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Do Good Work is not a label but a way of living.
It is the constant and diligent effort to achieve a new level of excellence in one’s own life.
It is the hidden inner beauty behind the struggle to achieve excellence.
It is not perfect but imperfect.
It is the effort, discipline and focus that often goes unnoticed.
The goal of this podcast is to highlight that drive.
The guests I have on this show emulate this drive in their own special way. You’ll be able to apply new ideas into your own life by learning from them.
We will also have 1on1 episodes with me where we’ll dive into my own experiences with entrepreneurship and leadership.
Every episode is designed to provide you with ideas that you can apply and grow in excellence in all areas of your life, business and career.
Do Good Work,
Raul
Before we started working together, I
made a vow to a client, a consultant
who serves large organizations.
And right before we signed the contract,
right before we got an onboarding right
before everything, like at the end of
our initial call or our second call,
I told them directly, "We are going to
stop selling your service, and we're
never gonna sell by the hour again."
And the-- when I said it and the way that
it was received, the mood that it was
received was like, "Okay, sure, dude."
It was polite, a little nervous because
the client believed in me in the
way you believe in someone who says
"We're gonna do something ambitious
before we actually begin the work."
So it felt more like
a promise than a plan.
But fast-forward a couple months later,
they actually did stop selling by the
hour, and they started selling the
outcomes of the work that they're doing.
And their prospects were changing the
conversations and the questions that
they were asking because the actual
narrative in the conversation was less
on, "Here's the work I can do for you.
Here's how much it is by the hour,"
and focusing on the transformation.
And yes, they stopped selling the service.
They were focused more
on the transformation.
And this change has positively
impacted the bottom line and
forecasted annual revenue.
So the belief was there
from the very beginning.
It just took work to make it real.
So in this pod, I wanna tell you
the same thing that I told them.
The business model you are currently
running is about to evolve.
The real question is, are you going
to change from a place in a position
of power and strength, or are you
gonna be forced to react from the
pressure that's gonna come later?
Even though the pressure may come six
months from now, a year from now, or
three years from now, the business
model is going to naturally evolve.
So why this evolution's
happening right now, and here's
the canary in the coal mine.
In early May twenty twenty-six,
OpenAI raised four billion to
start the deployment company,
and Anthropic also launched a
one point five billion enterprise
services venture with Blackstone,
Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs.
Both are designed to implement engineers
and consultants directly inside of
mid-sized companies to deploy AI.
Being a consultant or leveraging
services and delivering services
is a distribution channel now.
The major AI labs aren't just
building AI models anymore.
They're focusing on distribu-distributing
those models to the marketplace, which
gives us opportunity, but it also gives
us a sense of how are they gonna price?
How are things gonna change?"
Because an AI is naturally deflationary.
But what I'm not saying is
that the demand for your
expert-expertise is not going away.
I actually think the opposite is gonna
happen, that there will be more demand
for people like you with your services,
if you're selling agency services
or you're selling consultancies or
services, to help organizations navigate
the change, and that's gonna increase
in significant amount of demand.
But how-however, the key thing that's
going to change is how it gets priced.
How you price that demand, how you
capture the value, the new value that you
create, that is what's going to change.
Because if you keep billing the old
way, and operating the old way, another
company is gonna come in, like myself,
and take more risk with clients,
anchoring towards the outcome and
delivering your entire scope as the
baseline and focusing on net new value.
And you could be competed or
wiped out by someone who is
not working harder than you.
They're just restructuring on where
the actual value is, and they're
leveraging AI and agents to do so.
and I'll give you an
example from my own company.
I have a couple of agents that develop
signal-based lead generation for my
clients, drawing from real market data.
If I were running like most agencies,
I would only sell the ca-capability
of Signal-based lead generation,
that's a premium line item.
I would build my pitch decks around that.
I'd have everything
around that specific area.
However, for me and my clients,
that's a tangential add-on.
It's part of the scope,
it's not the whole thing.
It's not the headline offer.
I've helped those agencies where
it was just their headline offer,
and they were doing really well.
They actually do really well.
But the key thing is my focus is strategy,
go-to-market, and sales, and leads
are necessary part of that ingredient.
They're not the entire game, though.
And that's a simple example.
Wanna give you that example because
the offer that you thought was
your core advantage may no longer
be your competitive advantage.
It may not actually be your moat.
Once technology removes the barrier and
it's easier to replace or to deliver
that service, the key question that
you and every single business that
delivers services needs to answer
right now is: how do you combine your
expertise with your experience and your
nuanced read on the market and your
existing offerings to create net new
value that actually helps clients go
further than they could without you?
And that's what I'm gonna try
to answer in this podcast.
So we'll dive into specifically the
seven ingredients of the business
model, where AI is going to change
things, and what you can do about it.
So a business model is
not just a single thing.
It's not just one thing that you do.
This is "Here's how I make money."
It's a combination of components that work
together, and if you change one component,
it is going to influence the other.
And the way that I like to think about
it, there's seven core ingredients to your
consultancy or your agency business model.
The first is your value proposition.
This includes your intellectual property,
your expertise, and your experience.
So your IP is separate
from your expertise.
Your IP is that codified or
a methodology put together.
The second part of your business
model is your revenue drivers,
like how are you pricing?
What's your offer structure?
How are you developing your pricing
payment terms, and payment plans?
The third part is your
go-to-market strategy.
Obviously, your ICP, your ideal clients,
the key channels that you reach your
ideal clients, and your sales strategy
and client relationships, so LTV.
Part four is your key activities
that your team actually performs to
deliver value and service clients.
The fifth part are the habits that you
or your team run to keep the business
afloat, so the internal operations.
The sixth is, are the key resources
and partners that you work with,
and seven is your cost structure.
So here's where I'm personally and
also helping clients, and where I
personally also foresee where AI is
changing right now and in the future,
these seven parts of the business model.
I also have everything here in Substack.
If you go to dogoodwork.substack.com,
you'll get access to this article,
this entire piece that I wrote.
You'll also get access to peripheral
resources that I'm going to include
here, like on creating net new value
or the four ways to price in the
agentic era or the service stacks.
You'll see me reference those.
Those are separate articles.
They're all free.
You get to access them.
They're also on YouTube.
You get to listen to them as well.
So here are the seven areas of the
business model where I see AI changing it.
So for number one, the value proposition,
because with agents, you can package your
IP and expertise into an operating system.
You can actually deliver value
with these agents alongside you.
So not just building a team around it,
but actually building infrastructure and
agents that can help deliver that value.
But this forces you to only focus
on the nuance takes, the nuance area
where you know where AI falls short.
Plus, the IP can now
produce net new value.
So these are additional services or
peripheral services or net new assets
that enable your clients to get to
the done, finished, goal accomplished
state faster or with more quality.
If you want additional resources on
creating net new value, I have a Substack
for that and a podcast and a YouTube.
Just go to dogoodwork.substack.com
to learn about net new value.
So that's your value proposition.
For revenue drivers, so the second
part of your business model, if you're
focusing on not selling the service and
selling the outcome, that means that
your offer has to be restructured around
the actual value that you're creating,
not just the hours or the team or the
cost and materials it took to create it.
Your time to value will
be shorter with AI.
If you're charging by the hour and
like realistically for me, some things
that used to take twenty to forty
hours can now be done in half a day.
Doesn't mean that it's
gonna be crap outputs.
I know where AI ends and
I know where I begin.
But if that's true, like twenty to forty
hours in half a day, you don't have
to believe me, I'm seeing that myself.
But if that's true, let's just
assume that's true for you.
If your time to value is shorter,
how are you gonna price by the hour?
How are you gonna price by,
oh, where it's gonna take four
months to hit this outcome?
Like why not four days?
Why not four weeks?
So the real market research that
you do when you start focusing on
pricing, value creation, there's
actually three numbers that shows
that your clients are paying for it.
Number one, it's what
they're willing to pay.
Number two is what they're satisfied
and happy to pay, and number three
is what they tolerate to pay.
They tolerate paying this to crappy
vendors or to someone who isn't adding
as much value as you will be adding.
So your opportunity is to take what the
market is willing to pay and what they're
tolerating to pay, so there's that delta,
So if you find the difference between
what they're willing to pay, what they
hate about what they're paying, and
you're helping them, "Hey, I can help
you go further with more value," they're
gonna be satisfied and happy to pay that
so you wanna build a series of offers that
gives your clients or your prospective
clients options to get the outcome that
they want through working with you.
Not just one entry point, not just a
sprint, like, different options for
different parts of the relationship.
If you want additional resources for
here, again this is on the Substack.
You can also Google it
or find it on YouTube.
The two resources that I would recommend
for further reading on enhancing your
revenue with AI and the revenue portion
of your business model is the first
resource is The Offer Is Your Positioning:
How to Sell in the Post-Scope Era.
And number two, this is probably the
most important, is The Net New Value
Quadrant: How to Price Consulting and
Agency Services in the Agentic Era.
There's four ways to do that.
We'll also debrief that at
the end of this podcast.
Now, the third section of the-- your
business model is the go-to-market.
Now, AI does enhance your research,
signal research, custom value proposition
per prospect, and when you do that,
you're able to, one, meet prospects
where they're at, deliver more value or
communicate more value with them, and
then also go deeper with your existing
client segments that you already serve
so that you can help them go further.
The best clients that you can sell right
now with an enhanced offer stack are the
ones that you're currently working with
or the ones that you've previously worked
with, and you already have a relationship.
You can go further with them if you
know how to create net new value.
The fourth part of your
business model, key activities.
So what your team actually
performs to deliver value is
gonna get fundamentally rebuilt.
You're gonna augment your team.
So execution is gonna get compressed
or rerouted or handed to agents.
That doesn't mean that you're
gonna have to let go of people.
When you find out that when you get over
the hump of productivity and you're like,
"Oh, wow, it's not just I can do more,
I can make more revenue, I can help more
people," you're not gonna let them go.
You're gonna actually probably
hire more because you're gonna
be leveraging tokens and compute
to deliver that value at scale.
And your senior operators, you or
someone else on your team who's like
the senior leader or senior thinker or
consultant, their time is now gonna be
focused less on the work and more on
the judgment, the nuance, the context,
the relationship with the client,
because this is what matters the most.
The top of the stack is not
going away, and I wrote about
that in the services stack.
That's an additional resource
here, the services stack.
What remains when client
services are being eaten by AI?
One key thing that I wanna tell you is
that AI is capturing the best of human
insight, and it can take those insights
and create net new insights, but sometimes
those net new insights are wrong.
They might be fallacies.
They might be hallucinations.
So if AI is, and this is actually
how it's trained, if it's trained on
the best human insight, that means
it can originate a net new thought.
It can take a synthesis of
the best insights and create
something that's clever and feels
unique, but it may also be wrong.
So you wanna leverage and identify
where does AI end and you begin, so
that you can focus on the judgment.
That's what I mean by judgment
and nuanced takes based on all the
complexity of the inputs that you can
intake because you have multi-sensory
inputs to literally use the organ
in your head, which is your brain.
All right, so the fifth portion of
your business model, key habits.
So leveraging AI with a team to run the
business Not just deliver all the work.
This is similar to number four
with the key activities, but when
you start operating and changing,
your cost is going to change.
You might increase a little bit more
in compute, but you may actually be
able to offset not needing to hire
additional people for simple things
that you could have AI run for you.
So your cost structure is going to change.
It's gonna increase your margins if you
do this correctly, but it'll also force
you and stop and make you think which
engagements with clients should you no
longer take or which ones should you focus
on how can I increase value here, increase
a little pricing or keep everything
the same, keep pricing the same, and
your margins would increase as well.
That is actually the first play
in the net new value quadrant
when you price your services.
All right, so number six, the
sixth part of your business model
is key resources and partners.
So this one is gonna change.
It's pretty natural.
It's like your new resources and
partners are going to be either
frontier labs and/or not just
software, but infrastructure like
new computers or virtual computers
and/or also open source LLMs.
So these are different pieces of the P&L.
This didn't really exist majority of the
last five years, last three years really.
However, how you manage and how you
build your AI operational layer is
going to determine the key resources
and partners you need, the tech stack,
and the physical architecture, depending
on how you like to set things up.
Now, the seventh, and this is the
most natural, it's cost structure.
So because you're gonna be able to
increase margin because your cost
might go lower or you may able to
do more with less, doesn't mean
they have to let go of people.
That is negative thinking.
Just figure out how you can add
more value and then have more
people deliver that value at scale.
Your costs are naturally
going to stagnate or go down.
They might increase in the beginning
when you're figuring out how to
leverage the tokens efficiently,
but I think that is a sidestep.
I think one of the things that I like
about Dan Kennedy is he mentioned that
the person who can spend the most or
the business that can spend the most
to acquire a customer will always win.
That has been proven true.
It's been consistently proven true, and I
come from the cold direct response, like
cold ad, cold direct response acquisition
game, where if you can spend the most to
acquire a customer, you are going to win.
That means your business economics have
to make up for the cost of acquisition
or your LTV or your price point or your
go-to-market, et cetera, and your brand.
But here, I think another thing
is becoming true is the business
that can spend the most tokens,
compute profitably will win.
It's not about, "Ooh, let
me be token efficient.
Let me spend the least amount of
tokens and my bill's net zero."
That's cool, but if you can
figure out how to spend the
most profitably, you will win.
For further reading here, I have
an article on Substack and another
podcast on YouTube called What
AI Native Consulting Looks Like.
This gives you a deep dive of my own
consultancy and how I went through
the four stages of becoming AI native.
You can dive into that.
You can also Google it
on YouTube and find it.
But those are the seven parts and where
I see AI changing your business model.
And every one of those parts, you
don't have to redesign everything,
but once you touch one, it's gonna
naturally bleed into the other.
Everything is up for redesign
right now, and they don't change
in isolation, so what does an
evolved model actually look like?
So evolution is not just add AI
tools on top of your workflow.
Evolution, I think, has three elements
that you can start modeling right now,
and then once you start modeling this,
it'll naturally force you to enhance
and redesign your business model.
The first element is to sell
the outcomes, not the service.
and I say this to all my clients, and
I say this to you, and I say this with
complete respect and love and care.
No one cares about your services.
No one cares about my services.
You don't care about my services.
I don't care about your services.
What we care about are our problems
and how we're gonna solve them.
An agency selling marketing services does
not have clients waking up at two AM who
wake up and say, "I need more marketing."
Or leadership consultants don't
have clients that wake up and say,
"Oh, I need leadership development."
Or strategists, their clients aren't
staying up till three AM saying,
"I need a new strategic plan."
They don't know that.
That's not what they're thinking.
What they want is they
wanna get on the other side.
They wanna become that person or
that business that is capable of
doing and achieving the things
that they want to achieve.
We call that transformation,
and I see this pattern across
every single vertical I work in
marketing, sales-- organizational
transformation, I have clients in
leadership, in manufacturing, insurance.
The buyer's question is: what
is this going to do for me?
When they're looking at your service,
what is this going to do for me?
And when you lead with the service, you're
making the buyer do the translation work.
Meaning, if you don't communicate exactly
what you're helping them do, they have
to translate for you what this is going
to do for them, and they categorize you.
They may not always
categorize you correctly.
So when you lead with transformation,
you're able to close the gap for them,
and with the new tech and AI, you might
be able to take co-risk offers and be
able to take more risk with the client
to help them reach the transformation,
and you could capture the net new value
that you create with your services.
Skin in the game, along for the
ride, helping them go further.
You benefit, they benefit,
everyone benefits.
That's an option.
I'm not saying that's the only
option, but that's the first element.
Sell the outcomes, not the service.
The second element is your methodology
is going to become, and it should
become, your operating system.
And this is what I talked about in the
net new value quadrant, where we talk
about the intellectual property play,
that your agency or your consultancy
has a specific way of doing things.
You have your own methodology, your own
frameworks, your playbooks of how to
get a client from point A to point B.
That's your IP.
In the past, to monetize your IP,
you would sell your time to apply it.
You will sell your time
to coach through it.
You would sell your time to
help them go from A to B.
Or you would sell other people's time, or
you would create systems that help them.
The capacity, your
capacity is the bottleneck.
If you can deploy agents that can help
them go from A to B, time to value
shrinks, like dramatically, then you
can focus on the real nuances and the
real obstacles or hurdles to get from
point A to point B, and that way,
your methodology now is a system.
Either a system that you can install on
behalf of clients, or you could run for
clients with AI agents and your team.
So it's not dramatically different
from having this done with other
people, but it is going to be
dramatically different where now the
operating system can run without you.
There's some beautiful things that you
can create where wow, you install either
this agent or this fleet of agents or
these c-- like build the system for
the client, and that runs a portion
of their business for them without you
needing to be there twenty-four/seven
That's really interesting.
That is phenomenal.
That is possible right now.
So your clients still get your IP,
and they still get your judgment
and your frameworks applied to
their specific situation, but
you just compress time to value.
They're buying your methodology.
They're not buying the
agents underneath it.
They're buying specifically, here
is what we're going to do, here is
what we're going to achieve, and
you're not selling them a software.
'Cause if you start selling the software,
you start selling that, it cheapens,
it lowers your positioning, and that
distinction is everything right now.
You don't sell, "Here's the method," or,
"Here is the agent that's gonna do it.
Here's the software.
Here's the login."
You sell the journey.
You sell the actual methodology.
You sell the future state of their
business, and that is determined
practically by how you position
and how you sell and how you price.
If you price it low, then it's gonna
be feel like it's cheap software.
If you price it high, it's gonna feel
like an experience, and you do have to
have some hands-on concierge support.
So the third element in transforming
your business model is to stay at the
top of the stack as a strategic partner.
Everyone talks about wanting
to be the strategic partner.
What does that actually mean?
That means that you have either
your team or AI agents deliver on
the hands, the execution, and you
focus on relationship, judgment,
Your nuanced takes based on your
actual experience and knowing where the
client is, knowing where the cognitive
dissonance is, knowing their mindset, so
that's your nuance, as well as belief.
Belief is the biggest one, and I wrote
about this in the services stack,
and I'm going to quote this, and I'm
gonna read this verbatim 'cause this
is extremely important because this
does change every engagement that you
operate with and that you run with
if you're working with another human.
" Belief requires observations that
changes the outcome, skin in the game
that creates trust, and a human who is
willing to show up when things fall apart.
AI has none of those things, and
I don't see a path where reasoning
improvements alone close the gap."
End quote.
So AI is compressing the bottom of
the stack, the execution, the hands,
the framework template strategies
that, you plug and play and then...
Or like a landing page builder.
Yeah, you can build landing
pages based on formulas.
You can build pages, go-to-market strat.
You can build all these
things based on formulas.
That AI can take over.
What it can't take over is, again,
your nuanced take, the relationship you
have with the client, and the belief.
That belief is significant.
I know when I work with my own clients,
and we focus on the advisory portion of
it when I'm working with them, I believe
in the future state of who they could
be and what their business can be, and
they believe alongside with me, and
then they take the right actions and
executions or implement the right things
that we co-created together to become
and reach to that expectation and beyond.
So there is a significant portion
of belief, and everyone talks about,
"Oh, it's a strategic partner here
and there," but wants to earn that
you can only earn that right through
relationship and a shared belief.
So before agents, a consultant
who held transformation and belief
still had to deploy the work
together and deploy significant
time and capacity on execution.
Now you can do everything with AI agents
and with a team and with your support.
But the key thing is now you're able
to really focus on the top of the stack
where real value is created, where you
can also focus on client lifetime value,
and you can find and identify, 'cause
you're listening at that point, identify
new ways to create net new value based on
the new problems or new situations that
you couldn't solve before 'cause you were
just stuck in execution, you were stuck in
delivering and doing the hands, or you and
your team were stuck twenty four seven.
Like I-- you know those agencies, I worked
in those a- I helped those agencies.
They're always in perpetual burnout mode.
Like we're, we have this fire, that fire.
They're always firefighting.
It's not their fault, just like
the nature of some agency work.
But if you're able to leverage it, at
least get twenty percent back, maybe
forty per- maybe even up to sixty percent
back, and you're able to listen in
here, you get to act on net new value.
Then you can focus on how do we help
our clients go further, new offers, new
peripheral offers or what I talk about
in quadrant four in the net new value
quadrant, the value capture play, where
performance outcome and performance-based
pricing really makes sense.
Because with AI, you can
actually influence the outcomes.
'Cause in the past with performance-based
deals, you weren't always in control.
If you did rev shares or anything
like that, or profit shares, whatever
your structure was you could do
everything right and still fail.
The client could change things,
some things might fumble, humans
might not execute a few things.
You can now offset that with agents.
And if your agents are like, for
example, generating pipeline or producing
content at scale, right content, not
crappy content, not slop content, but
producing good things at scale, running
research flows, accelerating time
to market, you have more significant
influence over the outcome where
you can start taking more risk.
You're not just advising,
you're producing, and that's
a huge differentiation,
and it becomes a flywheel.
I'll give you another example.
I work with a consultant who does
marketing, and he never in his career
has done lead generation for his clients.
He's focused on events, he's focused
on the aesthetics, he's focused on
the video, he's focused on all these
key things that help clients really
achieve their goals, like their
fundraising and their toner goals.
He's helped them do that.
But now with technology, we're
identifying, hey, what if we can actually
help find new ways to fundraise and help
them find new fundraising opportunities
through tech, through AI agents, and
then from there, you help your clients go
further, need more of your services 'cause
they have to do more events and more
people about it and also get the word out.
Now the flywheel.
You help clients go further, you leverage
the tech, find new opportunities, leverage
that to help your services go further.
Clients are happy, you're
happy, everyone's happy.
leverage this for your clients
and for you to flourish.
So that's the evolved model.
You sell outcomes, you build the
systems, you focus on developing and
earning your right to partnership.
You price on value or you do value
capture depending on how you wanna price.
And so let's dive into now.
If you're listening to this
and you're like, "Okay, cool.
That's nice.
How do I know where...
Here are three signs to look out
for that might identify that you're
on the threshold of a breakthrough.
Meaning these are three signs
that if this is happening right
now, you actually might be...
they might feel negative by the way,
these signs, but if you're seeing
these right now in your business or
you're experiencing this, you actually
might be on the threshold, the cutting
edge of a breakthrough, and it's
up to you to decide if you're going
to break through or if you're not.
So the founders that I work with
who are closest to the thresholds
are not struggling businesses.
So they have a good business, the
revenue's coming in, are satisfied,
and the model is working, but
something's not working as it should.
Some things are changing.
So the first sign to look for is
that your revenue is capped by team
hours, not the value that you create,
meaning you can only grow as fast
as your team's calendar allows.
When everyone is fully
booked, top line stops moving.
So it's not because there's lack
of demand, it's because of time.
So the ceiling of that business
model is your capacity, not
the value that you deliver.
So the evolution here is to systemize your
execution layer annotate and write down.
I talk about this in the AI
native consultancy of what to
do, but just it's metacognition.
Think about your own thinking.
Buy that time back.
Figure out how you execute and where
your execution can be leveraged with
AI and augmented, and where AI ends
and where your nuance takes begins.
And when you leverage that, you
build agents to handle production.
Your team's calendar stops
being the limiting factor.
Now, this can only go so far
because naturally we exist in time.
We're humans.
But just know if you're
actually seeing that you can
only generate so much revenue.
I have a client who actually did that.
They were only generating so much revenue.
Their deals could only go so much because
they were focused primarily on time.
We stripped away value from time.
Now it's dramatically better and
it's way nicer of an experience
to run a business that way.
All right, so the second sign is your
team is always delivering, never thinking.
I alluded to that earlier with
always constant firefighting.
Yeah, your team is just putting
in the clock, doing execution,
not actually thinking.
This is not your fault.
This is not bad all the time.
This is good that you have that demand.
But also just know that the 80/20,
the strategic thinking, the building,
that time is necessary to build net
new offers and new capabilities.
And if that doesn't happen,
then you can't evolve.
So the way to to transform this and
evolve is take your team out of execution.
Focus on creating a master
brain, a data pool of all of your
learnings, insights, and execution
strategies and implementations,
like your master brain of execution.
You probably already have this.
And then leverage AI to
help you augment your work.
And again, metacognition.
Think about your own thinking.
Identify where does AI go?
Where does my team come in, Even if you
buy twenty percent back, that's enough.
Even if you augment twenty percent
and find that time back, that is
enough to start thinking about your
own thinking and creating that new
value, and creating that new value and
capabilities to serve clients go further.
Now, the third sign is that some
sales, not all, but some sales are
stalling and clients are asking about
AI substitution or AI discounts,
which is more prevalent than not.
Like your pricing might
be pressured by AI.
Some proposals might be taking longer.
Clients are now questioning.
They're saying if AI can do this
faster, can you give me a discount?
Can you change some things?"
That you're naturally seeing that you're
probably just selling the service itself.
You're not selling the transformation.
So you have to move up the stack and
identify where does the client actually
wanna go, and how can I add or create
net new value that I couldn't before?
Because you've done your homework,
you've done your research, you
created new offerings, you tested
that internally, and you wanna
offer this to clients to go further.
And when you sell, what you're selling is
the future state, not the deliverables,
the substitution conversation ends.
Like it literally ends.
Not, "Hey, can AI do this?"
But like when you start focused,
here's the transformation.
That's like saying, like I know this is a
peripheral example but I have to say it.
That's like saying if you want to either
gain or lose weight and you're helping
a client do that and they tell you,
"Hey, can AI just make this faster?"
It's no you still have to eat, you still
have to sleep, you still have to pick
up the weight and go for that walk.
AI can help you to a point, but
it can't help accelerate that.
but if you focus on the transformation
of what the outcome can look like
and the process that you're gonna
take to get that outcome, then
it's almost like stupid tasks.
Can AI help me go faster
to lose weight fast?
I just wanted to give you
a very contrasting example.
So here's the path to
evolve while you operate.
So the hard truth is this is not easy.
The hard truth is that
you have to do this.
You have to reinvent or redesign
your business model in Real time.
You're not pausing operations for
three weeks to redesign everything.
You have to do this in real time.
And that for me, when I've done
that, it feels sometimes 1.5X
work.
You're doing everything, then at 0.5X
more.
Sometimes it could feel like 2X
work, depending on where you're at,
the state of the business, but it
definitely is an added workload.
And I know you might be saying, "Raul, I
just can't add on to my plate right now."
Trust me, you can, because
it's not an entire season.
It's a sprint.
And then once you augment and you
figure out how to augment, you're
able to now create leverage faster.
So here's where I suggest you start.
Step number one is to redesign your
model around the transformations
you actually make for clients.
This is probably the third time
I mentioned this on the podcast.
You need to stop describing the service
and start describing the transformation.
This is pivotally important
because every client that I work
with, this is where we start.
We start on their offer stack.
Offers, redesign their offer, then we
start on the go-to-market or thereafter.
Everything is dependent on the value that
you create and how you communicate that.
For me, an offering is just a way to
communicate value and a foot in the door.
And once you make those offerings or
a series of offerings, then you can
open up for negotiation and identify
what does the client really want
Stop describing the service and
start describing the transformation.
I'll give you an example.
If you're a consultant who serves large
organizations, what specifically changes
in that org when your engagement ends?
What changes if you work with the leaders?
What changes with the leader?
What do they know, believe, or do
differently now with you there?
What if they never brought you in?
What would that future state
look like without you there?
So I want you to package the outcomes
into offerings in different tiers, and
I want you to anchor your pricing based
on the outcome, not on the inputs.
And this is not a messaging exercise.
This is actually like a restructuring
your offer stack and what you're
selling and what you're charging for it.
So that's step one.
Step two is to use the AI
tools now while you work.
You can't afford to not use them.
And if you tell me that paying two
hundred, five hundred, a thousand bucks
a month is too expensive, my dude,
like you have more ridiculous things
on the line item that you're paying
for that are not gonna add more value.
But you just have to leverage the tools.
Like I personally, quote
unquote, "went back to school."
Like instead of paying tuition
to a school, I paid tuition to
the APIs to figure this out.
That's how I thought about this.
And yes, there were moments where
"Oh crap, I just spent seven
hundred dollars in fifteen minutes.
What did I just do?"
You have to go through
those moments yourself.
You have to learn that way
so you understand the nuance.
The more that you do this, the easier
it is for you to figure out what
works, what doesn't work, versus
just like seeing these tutorials
or checking out this latest tool.
Go straight to the source.
Don't go through these middleman tools
that might be stealing your data.
So feed whatever tool you use, feed
them context, your calls, your thinking,
your emails, execution process.
Yes, set the settings up so
it doesn't train on your data.
Set up the right plans.
Do whatever enterprise plan you want.
Make sure that you're protected,
you protect your clients' data.
Make sure you do that conditionally right.
But you have to start using
this while you execute.
It's not some separate AI initiative.
You don't get these,
the small team to work.
You have to be in the weeds with
your team every single day, at
least for one to two hours a day.
Don't cheap out on this.
This is me telling you to not cheap out.
So set up the tools that actually fit
your workflow and be transparent with
clients when you're using the tools.
The transparency is not a liability.
Actually, your clients are yearning.
Are you gonna be a legacy type of
business or like service provider for
me, or are you actually gonna be on the
frontier helping me go to the future?
That's what your clients
are thinking right now.
Step number three, have someone in your
team build the infrastructure while you
operate, 'cause you're gonna find out
that just having the models is not enough.
You're gonna have the
actual infrastructure.
You have to have a brain, a
database, a hardness, all these
layers working together, as well
as agents, where they store their
data, how you get access to this.
Because if you're gonna be doing the work
anyways, just leverage the agents and
someone working with you to start building
the infrastructure on the back end.
This is not, we'll build the
system later once things slow down.
It's let's build an imperfect system now
and improve upon it every single day.
I want you in step three to become
unrecognizable in ninety days.
I actually think you can do that
in thirty days, but I think ninety
days is a healthy timeframe.
The capacity that you
recapture is not just time.
You're not just gonna get productive.
It's thinking time, and when you have
that thinking time, you're gonna be able
to create net new value, net new offers,
and this is gonna radically transform.
It's "Oh crap, we can actually
do this for our clients that
we didn't think we can do.
Now we can do it.
Let's go ahead and see what
we can do to offer that."
Step four, once the tooling buys you
back time, I want you deploy that time.
I want you to deploy it
into creating more value.
When the capacity comes back,
your questions and your narrative
is gonna go to, "How do I do or
execute this for the client?"
to "How do I use the work
that I'm already delivering to
clients to deliver more value?"
And then you start focusing on compounding
value, and every efficiency or iteration
helps you augment your work and identify
net new ways to create value and help
clients go further and deeper with
their relationship and more belief.
And then for you, you'll be able
to either, increase your offer
suite with the clients to help them
like literally tangental or deeper
vertically, being able to help them
go further and further because the end
outcomes here isn't just automation.
The end outcomes when do you apply these
four steps is you're selling outcomes.
You have systems built.
You're focusing on developing and
earning the partnership with your
clients to go further, and you're
pricing or capturing value with them.
That is the key, and that's what's
possible here, and this is how
AI is going to differentiate your
business model versus someone who's
just staying the same, I personally
believe we're probably like five,
five to 8% in this whole AI shift.
So I know we're early on this, But in
my opinion, if you start now, you'll
be happy than you started later.
So the evolution is already happening.
So when I told the consultant, my client
before we'd done any single session
or any real work, that they're gonna
stop selling their services and stop
selling by the hour, it felt shocking
because the model they built was working.
Like they were running
a pretty good business.
Their clients were happy, revenue
was coming in, and when I made
that suggestion, it felt like, wow,
it's like we're manufacturing a
problem where no problem existed.
But looking back, the
signs were all there.
Revenue was capped by capacity.
There was not as much time as there
is now to think on the calendar to
maximize net new value creation and
not maximizing the impact that work can
make because of the offer structure.
So if you're limiting it only
selling your services, you actually
are limiting the actual impact
you can do with those services.
And the difference between where
they're at now and where they
started isn't just working harder
or that we did a smarter tactic.
The difference is that they redesigned
their business model from the ground
up, and it's a work in progress.
It's not something you just
do in a week and you're done.
But they're moving up the stack,
selling transformation, staying
in the relationship, staying
where judgment and nuance and
belief are the combining forces.
And it's the same goes with you.
The business model you currently
are running is going to evolve.
The real question is, are you going to
evolve and change it when you are forced
to, or are you gonna start taking the
baby steps, even if it's one or two
of these steps that I laid out here?
Small steps and incremental steps
that change how you price, how
you differentiate, how you create
value, how you deliver that
value, and how you go to market.
So depending if you're gonna be
waiting and get pressure to change or
start changing with empowerment now,
both paths will lead to an evolved
model, but one of them is actually
a little bit easier than the other.
And if you're open to discussing and
figuring out how you can evolve your
business, your go-to-market, have someone
support you with everything that I just
set up, go ahead and reach out to me.
You can hit me up on LinkedIn or just
reply here, and we'll go from here.
This is it for Learn On This.
Do good work