i.
Real movement in real work.
The point is not to learn AI. The point is for the part of your work that matters most to change. Discovery finds the place. Applied Leverage changes it. You can feel the difference in your day.
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AI Advisory
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Founder-led businesses
AI advisory for founder-led businesses. We start inside your actual workflow, not inside a curriculum.
Diagnosis, plan, and build — from the same person, in one loop. Paid Discovery, guaranteed.
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02
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Before anything else
Let's rule things out.
Because most of the mental effort of arriving on a page like this goes into figuring out what category this is. So before the philosophy, before the pitch — the specifics.
This is —
- An advisory engagement for founder-led businesses.
- A paid 90-minute Discovery session, guaranteed: one leverage area worth acting on, or you continue at no cost or get refunded.
- Followed, if it's the right call, by a Workflow Upgrade, a System Build, or both — shaped to what the leverage actually calls for.
- One person doing the diagnosis, the plan, and the build. Not three.
This isn't —
- A course.
- A cohort.
- A prompt pack.
- An AI coach on a weekly call.
- A fractional-AI-officer retainer.
- An agency project quoted without diagnosis.
- Done-for-you with no involvement.
- A free "AI audit" that turns into free custom strategy.
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03
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How it works
Three stages. Most engagements
stop at stage two.
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01
Discovery — $2,500, 90 minutes, guaranteed.
A paid working session. We look at one real workflow — the one where a change would compound the most. By the end, we've identified the leverage area, built a conservative first-year value case using your numbers, and decided the right form for the intervention: a workflow upgrade, a system build, or both. If we don't find a real leverage area, you continue at no cost or get refunded.
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02
Applied Leverage — priced after Discovery.
The intervention itself. Three shapes: a Workflow Upgrade (teach you a new way of working AI into the part of your business that matters most); a System Build (create the asset, automation, or process); or a Hybrid (both, done together). The shape is selected after Discovery, not before. Fee is anchored to the value case built in Discovery — typically a share of the realistic, attributable first-year value.
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03
Partnership — only if earned.
Some engagements develop into ongoing work. This is never the default, and never sold upfront. It's offered only after successful Applied Leverage, when there's a real reason for it.
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04
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Discovery, in detail
What the 90 minutes
actually looks like.
No slide deck. No curriculum. No pitch. We look at one real piece of your work — a proposal workflow, a lead follow-up process, a research task you keep meaning to compress, whatever's live — and diagnose where a change would compound.
By the end, you'll have one named leverage area, a worked-through value case using your own numbers, and a recommended shape for the intervention. You'll also have a clear answer to the question "is this worth doing?"
If none of that materializes, you either continue in a second session at no cost, or get refunded. In writing. Before we start.
Book DiscoverySession plan, 90 minutes
- 0:00 – 0:10 Bonding, rapport, up-front contract
- 0:10 – 0:35 Business diagnosis — known pain and known desire
- 0:35 – 1:05 Workflow walkthrough — one real example, start to finish
- 1:05 – 1:20 Synthesis — the leverage area, made legible
- 1:20 – 1:30 Value math, budget conversation, and next step
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05
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What the value case looks like
Discovery ends with a number.
Drawn from a real engagement. A twelve-person agency. Proposals slow, founder rewriting too much, AI use inconsistent, delivery with too much rework. We walked the actual workflow, then did this together in the last fifteen minutes:
──────────────────────────────────────────── 1. Team time saved 8 staff × 4 hrs/week × $60/hr × 52 wks × 70% adoption = $69,888 2. Founder time recovered 1 founder × 6 hrs/week × $200/hr × 52 wks = $62,400 3. Rework reduced 20 cycles/mo × 1.5 hrs × $60/hr × 12 mo = $21,600 4. Faster proposals, more wins 2 extra wins/qtr × $15,000 gross profit/win = $120,000 Raw annual value ................. $273,888 × confidence (0.7) × attribution (0.6) ───────────────────────────────────────── Credible first-year value ........ $115,033 ────────────────────────────────────────────
That number is the anchor for the fee. It's built with your numbers, not ours. You leave Discovery with the sheet.
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What this is for
Three things the work moves.
ii.
A direction that's unmistakably yours.
Customized to this founder, this company, these constraints, these employees, these customers. Generic advice doesn't compound here. The business you build with this help should still be recognizably yours on the other side — more so, not less.
iii.
A partner who treats you as already capable.
You don't need rescuing. You don't need permission. You need someone who sees what you're doing, works with you on it at your level, and raises the ceiling by being in the room. That's the register of the work.
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07
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Fit
Who this is for — and who it isn't.
For —
- Founder-led, owner-led, or partner-led businesses.
- Roughly $500k–$10M in revenue, 2–30 people on the team.
- Knowledge-intensive work: consulting, professional services, agencies, advisors, coaches running practices, B2B services.
- Already using AI loosely. Paid ChatGPT or Claude. Sense there's more.
- Growth-minded. Willing to change workflow, not just talk about it.
Not for —
- "I want to learn AI" with no real workflow to change.
- Enterprise procurement. Committee buying. Long cycles.
- Pre-revenue founders looking for permission.
- Anyone whose real need is a $3k cohort experience.
- Done-for-you, no involvement.
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08
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One case
A proposal workflow that was eating the founder.
Twelve-person agency. The founder was rewriting 70% of every proposal before it went out. Proposals were taking four to six days. The team had tried three AI tools and given up on all of them.
Discovery found the leverage point wasn't "the team needs AI training." It was that the proposal template itself was carrying too much improvisation — there was no structured input the AI could work from, which is why every attempt to automate it had failed.
The intervention was a Hybrid: a workflow redesign that imposed structure on the input side, plus a system build that took that structured input and produced a draft at the founder's voice and standard. Two weeks of work. Three proposal cycles to calibrate.
Six months on: turnaround dropped from five days to one. Founder rewrite time dropped from 70% to under 15%. The team closed two additional deals in the quarter that would otherwise have aged out. Measured realistic first-year value, built with their numbers in Discovery: $115k. Fee was a fraction of that.
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We'd spent eight months trying to figure out what was wrong with our proposal process. The answer was twenty minutes into the walkthrough.
— paraphrased with permission from a client in the professional services space, 2026.
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09
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The obvious questions
Questions you're probably having.
Why not just use ChatGPT?
You should use ChatGPT. Most of our clients already do. The question isn't ChatGPT vs. not-ChatGPT — it's what happens in the gap between "I have an AI tab open" and "the part of my work that matters most has actually changed." That gap is what the work is for. If ChatGPT alone were closing it for you, you wouldn't be reading this page.
Why not a course or a cohort?
Courses teach a curriculum. The unit of learning here isn't the lesson — it's you, inside your real workflow. A course can give you frameworks. It can't walk your proposal flow with you and find the one structural thing that's breaking it. Different product.
Why not an AI coach with weekly calls?
Hours don't change workflows. A weekly call gives you someone to think out loud with; it doesn't produce a redesigned workflow or a built system. If weekly conversation is what you want, a coach is the right thing. If you want the work itself to change, it isn't.
Why is Discovery paid?
Because a paid first session filters for seriousness, prevents free custom strategy from leaking out, changes how the buyer shows up, and preserves equal stature between us. It's economic, not ideological. Free Discovery is worse Discovery for both sides. If no real leverage area emerges, you either continue at no cost or get refunded — that's where the risk lives.
What if I don't know what my "leverage point" is yet?
That's what Discovery is for. Most clients arrive with a hypothesis — "I think it's our proposal process" or "I think it's our lead follow-up" — and Discovery either confirms it or finds the real one. Not knowing is the normal starting condition, not a disqualifier.
How big does the business need to be?
Roughly $500k–$10M in revenue, 2–30 people, founder-led or owner-led. Smaller than that usually means the leverage point isn't real yet. Larger usually means procurement committees, which isn't the shape of engagement this is.
What about the AI moving so fast that any system built today is stale next quarter?
The work isn't built on any one model or tool. It's built on workflow design, context architecture, and division of labor between you and AI — the durable parts. When the models improve, your workflow absorbs the improvement. That's a feature of doing it this way rather than a bug.
What if the right answer is "no engagement"?
Then Discovery says so and you leave with the value math you built, the leverage analysis, and a clear recommendation — which may be "not yet" or "a different shape of help." That's a legitimate outcome of a paid session. It's why Discovery is guaranteed.
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10
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Next step
Book Discovery.
90 minutes. $2,500. Guaranteed. You leave with a named leverage area, a worked value case, and a recommended shape for the intervention — or you continue at no cost or get refunded.