What an AI audit is worth, and how to charge for one

There is a version of AI work you can sell before you can build anything: you sit with a business for two hours, find where their time goes, and hand them a written plan. The counterintuitive part is that charging for it makes it more likely to sell, not less.

Why a free consultation is worth less than a paid one

A free meeting attracts people who like meetings. They will take your two hours, thank you, and do nothing, because nothing was risked. Money makes it a project instead of a chat, and the person who paid actually does the homework you assign.

Climb the ladder, don't jump to the top

Free, then a couple hundred, then five hundred, then a thousand. Each step is the same conversation done with more evidence behind it. You are not waiting to feel ready. You raise it when the last three said yes without flinching.

What you actually deliver

Not a slide deck. A short written document with four things in it: where their hours currently go, the three jobs a machine should be doing instead, what each one would cost to set up, and what happens if they do nothing. That last section is the one that gets read twice.

The upsell menu is the real business

The audit pays for your time. What it is genuinely for is that at the end you are the person who knows exactly what is broken, and you are holding the list of what it costs to fix. Every item on that list is a proposal you have already earned the right to make.

Selling it with no audience

You do not need followers for this. You need ten businesses you can name. The person who walks into ten shops with a specific observation about each one will book more of these than the person waiting for an audience to appear.

The honest caveat

Charging a thousand dollars for a conversation only works when you can carry it. If you have never done the work, do the first few cheap or free on purpose, and be straight about why. Being new is fine. Pretending not to be is what ends badly.

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