Happy Friday! Sorry this newsletter is a day late. We’ve been filming a ton of content around the Dallas Fort Worth area and have some killer content coming out.

I'm building a private community called TKOwners for people who want to turn all these insights into real businesses. We have a slack channel where we drop insane AI tools and possibilities everyday. If you're serious about staying ahead of this AI revolution, check it out at tkowners.com. It's where the hundreds of action-takers hang out.

Let’s get into it:

If you’ve followed any of my content for the last year or so, you know I am bullish on AI. Specifically learning AI to future-proof yourself, and then monetizing that knowledge to help other businesses do the same. Those two things together are one of the most asymmetric opportunities I've seen in years, and the window is wide open right now because most people are still sitting on the sidelines.

That's exactly why I was so fired up to sit down with Corey a few weeks ago. His business model is so simple. He charges $1,000 to do a 45-minute Zoom call with a small business owner, writes up a report of how different ready-made tools to help them, sends it over with explanations (and then has the chance to upsell them on $3,000 to $5,000 implementation projects if he chooses!) He built this from scratch with zero followers, zero ad spend, and zero technical background.

If you’re inspired by Corey’s playbook after reading this- go check out the full episode on Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.

Corey sits down with a business owner, asks where they spend their time and where their biggest headaches are, runs the transcript through Claude, gets a list of tools (not tools that he makes, just ones that could fix those pain points) and delivers a polished report.

Right now, 97% of small business owners are not using AI tools. Not because they don't want to. Because nobody has sat down with them and shown them where to start. You can be that person. You don't need to be an expert. You need to be one week ahead of your client, which takes about seven days of focused studying.

Step 1: Discovery Call

It starts with a 45-minute Zoom call. Your job isn't to show up as an expert. Your job is to ask questions about their struggles and pain points. Then you just listen. You want to understand three things: what does their day actually look like, where are they losing time, and where are they losing leads or revenue.

Corey did all his calls physically over video call, then eventually built a voice agent named Annie who does the calls automatically. The client just calls a number, talks to Annie for 20 minutes, and the transcript pipes straight into a report-generating AI. You don't need that on day one. You just need a Zoom link and a list of questions.

Good questions to ask:

Record the call and get the transcript.

Step 2: Build the Report with Claude

Take the transcript of the call and paste it into Claude. Your prompt can be this simple:

"Here is a transcript of a conversation I had with a small business owner. Identify their top pain points. Then search for off-the-shelf software tools or AI tools that could solve each one. For each tool, include what it does, roughly what it costs, and how much time it could save per week."

Claude will pull tools from directories like Futurepedia and There's an AI For That, map them to the client's actual pain points, and give you everything you need to write the report. You're not inventing these solutions- you're curating them for the client.

Corey's report is structured like this, and you can copy it exactly:

Corey uses a tool called Gamma to turn the output into a beautiful formatted presentation. Upload your Claude output and Gamma handles the design. (It’s really nice.) The whole process, from transcript to polished report, takes about two hours once you've done it a couple of times.

Next week I'm speaking at the Personal IPO Summit alongside other audience-first founders like Sam Parr and Justin Welsh.

I started with 2,300 followers in late 2023. I'm now pulling 100+ million views a month and have 3.7 million followers across platforms. No ad spend at just three hours a week.

I'm bringing the full content system to the summit. Every piece of it, laid out live for the first time. If you haven’t built an audience yet, June is a good time to fix that.

Save your free seat here!

Step 3: Deliver It and Charge $1,000

Send the report to the client 48 hours after the call. Let them sit with it for a day. Then book a quick 30-minute follow-up call where you screen-share and walk through it together. At the end of that call, you introduce the upsell.

Corey started at $200, moved to $500, and is now at $1,000. He found that at $200, clients barely looked at the report. At $1,000, they show up to the follow-up call with notes. They've already invested real money, so they're ready to take the next step. And the next step is where this business actually makes its money.

Step 4: Upsell

The assessment is your foot in the door and already a huge money maker in itself. But likely the client is going to be begging you to help them further. Here's what's waiting on the other side.

Process optimization ($3,000 to $5,000). A lot of small businesses are automating broken processes. Before you touch a tool, you help them fix the workflow itself. That's a standalone engagement. Corey regularly charges $3,000 to $4,000 just for that step, before a single automation is built.

Automation builds ($1,000 to $3,000). Sometimes it's a simple Zapier or Make.com workflow that saves them hours a week. Corey charged $1,500 to build one automation for a wedding venue operator that was spending 30 minutes manually setting up each new client project in Asana. One zap. Done.

Custom AI knowledge systems ($2,000 to $5,000). One of Corey's clients owned a business brokerage. Every time he listed a company for sale, 400 emails flooded in within the first week, and 95% of them asked the same 10 questions. Corey built a custom GPT trained on the listing's marketing materials. Now buyers talk to that GPT first and only 5% of questions make it to the owner's inbox. That's a deliverable you can sell over and over for every new listing.

Speed-to-lead agents ($1,500 to $3,000). This is the highest-ROI upsell in the menu. A lead comes in on a website at 11 p.m. The owner is at dinner. By morning, that lead hired someone else. Corey builds AI agents that respond immediately, personalize the reply, answer FAQs, and book a call with the actual human. For businesses with a high average deal size, one extra closed client pays for this ten times over.

How to Find Your First Clients:

Host a free local AI meetup. Go to Luma or Meetup.com and post "AI for Small Business" in your city. You are the organizer, which automatically makes you the authority in the room. Don't pitch. Just deliver pure value for 20 minutes and capture emails at the door. Corey did his first one at a realtor's office and walked out with assessment clients.

Do free assessments first. Corey gave away his first two or three assessments to get testimonials and work out the kinks. Then he charged $200. Then $500. Then $1,000. Every price increase was backed by social proof. Start with your own network, a peer group, a business association, or even a local Facebook group for entrepreneurs.

Door knock local businesses. I know. Nobody wants to hear this. But door-knocking a local business in 2026 to talk about AI is the easiest conversation you will ever have. You're not selling insurance. You're showing up and saying, "Hey, I help small businesses figure out where AI can save them time." Every single owner you walk into is already thinking about this. You just have to show up.

The Bottom Line: This business has almost no overhead, almost no startup cost, and a built-in upsell ladder that can turn a $1,000 assessment into a $5,000 to $10,000 client relationship. You don't need a product or a warehouse or investors.

You will need seven days of studying AI tools, a Zoom account, and the willingness to ask good questions and listen. Really that’s it. The gap between what business owners know and what's possible with AI right now is enormous. That gap is your opportunity. Don't overthink it. You can just do things.

And again- if you want to find out more- go check out the full episode on Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. And when you start it, come back and let me know how quickly you made 10K net profit!

Have a great week!

Chris

P.S. I share deep dives on business ideas and complete playbooks three times a week on YouTube and every podcast platform.