Happy Thursday!
Really quick before I dive in, I get this question all the time: “How do I actually make money with all these AI tools?” Thats why I built Playmakers- my AI agency program where I teach you how to charge local businesses $500-$5,000 a month to set up and manage AI for them. You get three live calls a week, plug-and-play automation templates you can deploy for clients on day one, a 5 Day First Client Challenge, and my personal lead lists with businesses in your area ready to connect. 120+ people are already in the community building agencies right now. Go to playmakersai.com and check it out.
Okay, let’s get into it.
I talked to a guy a couple weeks ago who is making $230K a year helping business owners use credit cards they already have. He works from home, has almost no costs, and until recently, almost nobody had heard of what he does.
His name is Colin and he’s 26 years old. Last year, his first full year doing this, he cleared $231,000 in revenue on about $100 a month in software costs. Here is what he does and exactly how you can copy it. And if you’re inspired reading this, go listen to the episode on Spotify or Apple Podcasts!
The Business:
Colin is a credit card rewards consultant. He sits down with small business owners, looks at what they are already spending, and rebuilds their card strategy so they stop leaving thousands of dollars a month on the table. This might sound complicated, but it’s something you can learn fairly quickly. (It’s like AI. If you are a few weeks ahead of the person you’re teaching, your knowledge is invaluable)
Think about your average contractor spending $60,000 a month on materials. He signed up for whatever card his local bank handed him years ago and has never thought about it since. He is probably earning 1% back. With the right strategy, he could be earning 2.5% or 3% on that same spending. On $60,000 a month, that is the difference between $600 and $1,800 in monthly rewards. Colin charges $875, one time, to fix that. The client makes the fee back in weeks.
Nobody is serving this market. “Points” blogs exist everywhere, but they are written for travel hackers and churners. Nobody is sitting down with the plumber or the dentist and walking them through this stuff. That is your opening.
Your Offers
The first is a business consulting package at $875 flat. You do a short discovery call, some research on their spending, and then a 75-minute working session where you build out their full card strategy. You send a follow-up email with everything laid out. When they are ready to book a trip with their new points, you help with that too, all included in the one-time fee.
The second is a trip research service at $300 to $500. Someone comes to your website, tells you how many points they have and where they want to go, and you find the best redemption deal and help them book it. Flat fee once it is done. Colin has two part-time contractors handling most of this now and 35 active trips being managed at this moment. He has never run a single ad for it.
Just start with the consulting package. It is where the real money is and it is what builds your knowledge the fastest.
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How to Get Smart Enough to Start
You do not need to have visited 60 countries. You do not need to have personally redeemed points through every airline partner. You just need to know more than your clients, and that bar is really low.
If you spent a weekend reading the right stuff and prompting AI with questions, you would know more about credit card rewards than 99% of the people you will ever pitch. -The Daily Drop has a free beginner course on their website and it is the best place to start.
-The Points Guy and One Mile at a Time have years of deep strategy, card comparisons, and redemption guides. Read them like a textbook.
-Seats.aero is where you can practice finding real deals before you have a single client. It searches 25 airline programs at once and it is what Colin uses every single day.
You do not need clients to start building credibility. You just need to do the work and share it publicly. Colin's self-training became a LinkedIn post. He spent five hours researching a deal on Turkish Airlines miles for a flight to Hawaii, got all the way to the booking screen, and never pulled the trigger. Then he posted what he found and what he learned. It hit 100,000 impressions with under 1,000 followers. That post sustained his early business for months.
Who to Go After
Your best client is a small business owner spending at least $20,000 a month on credit cards who has never once thought about their rewards strategy. Construction companies, medical practices, restaurants, trades. People with serious spending and zero optimization. Go find the lumber yard owner. Go find the dentist who has been on a 1% cashback card from his credit union since 2014. That is your person.
***Avoid the tech founder crowd. Colin said it himself: those people already think they know everything and they are not that fun to work with.
Your pitch should be straightforward. Tell them you are going to look at what they are already spending, build them a card strategy, and help them book a trip with the points they earn. One flat fee. If you do not find them more value than you charge, they never have to use you again. Almost nobody says no to that framing.
What if someone tries to contact you for credit card deals.. but you miss it. So he goes and books with someone else. That's a customer worth thousands of dollars, gone because nobody picked up. HighLevel's AI Employee fixes this. The moment an inquiry comes in, a missed call, a web form, a text, it responds, qualifies the lead, and books the appointment on your calendar automatically. You're out spraying acres and the business is still selling itself back at the office.
Follow-ups run completely on their own too. Someone got a quote and went quiet? HighLevel nudges him three days later. Most of those conversions never happen without a system catching them. And my readers get a huge deal- go to gohighlevel.com/tkopod for a 30-day free trial.
Get Your First Client:
Start posting on LinkedIn once a day about what you are learning. A deal you found. A card strategy tip. A before-and-after example, even a hypothetical one. The algorithm rewards consistency and this niche has almost no competition on LinkedIn right now.
Charge a founding rate of $400 to $500 for your first five clients instead of $875. Do the work, get five testimonials, then raise your price. Colin started at $75 a call. By the time he quit his job he was at $875 and not turning anyone away.
*One more thing worth knowing. Credit card affiliate links can make some real money too. When you recommend a card and a client signs up through your link, you can earn $300 to $400 per card. Colin said it has become a meaningful part of his revenue without any extra work on his end.
The gap between what most business owners are earning on their cards and what they could be earning is enormous. You do not need to close the whole gap. You just need to close enough of it to justify $875, and that is not a high bar when the contractor you are talking to is leaving $1,200 a month on the table.
Go find that dentist or contractor or other business owner that has no time to think through these points and possibilities on their own. They are not hard to find and they need exactly what you know.
You can just do things.
And again- if you want to learn more about this hustle, go listen to the episode on Spotify or Apple Podcasts! And when you start it, come back and let me know how quickly you landed your first monthly client!
Lastly, I'm always looking for cool, unique businesses to share on my podcasts. If you have one and are comfortable sharing your journey, drop your info here!
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.
