The client asked Niki what her fee was, and she said $10,000.
She had never sold a consulting engagement before. She’d spent her career in HR, most recently as a chief HR officer, and she’d relocated from New York City to Charlotte with the idea of working for herself.
“I charged a $10K fee. And I was so proud of myself. I will never forget that being my first sale, and leveraging AI to do it.”
Enrollment for The AI Consultancy Project opened this morning, and I want to spend this afternoon on the part of the program that matters most in your first 90 days: getting paid once.
“That gave me the confidence to say, ‘I can do this’”
Here’s what the first gig did for Niki, in addition to the cash in the bank:
“It’s just a matter of, how do I do this at scale and repeat that same kind of success.”
The question changed from can I do this to how do I do it again. That is a critical turning point – and I have designed the entire program to get you to your “first dollar earned” milestone as fast as possible.
The size of that first check matters far less than you might expect, and you’re about to meet students at both ends of the spectrum. The momentum is the same either way.
Niki S., AI Consultancy Project student
“I took a chance on the course and it has paid off”
Stephanie’s first client was a 5-figure deal, and she almost didn’t enroll. She’d done “online courses” before and gotten burned:
“There is just [an] insane amount of programs that pop up.”
“I’ve done a few where I’ve put in the investment, gone through, and then I hit the wall of it being an upsell to something else.”
She skipped the tech rabbit hole and went straight at delivering something useful. Her early work was unglamorous and sat entirely inside the world she already knew: impact reports built from course data, pre-survey analysis, workshop transcripts turned into actionable insights.
Her first client was a five-figure deal. Then she landed a motivational speaker with a 20-year career, the Tony Robbins and Jack Canfield tier, to build an AI-powered quiz and course development system.
Her Slack message when it closed was five words and three exclamation points:
“I have a new client!!!”
What she credits is not the tooling. It’s having the words ready when the conversation finally showed up:
“Listening into [the live sessions] gives me that confidence to have the conversations, do the due diligence in the background, and then pull from the [curriculum] as I need.”