is that, like. Well, when we were charging $200, of course, like, they got value out of it, but to the client, it was like, oh, it's 200 bucks. Like, how good can it be? Right? It was one of those, like, perceived value things of a 200 assessment. But now that we're charging a thousand dollars, clients are way more. They're just way more bought into, you know, looking at it and paying attention to the suggestions. And we're taking a lot more seriously when it's time to discuss an upsell, because they've already invested a thousand dollars. Well, now we might as well, you know, take this thing to the finish line and see what we can do next.

[Chris]

If you have a legitimate reason for charging them, say, 3,500 for doing something bigger after this, it's a much harder, like, a bigger jump to go from 200 to 3,500 than it is. So you're almost shooting yourself in the foot later on by being cheap early on. Like, you just shoot yourself in both feet, so to speak.

[Corey]

Right, exactly.

[Chris]

If you charge a thousand, then, like, 3,500. It's not. It's still in the ballpark.

[Corey]

Right.

[Chris]

What's an example of a. A common upsell? So you. You charge a th, 000. They pay it. You show them the audit. How much are you going to charge for what type of service?

[Corey]

Yeah, And I'll show you essentially our upsell menu. I'm happy to do that. Yeah. And I just want to finish out kind of what's in the assessment here real quick, too, just to kind of put a bow on it for people. So after we go through the recommendations, then we've got what we Call a four day quick win plan where we just try to make it super, super simple for people to implement what we suggested. Right. Because a lot of times people get this and they're still overwhelmed. So it's like, hey, day one, all you gotta do, set up fathom and connect it to your calendar. Done. Right. So the quick win plan is designed to just bring it down to the ground level and make it super easy for them to implement. And then when it comes to upsell opportunities, that's what this section is all about. What comes after quick wins. So this is kind of where we're planting that seed in their mind of like, well, hey, this report gives you all the quick wins, but what's in this section? This stuff is a little bit of a heavier lift. So this is what the bulk of the conversation comes down to when we're talking about like what can we do next? Right. So in this case we recognize that they're not using a CRM. This is a seven figure business that is literally not using a CRM. So hey, how about we set up a go high level CRM for you and connect it to your, your other tools. Right? That's easily a three to $5,000 proposal. Right. And then how about we create a Claude skill that captures your brand voice so that a lot of your social media content isn't generic, which is one of the pain points they mentioned in their interview. Right. And you can go on and on. So that's what that section is. And then we, we quantify the financial impact of like, hey, you're getting eight hours per week back. If you implement our suggestions, we just assume the month or the hourly rate is $100 an hour. But for most business owners it's a lot higher than that. In this case is I think $3200 minus the monthly tool cost of what we're prescribing here of $59 a month. So we try to make it super simple that like, hey, if you just do what we say, it's worth it.

[Chris]

If I were you, I would take this slide, duplicate it and put it at the very top as well. Seriously?

[Corey]

No, right. As you were saying that, I was like, oh, that's, I know what he's going to say and I need to do that.

[Chris]

Yeah, because it's a hook. It's like, all right, how.

[Corey]

You know, that's really good feedback. And so if you want to go into all of the upsell opportunities. So inside of Claude, I kind of put together this little diagram today. So here at the top is like a high level of the whole process. If somebody wanted to just copy exactly the way we do things. But if we want to get into the actual upsell menu. So one of the things that you can upsell is what we call process optimization work. So you know, naturally for during this assessment, we're going to uncover a lot of things that people just want to automate. Right. They're like, hey, this thing's, this thing's eating up 10 hours a week. I just need to automate it. I just need to hand it off to AI and be done with it. But what we find is that, well, this process is taking you 10 hours a week because it's 15 steps and it should be seven steps. So we're not just going to automate the current process. That's going to be, you're just going to be speeding up in efficiency. First we got to fix the process, right? And that's going to be one engagement in and of itself. And we've successfully sold process optimization engagements for three to four thousand dollars at a time just to fix one process and then to actually go and automate it or add AI to it, that's a whole separate engagement which might be another 3, 5, 10k. Does that make sense?

[Chris]

Geez, yeah. I mean as a zapier junkie, like a certified zapier junkie, I think some of these things I could knock out in like 15 minutes.

[Corey]

You could, but the business owner who's

[Chris]

still a lot of value, like that's after a decade of tinkering with zapier, like my zapier account is way old, you know. So like that decade of experience allows me. Allows you to charge a thousand dollars an hour for something.

[Corey]

Exactly.

[Chris]

You know, you're right.

[Corey]

And so that's just kind of the first place we go is a lot of times process is broken, we got to fix it first. That's going to be, that's a three to $5,000 upsell all day. Right. Second thing exactly like you said is sometimes they just need like a two step zap created or like a make.com automation implemented in that case. Right. One to 3K is pretty standard actually for this exact client that I just showed you the redacted assessment for the wedding venue business. We did a build for them, fifteen hundred dollars, a zapier automation to essentially format their asana projects in a certain way every time they got a new client because their operations manager was having to come in and spend 30 minutes per client to set up this Asana project, built them a Zapier Automation. 1500 bucks, done saved them a ton of time, and they loved it. Right, so that's another one. And then this one. This is actually. We're in the middle of one of these projects right now, and we've got another one in the pipeline is a simple knowledge system. So another client that we did an assessment for, he is the owner of a business brokerage. He does five to seven listings per year. Right. Because these are bigger deals.

[Chris]

That's a lot of money.

[Corey]

Yeah, it's a lot of money. He's killing it. But every time he goes to list a business, he's getting 200 to 400 emails just in the first week from potential buyers.

[Chris]

I know that business well. It's tough business.

[Corey]

Yeah. But so not only tire kickers, but of the 400 questions, 95% of them are the same. 10 questions.

[Chris]

So I just like real estate. Yeah. I mean, my wife's a real estate broker, and every call is just her answering questions. That's in her freaking listing. Come on.

[Corey]

Yeah, guys.

[Chris]

Tkowners.com that's my community, where people are building businesses. I do AMAs, Q&As every week, live. You can ask me anything you want. You can have accountability partners. It's about a thousand people in there building, starting growing businesses. Check out TKO, as in the Kerner office, tkowners.com and that's why I told

[Corey]

him, I'm like, ron, you are the owner of this company. You have no business answering all these questions. Let's just create a custom GPT that we train on your sim, which is essentially the marketing package for the listing. We create a custom GPT trained on your sim, and we just give that to buyers so that, that can handle 95% of the Q&A workload, and only 5% of the questions make it into your inbox. And he loved it. And we, we built that for him. And it's. It's saving him a ton of time. So that's another, you know, example of what we call like a knowledge system.

[Chris]

Right.

[Corey]

Super. Honestly, pretty easy to build, but the, the key there is in the system prompt. For example, you know, don't give the listing company's phone number out and, you know, don't give this specific financial data out. Make sure you only give this. Right. But once you've done the system prompt one time, we can go and sell that to him for every listing he ever has again. You see what I mean?

[Chris]

Yeah. Now, you've mentioned brokers, a Few times. Real estate, business brokers. Are there certain industries that this sale, both the audit and the upsells work better for? Because you know, with any, any service in any industry is going to work better or worse. What kind of patterns have you noticed?

[Corey]

Yeah, that's a good question. So I don't want to say that like it doesn't work well in one industry versus another because we've had clients across the board like we've had again, realtors, business brokerages, wedding venue operators. We had one recently who owns a barber school. It's just, it's all across the board. I mean my, my honest answer would be if you, if you have a team and it's not, you're not just a solo operator and you're, you know, you've got your hands in a lot of different parts in your business, it's probably going to be, at least the assessment is probably going to be a good fit for you. Right. And I'd say if you're in the, if you've got like five to 50 employees, then the assessment's a no brainer. And there's probably going to be at least three to five upsell opportunities across, you know, some of these different buckets here.

[Chris]

Okay, I think the golden question is how do you find customers here?

[Corey]

Yes. How do you find customers? That's a great question. So I've got you covered there. So I actually wrote an article on X a couple weeks back. I think the title of the article was 7 Ways to Sell AI Services if Nobody knows who you are. So these are seven ways that anybody can sell AI services, followers or no followers. Right. So the first, and this one is such a no brainer, but nobody is going to do it, is to host a local AI meetup in your town. Right. You go on Luma, you go on meetup.com and you literally just say hey AI for small business meetup. And I did exactly that.

[Chris]

Not like a presentation, not a seminary,

[Corey]

not a sales pitch.

[Chris]

A sales pitch. But I think it's important that you are the authority. You're the guy that put this thing together, like the organizer of it. That automatically makes you the de facto smart guy in the room, Right?

[Corey]

Exactly. And a lot of people hear that and they're like, oh well, like I'm, I'm not an expert. I've only been learning this stuff for like two weeks and chances are that's 13 days longer than every other person that's going to be in attendance. Right. So I did exactly that. I reached out to Actually, the realtor that sold me my house and asked her, I said, hey, because I know she's well connected in the community. I'm like, hey, do you want to either partner on this free AI event or can I, you know, do it inside your office for your team? And she was more than happy to help me facilitate that. So I did a free AI meetup inside of her office and many people that attended were brokers and honestly the broker in charge in her office. And I did exactly what you said, Chris. I just did a free little 20, 25 minute presentation, pure value, no pitch at all. Captured emails at the door of people that were there and we did an assessment for her and it turned into revenue. So that's something that anybody can do. It just takes, you know, a little bit of promotion, a little bit of hustle. That's it. I guarantee you I could pitch some sort of workshop or some sort of actual paid event at their office and I can virtually guarantee they'd go for it.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Corey]

So yeah, that one's a no brainer. I meet up in your city now, the next one. And Chris, I know you'll appreciate this is to door knock some local businesses again, something that 99.9% of people are never going to do. But it's like door knocking a business to try to talk about AI in 2026. Do you realize how easy of a conversation that is versus door knocking a business and trying to sell them like insurance or even home services? Because of how everybody is thinking about AI right now, like you're not even showing up trying to sell something, you're just trying to show up and have a conversation about how they are or aren't using AI in their business. And as always, we lead with value and if it turns into a sales conversation, so be it. Right, but that's a really easy way to get your foot in the door, especially if you're new and especially if you're only charging, you know, 200 bucks for an assessment or 500 bucks for an assessment if you're starting out. Would you agree?

[Chris]

Yeah, yeah, 100%. What about the free audits? Can you speak to that?

[Corey]

Yeah, so, and like I said earlier, this is kind of how we started off in trying to prove this concept and get some testimonials. So I'm a part of this just like local CEO peer group here with there's like 11 or 12 guys, all different industries. Most of them are older. Right. They're not very in tune with AI, but they're all successful. Business people. And I reached out to all of them and I said, hey guys, I'd love to do a free audit for two or three of you guys. Are you open to that? And of course they were like, well, yeah, obviously, why wouldn't we be? So we did exactly that. We did the audit, we delivered it to them, they saw the value, gave us a testimonial, and that was that. So from there, the free audit doesn't need to be the end of the line. You could then, you know, tactfully upsell those people because you know them. It's somebody in your network, a warm contact, most likely. Who's to say you don't do a free audit and then turn around and do a, you know, $1,500 Zapier automation build, right. To. To start with them. You know what I mean?

[Chris]

Yeah, I love it. What about office hours?

[Corey]

Yeah, so that's another one that again, anybody could do. And you don't need to be an expert. You just need to be one step ahead of the average person, which isn't that hard these days. So you could go to a co working space or I mean, kind of like I did with the AI meetup, like go to any of the realtor offices in your town. You know how many realtor offices, if you went to them and said, hey, can I just host a free weekly or monthly AI office hours in your office, where I literally just show up and sit there and work on my computer. And if people have AI questions, I just answer their questions like they're all going to say yes to that. And you know, you're, you're either going to get audit clients out of that. The brokers in charge at the office might want to talk to you about doing workshops. I mean, the very worst thing that would happen if you did that is you get a lot of really good contacts who know a lot of other people in the area. Right. Like virtually no downside. Especially if, if you're just getting into this game. Right.

[Chris]

Are there any other, like tips or tricks or lessons you had to learn the hard way that you could pass advice on to people to help them avoid that?

[Corey]

That's a great question. So I would say really specializing in one upsell to start, and that's something we are still trying to get better at is like, you know, when you get into this business and you're doing the assessments, you start to see a hundred different things that you could potentially upsell for a client. But what I find is when you're a jack of all trades you get spread really thin. So again, if you're starting off, get really good at the assessment and then let's just say your main go to upsell is like a custom GPT, right? So that's kind of what you're looking to upsell every time. That doesn't mean that you say no to other upsell opportunities, but that's kind of your bread and butter and that's what you do really good at and that's what you productize. So that would be my advice is just don't try to get spread too thin and don't bite off more than you can chew. Especially in the early days.

[Chris]

I would even take it a step further and say like find the upsell that's most closely tied to either revenue or savings for them and go there.

[Corey]

Revenue specifically.

[Chris]

Right. The one that's less nebulous but like this one will make you x more dollars per month or save you x more dollars per month.

[Corey]

And a really good one there. And this is actually the very first AI engagement that paid engagement I ever did is a speed to lead AI agent. Right? So what you find is that a lot of, a lot of service businesses particularly they, they're not picking up the phone fast enough, right? Leads are coming in, they're getting emails from leads at 10pm or 2am or at a time when they can't answer the phone or the email. And if they don't answer within 10 minutes or sometimes even less, that leads going somewhere else. So the very first AI solution I built for somebody was a within make.com, which you can do the same in Zapier, an AI agent that when somebody submits a form on their website it responds, but in a personalized manner, not just like hey, we've received your form, you know, we'll get back to you. It looks the person up, it tailors a response to them and then it can have a conversation back and forth with them to get a call scheduled with an actual salesperson and in this case get a tour scheduled for a wedding venue because it was that same wedding venue business that I mentioned because their salesperson all day she's doing tours in person. So they have leads coming in on the website and she's been doing tours all day so she can't get back to them until six, seven, eight hours later. So when we implemented this speed to lead agent that's trained on all their FAQs and everything about their property, they started booking more tours immediately and it was it directly tied to Revenue because their average deal size as 11 grand and they know that if they get somebody on a tour, they have a 40% close rate. So it's so easy to quantify. Oh, if this speed to lead agent gets me, you know, one, if not two more tours a month, it's going to make me an extra eleven grand. Is really what it comes down to.

[Chris]

When you take the transcript of the call or of the, the zoom call or the voice agent call, what is the prompt you give to Claude to get that output? The audit output?

[Corey]

What I will say for the audience is that they don't need to get crazy with the prompt. They can literally say to Claude, hey, I've attached the transcript of a conversation I had with a local business owner. Your job is to go out on the Internet and find any AI tools or just any software tools that they can implement that are off the shelf that can fix the pain points that you've identified from the transcript. Like it can be that simple. And there are some websites, I think futurepedia is one of them. Also is one called there's an AI for that, I think dot com. That are literally just directories of thousands of AI tools. So you could just tell Claude, hey, go search futurepedia and find some tools that solve the pain points that this client has based on this transcript. You see what I mean?

[Chris]

Yeah, yeah. I never heard of futurepedia. Well, Corey, is there anything that we should have covered that we didn't cover? Anything we missed? This has been excellent.

[Corey]

I think we touched on all of it. No, I mean the one thing I'll leave everybody with is again, you don't need to be an AI expert to do this. You just need to be one step ahead of your average client. Which is, which is literally you studying this stuff for like seven days and then you can easily go out and sell it. So that'd be my best tip. Just get after it.

[Chris]

Okay, well, thank you, Corey. Is there. Where can everyone find you?

[Corey]

Yeah, so they. The best place is on my podcast called build with AI, which is on YouTube and on any podcast platform. I do live AI builds and tutorials twice a week and that's gonna be the best place.

[Chris]

Okay, thank you, Corey.

[Corey]

Thank you, man.

[Chris]

Hey guys, if you're still listening to this, it's probably because you haven't had a chance to take your AirPods out. You're still mowing the lawn, you're still driving, what have you. If you're still here with me, I would really, really love and appreciate a five star review on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcast. It would mean a lot if you want to go the extra mile. Share this episode with a friend that might have an interest in starting a business. It would mean a ton. Hope you have the best day of your life today.