AI breaks your business model. It doesn't have to break your business.
Your team's getting faster with AI, and your billable hours are collapsing.
You've started using AI to do the work. Or you're about to.
And you're thinking:
"This breaks my business model. What am I going to do?"
It's not a slump. The faster they get, the less you can bill.
"How long does it take you to create an incident report?"
A speaker asked that at an AI security conference.
The room guessed three days. Maybe a week.
"What if I said you could do it in 14 minutes?"
Someone in the audience said, "That breaks the business model!"
Exactly.
If your business model is based on trading time for money, AI poses a serious threat.
Replacing people with agents won't fix it. Hiring won't either.
1. Maybe you're thinking about replacing some of your people with AI agents.
If you're honest about how many hours you're billing, your revenue continues to collapse.
Agents are cheap compared to employees. But they're so fast at certain things that the revenue will just keep collapsing.
And that's assuming it even makes sense to bill out your AI agent by the hour. It doesn't.
The alternative is to mark up your AI agent costs, which is always going to be a crazy low-margin commodity move.
2. Maybe you're thinking about hiring fast enough to stay ahead of the curve.
That's how you grew the business before. You increased your inventory of hours that you could sell at a markup.
This one doesn't even pass the sniff test.
Everyone you hire is either going to be enabled by AI, which is going to collapse their billable hours, or they're going to be slow on purpose and create busywork to justify their timesheets.
Which your existing employees could do right now.
3. Maybe you're thinking about closing the firm and getting a day job.
You wouldn't last three months working for someone else.
Stop selling time and start selling results.
"What do you mean by results?"
You've been working with clients for years, but what they've been buying is not what you thought you were selling.
You thought you were selling time or deliverables. What they were buying was an improved business.
Business outcomes. Results. Not inputs or outputs or deliverables or features.
They were investing in you in order to get business benefits.
You just never took the time to ask why they wanted your time, or your deliverables, or whatever the heck you do.
People who do this close deals two or three times larger than anything they've ever done.
It's not uncommon for people who follow my advice to be sending out proposals and closing deals that are two or three times larger than anything they've ever done, without a big increase in effort.
I've got a bunch of testimonials from solo operators who have doubled their income and profitability.
The result? I successfully negotiated a project worth 10x what I had originally planned to charge, and my client never questioned the investment because the value was clear from the very beginning.
— Guy Shaffer
Jonathan’s book increased my revenue by 1000%! I’m actually winning projects at 10x the hourly rate I used to make. In the past quarter, I banked six months salary. Honestly, the feeling of knowing you have 6mo in the bank is freedom beyond anything I have ever experienced.
Jonathan, I landed a $25k monthly contract on account of the advice in your book. Thank you a thousand times over!!
You don't have the foggiest idea how to start.
You have no idea how to price a project except on a cost-plus or time-and-materials basis.
You have no idea what to say in a sales call if you're not trying to uncover scope.
You have no idea how to write a value-based, three-option proposal.
You're adrift in the ocean.
Here's what we do about that.
Rebase: I teach you and your team to sell results.
1. I open your eyes to what your clients have actually been buying all along.
Business buyers buy business benefits. Increased revenue, an improved net promoter score, more stars in the app store, whatever.
There's some metric your client is concerned with and believes you've been improving over the years. But you've been pricing based on time spent, so you're blind to how you've improved their business.
If you have repeat customers, it's because you've been improving their business. You need to find out in what ways. That could be asking for testimonials, interviewing them, doing case studies, or just thinking about it.
2. We look at your past engagements for a productized service.
We create it as a foot-in-the-door, entry-level purchase to bring in new clients. Typically, it's some kind of roadmap, diagnostic, or expert recommendations.
3. I teach you and your team how to have a sales conversation and write a three-option proposal.
After the roadmap, the client is probably going to request some help with implementation. That's where the proposal comes in.
I'll also teach you how to follow up if the client ghosts you, and the various ways people tend to try to negotiate proposals like this.
I have tons of material on all of this.
4. I stay engaged in an advisory capacity as you implement what you've learned.
| | | | --- | --- | | Length | Four months | | Price | $30,000, paid up front | | Guarantee | None | | How it works | You and your team work with me privately. | | Who it's for | Firm owners who can change their pricing without asking anyone's permission. | | What I ask from you | An honest debrief at the end, and a testimonial or case study if it makes sense. |
I don't have any success stories from firms. In the firm engagements I've had, there was always something that interfered.
Three examples.
One: the owner couldn't get the leadership team to go along.
In one case, the CEO, who was my client, couldn't convince the rest of the executive team to do anything that I suggested. That was a huge waste of money.
I can't work with a founder who is at the mercy of their own executive team. If that sounds familiar, this isn't for you.
Two: the team over-delivered.
I had a firm that very soon closed their biggest deal ever. Then the dev team over-delivered like crazy and didn't stay on track with what they'd actually promised. They built what they wanted to build, because they're salaried, so it made no difference to them.
The owner ended up losing money, even though the project was twice as big as their biggest previous project. There was no financial incentive for the employees to finish fast.
I have theories on how to fix that. I've never done it.
Three: the sales guy was untrainable.
In a third case, the owner did have control and the team didn't over-deliver. But their one sales guy was an untrainable clown.
Today I'd suggest they fire the sales guy immediately and train someone internally, like an account manager or someone who actually understands their clients.
This is the lowest the price will ever be.
I have a huge incentive to get a glowing testimonial from you.
Once I do, the price is going to triple.