Speaker 1The smallest one was $10,000 a month, the medium plan was $15,000 a month, and the highest was $25,000 a month. And they ended up closing at $15,000 a month. We were looking at the $25,000 plan, and we were like, okay.
Speaker 2You're like, I'm sorry, sir, that's actually not available. That's just a price anchor. I learned about it from Alex Hormozy. You're not actually supposed to pick that.
Speaker 1This took their employees about an hour per proposal. It cut it down to about, like, more or less five minutes.
Speaker 3Ask for money, and you get advice. But ask for advice, and you get money twice.
Speaker 2I don't want people to watch this and be like, oh, he had a rich uncle. How nice. Right? No. Okay. Never met him before. Meet James, Brendan, and Carter. They are 21 to 23 years old college students. And four months ago, James was on a treadmill listening to an episode of this podcast, and an idea hit him. So he called Brendan, and they texted every single contact in their phones asking for advice. And one of those texts turned into a $30 million construction company. Paying them $15,000 a month. No office, no employees, no rich uncle, no connections, just college students. And one of them dropped out of BYU to do this. And by the end of this episode, you're going to know the exact text they sent. Please enjoy. Why don't you guys tell me what you do? What is your business?
Speaker 1Yeah. So we run Certified AI Partners. Simply put, we become a company's AI department. So think like an IT department, kind of that handles everything IT. But we just do everything. We do everything. We do everything. We do everything AI. But rather than locking things down, we unlock things and unlock their capacity to grow with AI.
Speaker 2Okay. What gave you this idea?
Speaker 1Funny enough, we just super quick background. We all kind of did our own AI companies before. I was selling voice agents to HVAC companies. Brendan was doing AEO for companies, and Carter was selling OpenClaw. So we're all kind of looking for ways to grow and make more money because we were selling to small companies. But funny enough, like I said, I was listening to your podcast with Corey Gannon, and he talks about doing an AI assessment for companies. And like a light bulb just struck. I remember I was working out in the gym. I was like, that is genius. And so I got home the next week. I was on a trip, and I called Brendan up. I was like, we should do this. And so we started walking into local companies, offering AI assessments, identifying opportunities. And then from there, we're like, you know, why are we going for software? Why don't we do this for small fish? Why don't we do this for bigger fish? So we kind of moved to like mid-market companies and from there, from doing AI assessments, we're like, well, why don't we just become their AI team rather than selling one-off automations and pricing each one? Let's just do everything for them. And so that's kind of how it started, just a little bit long winded answer.
Speaker 2Okay. So when you say you start, what you started at was walking into small businesses. What did that actually look like? Were you physically walking into businesses and what types of businesses were they?
Speaker 1It was just here in Provo, and it was any and all kinds of businesses like orthopedics, dental offices, insurance companies. It was like, hey, I'm James. He's Brendan. Can we do a free AI assessment for you? It takes 15 minutes. And then that kind of got our foot in the door. And they're like, okay, well, how about we do a bigger one? And then we just kind of kept hitting a wall with the smaller companies of they had the problems, but they didn't necessarily have the budget. And so that's kind of when we pivoted to bigger companies.
Speaker 2Okay. What did that look like? Like, what types of businesses did you start walking in at that point?
Speaker 3So we kind of realized we were like, okay, with these smaller businesses, we're walking in, we're able to find the owner easily. Right. But with these mid-market companies, there's a little bit more of a barrier to entry. Right. And so what really has been working for us is using our existing networks. And so like reaching out to everyone we know in our contacts and saying, hey, who do you know that owns a business of this size that needs help? So literally sending out like hundreds of messages to all of our contacts and asking them that question. And so that's been our number one source of clients and leads is just using our existing network.
Speaker 2And it's like, that's such like an obvious answer, but it's not, and I'm not, I'm not cutting you down. It's, it's like the, it's the answer. I don't care if you have a taco truck, I don't care what you're selling, lemonade stand. You start with the people that you know, the people in your sphere of influence. And people, myself included, shrink from that because it's awkward. It's embarrassing. I don't want to sell to my friends. I don't want to ruin the relationship. But at the end of the day, a business is simply solving problems for other people. So if you love your friends and if you have people that you want to do right by, then try to solve their problems in this case with AI. So what did that actually look like? Are you sending texts, LinkedIn DMs, Facebook messages?
Speaker 3So it started off with just texts. And so just like literally sending out iMessages to our contacts. Saying, Hey, we just started this company. We're looking to help business owners between 10 million and 50 million a year in revenue. And we want to help them with AI, implementing AI in their company. And some of the texts would even say like, Hey, we just want to get your feedback. We just want to get your advice on the business model, what you think, right? There's that funny quote by Pitbull where he says, ask for money and you get advice. But ask for advice and you get money twice. And so. That's pretty good. I've never heard that. Mr. Worldwide strikes again. It's in one of his songs. But basically by asking for advice, you build rapport, you build trust, and they're more willing to give you referrals or even themselves become the client of yours.
Speaker 2Yeah. Well, and it plays to their ego. Yeah, exactly. This guy wants my advice. I like, I like, you know, I've always liked this guy. You know, if he's asking me for advice, he must be pretty smart. I like him.
Speaker 3Yeah. Even in the LinkedIn DMs, we'll sometimes glaze the experience. We'll sometimes say like. Hey, we noticed you have a ton of impressive experience in construction. We've been helping out some construction companies. Could we get your advice on what we're doing? And that way we're able to book a call with them and get them on a call.
Speaker 2Now, are you DMing people on LinkedIn that you don't know as well? Or were you back then or just people that you were like already connected with?
Speaker 3So we started with our existing iMessage contacts. And then once we went through all of those, then we just started going to LinkedIn and looking for ideal customer and then connecting with them. And once they accepted the connection, we send out a DM. Okay. And how old are you guys? So I'm 21. We're all in our early 20s. Yeah. I'm 23.
Speaker 2A little bit. I'm 23 as well. Okay. And are you all in college right now? Yeah. Carter and I are full time. We're at BYU. Yeah. Okay. I was at BYU.
Speaker 4Okay. And where are you now? I just, I dropped out. I'm working full time on this.
Speaker 2Okay. All right. Love it. So what was your first like big, big break when chasing these middle market businesses?
Speaker 3Yeah. So our first big break is we reached out to a CEO of a construction company that covers Utah, Arizona, California. And again, we literally just asked for advice. We're like, Hey, we're looking for advice. He reached out back to us and was like, Hey, I actually think my company needs this. So let's hop on a call and talk about it. And so that was the beginning of our engagement with our first client.
Speaker 2Yeah. And how did that client end up going?
Speaker 1Yeah. From there, we kind of got our foot in the door. By doing a full paid assessment, it was like a thousand dollars, you know? And from there we were kind of like, where do you see bottlenecks in your company? He gave us a few areas. We're like, okay, give us all the people that we need to interview. And then we just sent a survey out to them. And at the end of the survey, they had to book a 30 minute call with us. And so what the survey just kind of twisted on those bottlenecks, got more information, what softwares they're touching. So then when we hopped on the call, say if it was you, Chris, and be like, okay, Chris, you said, I'm going to call you. You said these were the bottlenecks, expound on that. And then we just got more information, have an AI note taker in there. And then from there, we just kind of gathered all this information and made this clean, simple presentation for their C-suite on ranking their AI opportunities, how much ROI it would give them based off of what the employees and the C-suite had told us. And then from there, we priced our retainer at either the smallest one was 10 grand a month, the medium plan was 15 grand a month, and the highest was 25 grand a month. And they ended up closing at 15 grand a month.
Speaker 2How did, like, where did you get the nerves of steel to come up with that pricing structure? Can we be completely
Speaker 1transparent with you? We, we were kind of like, we would have been so happy at 10 grand a month. And I've done door-to-door sales before. I know a little bit about sales, but I'm like, okay, how about let's anchor super high. So we have a lot of room to negotiate. Let's just throw up a 15 grand and a 25 grand pricing plan. So we presented to them. And a helpful thing in these assessments is we build mini working demos. So after we meet with the employees, right, send us examples of the work papers or the invoices that could be redacted or whatnot. And so they gave us examples and we could build these mini working demos of the actually doing the work. And so they get really excited during the call. Like, oh, they've kind of already solved the problem. But getting back to the question is we just kind of threw out those prices so we could anchor high. But. We ended up meeting with the CEO separately, like a few days after. And he's like, yeah, you know, we were looking at the 25 grand plan and we
Speaker 2were like, okay. You're like, yeah, I'm sorry, sir. That's actually not available.
Speaker 1No, all of us were smiling and we're like, we were just like, we were just letting him talk himself into it. But then he wanted to negotiate a few things. We ended up at 15 grand a month. So higher than that we wanted.
Speaker 2Right. Yeah. Was this like your first big fish? This was the first big fish. Yeah. And I forget where you said he came from.
Speaker 3Was that a LinkedIn DM? No. So that was just iMessage outreach. So just reaching out to people we had in our contacts and asking for referrals.
Speaker 2So is he a family friend or how well did you know this person? No, he wasn't.
Speaker 4Oh, go ahead. Or you go, Brandon. I was just going to say, no, he was just a connection that we knew in the Utah County area. So someone we didn't have like really previous connections to, but just a mentor in the area that we reached out to.
Speaker 2Okay. So it's not like, I don't want people to watch this and be like, oh, he had a rich uncle. How nice. Right? No. Yeah. No. Okay. So this, did you charge a thousand for the assessment as well? Yeah. Okay. And I'm, I'm taking, you just, you took the transcript from your call and ran it through Claude and had it make a, a, um, a slideshow, like a deck.
Speaker 4Yeah. So, uh, James actually has that, but basically what we did when we did the interviews, they sent us some of their actual examples. Like one of the processes was, uh, a maintenance proposal for their construction and what they did. And so they sent us actual proposals that they've done in the past and the, um, the field reports that they had, which they then created the proposals out of. And so we had like real examples, real files, our transcripts, and then Claude. Yeah. And then that was it. We were able to help put together the full assessment for them.
Speaker 2Now, I imagine they had like a bunch of problems. What's like a very clear example of a problem that they had that you solved with AI for them?
Speaker 1So we just broke it out into areas, right? Of the biggest operations that we, we didn't interview everyone, but we interviewed a lot of people and this is what we like categorize it as. A good example to answer your question was this construction company, they do a lot of maintenance on these big storm wells. And so they have to go out, clear out debris, water, if it's clogging it up. And so they get an inspection report of those wells and about how much time it's going to take them to clean. And from there, they create a price proposal for how much that job is going to cost, send it off to the HOA or whatever property, and they either approve or deny it. And so on average, this took, um, their employees about an hour per proposal, uh, based off of everyone that we interviewed. And so we just mapped out how. They do it now. And then we mapped out the steps that AI could take off their plate and how much that would save them. And based off, we can show you the demo as well. It cut it down to about like more or less five minutes. Uh, and so we built this demo with the examples that they sent to us of how they went through it. And this is a working, working demo with the ones that they sent us. It just kind of goes through counts, the amount of structures that they're going to have to clean, how much debris is in there. And then prices it based off of that. And so this is what we presented to the C-suite.
Speaker 2Okay. And were they just like, were they just like floored?
Speaker 1Oh, you should have seen their faces. They were like, oh my gosh, like this is working. Like, cause they see, they see their, they gave us their problem. And then in front of them, they're seeing it being solved. And so you can see like, here was what the real employee got. They ended at 3,575. And with our first trial. With the automation and all the info we gathered, we ended at 300, 3,375 and they can adjust the pricing in here, but yeah. So then seeing it live was like shock factor for them.
Speaker 2What was the revenue of this company?
Speaker 1They're doing about 30 million a year.
Speaker 2Okay. Um, I'm assuming like Boomer owned or close to it. Been in business for a while.
Speaker 1Yeah. Yeah. The owner's about in his like forties and so.
Speaker 2Okay. Okay. So not quite. Yeah. Um, all right. What, what clients were you able to acquire after this? And how, sorry, how long have you been at this? Like a few months, right? Yeah. This was about like a month ago.
Speaker 1So this is like maybe two and a half months in.
Speaker 2Okay. Yeah. Um, yeah. So this was like your big break at this size of a business. Has anything happened in this, in this range sense?
Speaker 4So we're on our, on track to sign like two more clients. So we're on track to sign like two more clients.
Speaker 2on the top of their mind. But it's just like, there's just a lot of trust conveyed there. Like, you know, this guy gets me because he's from where I'm from. Yeah. And of course it doesn't mean you can't scale this. It just means like, if you're going to start somewhere geographically, might as well start where you are.
Speaker 4Yeah. Yeah. A lot more leverage. 100%. We started where we're at and now we're, we have the trust there. But another thing we figured out too, is like in our circle of connections, if we say we know 500 people that trust us, if you reach out to those 500 people, each one of those probably has 500 people that trust them. And so our way of branching out of that is starting with the people local to us, but then figuring out who they know. And then the trust can instead be conveyed from the location, but through the people that we know. And so like anyone, if you think you don't know a lot of people. You probably have a couple hundred followers on Instagram, followers on LinkedIn, you got contacts on your phone, and then those people don't all live next to you. And so that's how we can start growing outside of just Utah County.
Speaker 2Yep. What advice would you have for people wanting to start a business like this?
Speaker 3Oh man. I think the best advice is just find something to sell, like find a repeatable problem, and then just send outreach. Honestly, it's just about taking action before thinking. I think too many people get stuck in the loop of like, redefining business ideas over and over. But honestly, when we started, like, we didn't even have the idea fully formed out. We just started reaching out to people. We just started sending a ton of texts every single day, and it ended up with a huge client. And so, you know, just start sending those messages.
Speaker 2I mean, there are over 1.2 million management consultants in the U.S. alone. Um, 10 years from now, how many AI consultants will there be? Like probably more, probably more. So they're like the, the, the ocean is very, very large when it comes to this type of business.
Speaker 1Yeah. And there's a, go ahead. One thing I would just add to that is, um, Corey Gannon kind of touches on this, but it can be daunting to feel like, you know, who am I to know more about AI than these companies? But I mean, we're, we're talking to business owners every week and it's very apparent that they're at. The, they're using it as like a search bar side of things. Like they're, they're at the beginning right now. And it's, you know, even just a little bit more than them. Like you could be going in and teaching them about, here's how to use chat. Here's how to connect it to your softwares. And that alone is invaluable. But then you start to identify all these other things that you can do. So just get started.
Speaker 2There's a lot of places in life where it's, it's a mistake to be overconfident. Like if I walk into the gym and think I can bench 500 pounds, I can kill myself. Yeah. But when it comes. To AI and like selling AI consulting services, you need to assume that you are better at AI than the vast majority of people. And if you're just listening to this podcast right now, you're probably in that group. Exactly. It's when we think like, what do I know? Who am I? I don't, I just, all I'm doing is putting MCPs together with Hermes agent and putting open clause on my Mac mini. Like, what do I know? Or are they, all I'm doing is, you know, fixing my radiator with chat GPT. Like, I don't care. Like. Don't assume that people are better than AI than you, because that means you won't have the confidence to ever talk to them and do anything. Like, even if it's a false confidence, at least just have it so you can start talking to people and learning as you go.
Speaker 1Yeah. Cause that, that stuff alone is more than what? 90% of people touching AI. Like it may seem normal to us or cause I've listened to your podcast for the past two years and heard all the AI stuff. It kind of seems normal by now, but it's like, then you step outside of it and you're like, Oh, they're nowhere near. Where we are yet.
Speaker 2Yeah. Yeah. My, my brother-in-law works for a $60 million business in Alabama. And it sounds like the type of business that you would work with. And he was in a board meeting and there were like 20 people on there. And he asked them like, how many of you guys use chat GPT? And I think three hands went up. Yeah. And this is like, this is in like 2026. Yeah. Like, what are we doing? $60 million company. And he started showing them stuff and he's like an alien from another planet. He's like their God now. And he's just like prompting chat GPT. He's not making agents or anything like, yeah, just don't assume. No, do not assume at all.
Speaker 4And I think that's why there's such a big opportunity for people like us. Like as far as like the industry, we are in the bottom of the totem pole. We have very little experience in the business industry. We're young, but people are looking to us as the experts on AI just because we have a little bit more experience than them. And so I think like everyone listens to that. And I think that can fit into that category. Like, oh yeah, you just learn a little bit about AI. You can be known as the expert in AI to these massive, massive companies that are out there.
Speaker 2What, what tools out there are worth learning today? Like as of today that if people want to do what you do, they should learn these tools to better monetize.
Speaker 1Yeah, I would say for you need to be on Claude for sure. I'd say preferably Claude code or codex and honestly the 80 20 of it is you need to know how to use those tools and how to connect like MCPs and APIs. If you know those two things, you have a lot of weight that you can throw around and things that you can do in the business because that unlocks a whole different world of things that you can do.
Speaker 2Yeah. Um, any other kind of random tools? Like what did you use to build your website?
Speaker 4Yeah, I would say one that I really liked is railway. Um, it's super easy to connect to and basically what it does is it hosts things. So you can host your website, you can host custom apps or agents that you build on it and also has database to store information. So essentially you could spin up, uh, an AI agent that works like an employee in a company just with railway and it's all right there. So I would say railway, another, another tool that I've really been loving is called Composio and it solves the problem of MCPs. So you can connect any number of MCPs to Composio and then it's one single MCP. And so like I have five gmails connected to my one Composio and it's one MCP for clock. That's cool. Really helpful.
Speaker 2Oh, I've been looking for that actually because you probably have lots of emails that you work with. Oh, I've got like seven and
Speaker 4I'm over here like disconnecting
Speaker 2MCPs like a Neanderthal and reconnecting because like go search for this now search for this. Yep. Yeah. Brilliant. So one connection has many different
Speaker 4ways to connect to your cloud. Yeah. Awesome. Like for gmail, for example, you can have as many gmails connected as you want. Um, and you just connect it once to your cloud or your codecs like that's it.
Speaker 2Any, uh, when it comes to like doing AI audits or making these presentations, do you have any like prompting tips? Yeah, I would say, or model tips
Speaker 1to use, I would say a lot of it comes from like obviously garbage in garbage out. So if you can make sure that your interview with them and. Uh, we, we just have a simple survey that we send out to them that kind of identifies the bottlenecks, what softwares are using, and that that's before the interview. And so if we can gather as much ammo as we can before we go to clone and say, okay, what are the opportunities? Um, I wouldn't say there's any special prompt, honestly. It's like, well, let's identify what's possible. What does that mean for them? ROI wise, based off of what they told me, how, how much hours they spend on X, Y, Z task, how much they get paid or, you know, how. How much they're paying this specific team. Um, I don't think there's no special prompt. It's more just making sure you get as much ammo before you go to Claude and spin up your presentation. That will help you a lot. And, and, uh, and then, okay. Um, anything else?
Speaker 4Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. I would just add to that, uh, something that's helpful to me because like, I may not be an expert in sales or I may not be an expert, um, in automating things, but other people are, and so one thing you can do, like, I know. Elon Musk has a very, has a five-step process to automating things. And so you can tell your cloud, Hey, act like Elon Musk and apply his five-step automation process to this problem that we're trying to solve. And then it thinks in a way that is using the expertise and wisdom of other people, um, to be able to give you a really good output. And so like, if it's sales, like, Hey, act like Alex Ramosi here, how would you draft this, um, proposal to a company? And so. I think that's an easy way to prompt without having to follow like a specific prompt structure.
Speaker 2Yeah, I, I agree. And I think that one line is so smart, like act like so-and-so because it's, if you don't tell it that it's going to get the average, right. It's going to get the average of all the advice out there on the internet about the one thing and average is just that it's average. But if you think that Elon, Alex, or whoever has above average or significantly above average advice with regards to a funnel, you're making a website, a web. Yeah. Or whatever, then you have to ask it, or it just won't know. It doesn't know what's in your head.
Speaker 1Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2Guys, where can we find you? If you want to learn more?
Speaker 3Yeah. So you can find us at certified AI partners.com. Um, all three of us are on LinkedIn. We're all active posting a lot on there. Also the LinkedIn company page, certified AI partners. Um, and we're also on every social out there. So beautiful. Anything else that people should know about you? I think I'll say like. start, like if we can do it, like we're all in our early twenties, we don't have much career your experience. And if we're able to close these big deals, like anyone can do it. Yeah. I love it. All right. Thank you guys.
Speaker 2Yeah. Thank you, Chris. Thank you, Chris. Hey guys, if you're still listening to this, it's probably because you haven't had a chance to take your AirPods out. You're still mowing the lawn. You're still driving. What have you, if you're still here with me, I would really, really love and appreciate a five-star review on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. It would mean a lot. If you want to go the extra mile, share this episode with a friend that might have an interest in starting a business. It would mean a ton. Hope you have the best day of your life today.
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