I'm Jonathan Leung. I build Applied Leverage engagements for founder-led businesses that want AI to actually change how they work — not just add to the pile of tools they're already drowning in.
It didn't start that way. When AI hit critical velocity, I did what a lot of capable, curious people did: I went deep. I ran workshops. I taught prompt engineering. I built short courses. I booked myself solid teaching founders what the new tools could do.
People loved it. The reviews were glowing. "Best training I've ever attended." "Changed how I think about AI." I was riding a real wave, and I was telling myself I was doing real good.
Then I'd follow up six weeks later and find that none of them had actually changed how they worked. Not one workflow. Not one process. Nothing.
It wasn't one or two clients. It was basically all of them. They left the workshop energized. They told their teams about it. They bought a month of ChatGPT Pro. And then Monday rolled around and they did their job the same way they'd done it the week before.
I thought I was the problem. So I taught harder. Better demos. More examples. Tighter slides. Better onboarding. More personalized follow-ups.
It didn't matter. Every cohort had the same ending. Great reviews, no change.
The Tuesday that broke it
One Tuesday in the middle of a 1:1 with a founder I'd been working with for four months — let's call him Ren — I watched him open his laptop, ignore three tools I'd taught him, and do the same manual proposal drafting he'd been doing for a decade. Tab by tab. Copy-paste by copy-paste.
I was embarrassed for him, for a second. Then I was embarrassed for me.
I asked him why.
He looked at me for a long moment, like he was deciding whether to be honest with me. Then he said:
"I know the stuff you taught me. I just don't know how to put it inside my actual day."
That was the moment.
What I had been getting wrong
I had been teaching the category. AI. LLMs. Prompting. Workflows in the abstract. And Ren had learned the category perfectly. He could pass any quiz I gave him. He could explain the difference between a zero-shot and a few-shot prompt.
What he couldn't do — what nobody in my cohorts could do — was step back into their actual Tuesday and rewire the seventeen small decisions, tool switches, copy-pastes, and manual reviews that made up a normal workday, so that the new capability was inside the work instead of adjacent to it.
The unit of learning was never the lesson. The unit of learning was the person, inside their real workflow, in front of the real file, with the real customer on the other side.
Generic education wasn't wrong. It was aimed at the wrong place. No amount of teaching the category would ever translate into rewired workflows, because the translation work itself — from category to specific workflow — is the actual craft, and I'd been skipping it entirely.
What I did next
I burned the curriculum. Canceled the next cohort. Sent refund emails. That part was terrifying.
Then I started over. The new practice had one question at its center: what is the one leverage point in this specific person's business where a change would make the work that matters actually move?
Everything flowed from that question. The paid first session instead of the free consult. The workflow walkthrough instead of the strategy deck. The written Leverage Map instead of a vague follow-up email. The refund guarantee instead of the soft reassurance. The Workflow Upgrade / System Build / Hybrid taxonomy instead of "we'll figure it out together."
Within ninety days, the pattern that had been invisible became the entire business. Not because I was teaching more or building a bigger course funnel. The opposite: because I had radically narrowed the offer to exactly the one thing that actually worked.
Why I tell you this
Because if you're reading this page, you've probably been Ren.
You've bought the thing. You've taken the course. You've hired the consultant. You've watched the demos. And you still, on a regular Tuesday, open your laptop and do your job more or less the way you did it eighteen months ago.
That's not a character flaw. That's what happens when the help you bought was never shaped for the translation work in the first place.
Applied Leverage exists to do that translation work, specifically, once, inside your actual workflow. A 90-minute diagnosis. One leverage point named. One next step clear. A written plan in your inbox within 24 hours.
That's the whole offer. That's what I get out of bed for.
— Jonathan