Brett and Naveen break down how GenX escapees can use AI to work faster, earn more, and de-risk the leap from corporate. You’ll learn where AI actually helps (and where it doesn’t), how to turn your experience into simple, repeatable, AI-enabled services, and why singles (small wins) beat swinging for enterprise home runs when you’re solo. Think: micro-SaaS, productized services, and month-to-month offers that business owners can say “yes” to quickly.

Key Takeaways

• GenX Advantage: We’ve lived analog → digital → internet → mobile. We know how to train people—now we train AI. We also know when outputs are “off.”
• AI as Fractional Workforce: Treat AI like your on-demand researcher, analyst, designer, scheduler, and SDR. One subscription, many “roles.”
• Start with Singles: Stop chasing six-figure whales out of the gate. Package $1–5K/month services that solve one need deeply, repeat it across clients.
• Outcome > Hours: Price the result (clean CRM, personalized outreach engine, faster proposals), not your time. AI compresses hours into minutes—that’s the point.
• Productize the Process: Turn your workflow into a mini system: inputs → AI-assisted steps → valuable output. Reuse 80%, customize 20%.
• Risk Wins Deals: Month-to-month + clear ROI beats open-ended fractional promises for most SMBs.

Practical Use Cases We Cover

• Lead gen & personalized outreach at scale

• CRM cleanup & contact enrichment

• Proposal/slide creation (e.g., Gamma)

• Research & meeting prep “briefings”

• Contract review & red-flag summaries

• Agents & light automations (only after nailing the manual workflow)

Simple Monetization Paths (Examples)

• $2–5K/mo: “Done-for-you” outbound engine (200 targeted emails, replies routed, CRM updated).
• $1–3K flat: CRM cleanup + enrichment + basic dashboard.
• $1–2K/mo: Founder research briefs + talk tracks before key meetings.
• $3–8K setup + $1–3K/mo: Build a lightweight, repeatable micro-SaaS/workflow (pricing, content kits, hiring screens) for a niche.

Timestamps

• 00:00 Intro & why AI is a GenX superpower

• 03:30 From big-corp AI to solo/SMB impact

• 06:10 Training people vs. training AI (and knowing “good”)

• 11:20 AI as your fractional team: practical tools & roles

• 16:45 Thought partner use case (Brett’s real examples)

• 23:30 Singles over home runs: structure simple wins

• 29:45 Value pricing when AI compresses your time

• 34:20 Risk, ROI, and easy “yes” offers for SMBs

• 38:45 Partnering to productize (stack skills → stack revenue)

• 42:50 Action plan & where to find Naveen

Memorable Lines

• “AI is the great equalizer—your fractional workforce in one subscription.”

• “Don’t sell AI—sell a solved problem that AI helps deliver.”

• “GenX knows what ‘good’ looks like. That’s the edge 20-somethings can’t fake.”

Resources Mentioned

• Explained Consulting: explained.consulting

• Gamma for slide/proposal generation

Hey Navin, welcome to the Corporate Escapee podcast. My pleasure. Excited about this one. We talk, we're going to do all things AI, right? How GenXers can make money from AI, escapees specifically, and kind of the genesis for this. I've been meaning to bring you on to talk about AI just because of your background, what you're doing today. But I had Megan Collier on the podcast maybe a month ago now talking about user generated content and folks haven't heard about that.

Thank you for having me.

it piqued a lot of interest and I know that's one pathway to make money. think AI, Gen X and AI is another way to make money. So I thought, you know what, let's bring on the expert to talk all things AI. So maybe you get started. Why don't you just share with the audience a little bit about your background, what you're working on today and we'll dive into it.

Thanks, Brett. really appreciate you having me on. This has been a great experience being part of the collective. But from a background perspective, I've been working at big corporate agencies for a while, basically working in big corporate, helping other big corporations use AI and figure out ways to do marketing as a whole. They had DeepPockets, which gave me an opportunity to really play with cutting edge technologies right from the get-go, which has been fantastic. But I also feel like that also kind of held me back a little.

right, because the way that corporations work and we know how the bureaucracies of corporations and 15 different departments that I'll have to get involved in. Imagine doing that with another agency that has their own 15 different departments that have to get involved. So I found it to be very challenging to kind of push the envelope on what AI could do. So what I did was basically kind of took a pivot, right? So I took some of the learnings that I gained from big corporations and how they're using AI.

especially in an industry like marketing that was being disrupted with chat TVT and mid journeys and all those type of things and said, how can I bring that to smaller businesses? How can I bring that to solo entrepreneurs and or small businesses that are just trying to get off the ground with AI and understanding what can be done? AI has come down in pricing, right? That it's no longer a tool of the rich. And it's something that we have to figure out how we're going to use it. We start thinking about it from the perspective of how to optimize and how to gain

out of the businesses. So I started to explain consulting as a way to kind of educate and build strategies and consult with small businesses to try to figure out how they can leverage it to get the efficiencies that they need to win in this marketplace.

Yeah, that's awesome. Well said. So if I was going to do your intro, I never would have got to that point. and that's what I love about this, right? Because big corporate, you gain the perspective, the understanding. Sometimes they have the budgets and the deep pockets, as you mentioned. There's red tapes there, right? So you really can't go test and do many experiments and figure out where the biggest return is going to be. So again, I think.

Ha ha.

the

Yeah.

Well, or they do a lot of experiments and it just kind of falls flat after somebody else, a lawyer gets involved or somebody else gets involved and says, don't know if that's the direction or it's going to eat into our other business lines. Let's stop talking about this or that. And you're just like, but this is where the industry is going. This is what we need to be investing in. And it just makes it so difficult to have those conversations with the right people. Right.

Exactly. And again, I think, we're so, it seems like we've been talking about AI forever, but we're still in the infancy of this, right? And we're learning the ups, the downs, and we can get into some of those challenges. But, you know, one thing I think you and I share the perspective is that GenX coupled with AI can be a really powerful tool, right? Because AI needs that knowledge and wisdom that 20 somethings do not have, you know, and again, the other thing, GenX, we've been through

technology pivots in evolutions, right? it's that so love your perspective on this. I kind of prodded you into a direction, but feel free to disagree with me but

Yeah.

That's No, no, I 100%. We are definitely the bridge generation, right? We've seen the analog world turn into a digital world. We've seen the advent of the Internet as a whole and then social media and all the different tools that we've had to adapt to. I think we are best suited to understand how to take advantage of new tools when they're put in front of us. Because you know, and you look at you look at the generation before us and they are.

kind of stuck in their ways. They've done certain things a certain way and that's just the way they are. If you look at the generation after us, they also kind of always had the tools, always kind of worked within the space. We are the ones who had to kind of learn to adapt and change the way we work. AI is doing the same thing. It's a new tool that gives us that perspective of like saying, how do we change? The other thing that I think that sets us up differently is we are the generation that kind of trained the next generation. We understand how to train things, right?

We've trained people, now we're training AI. So we're in a position where we have the years of experience of understanding how to do things well, but then we've also trained, we've also taught people how to do things. You think about what an AI is, you're basically teaching what does good look like? How should a answer be created? What is a good output, right? We've done that work already. Now we're doing it instead of to a Gen Z-er or a millennial, we're doing it to an AI solution.

Good point.

but the output is the same. So we're kind of got that training and mindset in place. We also know what good looks like, right? I think that's another aspect that our experience gives us that we know when we get slop back from AI, how do we have to ask the question differently? What is it that we need to do to get the answers that we're looking for? You can only get that within years of experience. So we're kind of on that bridge where we know what good looks like because we've been there for a while.

but we also adaptable enough that we can say, do we take the advantage of these tools? And that really gives us the sense of how to use, how we're well positioned to become the operators of AI. And then just on a personal note, I think the other aspect of this thing is that we're all at that age where we're trying to be as efficient with our time as possible, right? When you're younger, you have all the time in the world to try to figure out how to do things or even if it takes a little bit longer to do things, you can kind of figure out your way around it. We have to be good.

Yeah.

We have to be good quickly, right? So we have that motivation that exists within us to sit there and say, what tools can I take advantage of that are available to me now that are gonna make me as efficient and as productive as possible? And we will jump on that. We will take advantage of it we will try to make it work for the models in the after place. So that's kind of why I think we are in a generational pivot that we can take advantage of that I think, you've talked about it too.

Yeah.

take our experience and turn it into something positive, right? Versus where corporate looks at it and says, that's a negative aspect that you're older and you're too expensive. Let's take that and turn it around on its head and say, our experience is what differentiates us.

Yeah. And so two things, one, I'm going to go back and reiterate. Yeah. Cause again, in our corporate career, who was the ones that had to figure out to go from analog to write the internet and how that changed. Right. We went from, beepers and pay phones, right. was big change to cell phones and then mobile guess who had to figure out how to implement and integrate that into the business. Most businesses or many businesses still aren't very good at that. Right. They couldn't figure out legacy, how to do it. But we, as a generation, we're the ones responsible

Right.

before doing that. So now that we're here with AI, we got 20 to 30 years of business experience, who better to understand, right, how this would impact you. So 100 % agree with you there.

Yeah, I mean, what you're referring to is the workflow changes that have to occur and how do we adapt to those workflow changes, right? Invoices still need to get paid, but the way that you get them paid, the way you figure out how to create them or whatever changes, and we are the best adapted to that versus other people are like, I don't know what that existing structure is and how do we change it? So being a change agent is perfect for us.

Yeah, a hundred percent agreed. And the other thing you talked about the productivity, think is absolutely true. And so there's two things again, I found it. You're a little newer in your escapee journey, but when you're in corporate, 80 % of your day is already preset with meetings and projects that you're working on. may even be more than that in some weeks, right? All of a you're going to the solo world. You own everything, right? And maybe you had people that helped you do certain things before a different function did things for you. So being.

Mm-hmm.

able to use this tool has been a lifesaver for me as it's grown. again, I'm, you're like, put you at expert level. I'm like novice level, but at novice level, it's unbelievably helped, you know, get me and streamline my day, just things that took an hour, an hour, three minutes, right? You're like,

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, there's two aspects to what you're referring to. One is the offset of like, hey, how do I do this on my own? I've always had people I depended on or functions that I didn't really have to worry about how to handle. And now all of a sudden I'm scared to kind of go out on my own because I don't know how to, you know, design a logo. I don't know how to build a website because I'm an HR coordinator, right? But I wanted to go solo. Now all of a sudden you're like in that zone where you're like,

I need help, but I can't afford to hire a whole bunch of people because I'm kind of going on my own. I don't know how to do that. Like as a design, as a developer, I've always had designers or UX and engineers that have been part of the conversation. AI is the great equalizer. Right? It's your fractional workforce that you have access to that didn't exist even five years ago that you didn't have that tool. You need to hire people or you need to team up with other people.

You know, the idea of being able to kind of go out on your own, sitting there saying, hey, I need some fractional help with an analyst. I need fractional help with a CFO. I need fractional help with a designer. I need fractional help with XYZ. Those are all tools that you now have access with one subscription to an open AI or a cloud type function that exists. And then on top of it, you know, you have tools that are kind of built into the, into

use case based solutions like gamma AI is a great solution for building PowerPoints before you'd sit there and say, I can create a script, but then I handed it off to a design team that would turn it into a PowerPoint site. That's what gamma AI can do for you now, right? You give it the proposal, you give it a presentation and says, let me go ahead and restructure this thing, make it look pretty, add a whole bunch of clip arts to it and whatnot. Then you're also gonna have a production ready solution that's ready to hand off to clients, right?

And that's where I think a lot of the power of what AI can do as far as starting off in your career and starting to say, how can I start this thing on my own? You can because AI can be your co-pilot. It can help you kind of get over that hump of saying, what if I need assistance with this? And I do think that other having conversations, having our deep catalog of individuals that we can lean on helps with that as well. Cause then we can start to validate some of the answers that we get back. But we can start understanding what that looks like.

And we can start working with AI to start saying, hey, can you be my sales engineer for me and tell me how to get this thing out the door? Can you help me be a marketing expert and help me write content? And those are the types of functions that exist within AI, especially in today's latest batch of tools.

Yeah, makes sense. And I do want to drill deeper into the kind of the service aspect, the expertise of knowledge, right? That is helpful, right? So the way I look at AI and all these functions, it'll give you the good foundational, right? It'll ask you, if you prompt it the right way, it'll ask you, have you thought about these things? So it should get you to the 101 things that you may not have known, but there's still a ton of value in like somebody, I could yes work with an AI

agent let's use an agent right it's relatively new term but it's popping up yes I could you know work my way through it and figure out how to create it and probably get it to the 80 % where it's doing the right thing or I could partner with somebody like you who can give me the supercharged version of it right that gets you where I need to go a lot quicker so again kind of I'm not I want to segue quite yet into the

Mm-hmm.

Right.

the revenue opportunities, but you're starting to see where the opportunities lie, right? Somebody that's got your experience and the technical, you're double whammy, but there's a bunch of us that don't have the technical that have the knowledge that we could use this.

That's the beauty of where AI is when you're going out solo and you're starting to say, I have to use this AI. It is natural language, right? It is human language that you're talking to. You're talking to a computer, but it's in context of that. Like, hey, can you help me analyze this report? Can you do some research on this company that I'm looking at? Can you help me schedule a meeting? Those are all things that you would be talking to a human about. You can talk to it. So I think...

One of the things that make AI so different from other technologies is that it's adapting to the way we think and the way we talk about things versus the way that other technology adoptions have to occur, which is we had to kind of learn how to work within its structure, right? So if you kind of imagine when Google first came out, right, we had to learn how to ask it questions to get the search results we wanted. We had to understand the tricks and the treats. People made whole industries around how to do SEO and

how to get your content to kind of show up right and all this other stuff that existed out there. AI allows you to kind of have that, to get to that 80 % mark is not a huge hurdle. It is a very easy bump up because you ask it what you want in very human nature language, right? It's that other 20 % that says, hey, I think I'm ready to kind of go to the next level. How do I kind of adapt to that change? And I think that's where...

You know, you got to kind of sit there and say, this where I need to spend my time? Is this what the value is and what does that agent? You know? Yes, yes, exactly.

Yeah. Who, not how, right? One of my favorite books of all time still is right there's, there's opportunity, you know, and this kind of leads to where we're going. And I've been preaching more about this lately is AI doesn't, the world's built on tribal knowledge. Big corporations is absolutely built on tribal knowledge. AI does not understand tribal knowledge, right? It'll make it up. And that's where your years of experience will play as a benefit because you understand how to look under the rocks.

Right.

or where the knowledge is pockets of information is buried somewhere that AI is just going to give you a generic based on the learning model or the language model. I'm not going to go over my skis on the technical side of it, but what it's been trained and there's no way for these small businesses or larger businesses that it can get inside and really understand, right? What's, what's driving process or the, these types of areas. So that's why I think when I'm sorry.

That's right.

What's been trade-off?

Yeah, I was just going to say I think the first thing that you gotta be thinking about when you going down this pathway, even before you get to agents, what's a good prompt look like, right? What does it look like to get the answer? If you give it a generic prompt, you're going to get a generic answer back, right? If you ask it a question like create me a job description for an HR admin, you're going to get a very generic answer. But if you know, because you were in that industry, you understand what it looks like.

Yeah.

You can ask it a very specific question. Hey, these are the criteria as I'm looking forward. These are the specifications that I want. Can you create me a job description that matches these needs? All of a sudden you're going to get a result that's going to be mind blowingly accurate, right? Because you've keyed you added keywords, you've added context, you've added structure to the to the prompt itself to get a very good answer. Then you take that and you start saying what's the next level to that, right? It's like hey, let me give it some examples of what's a good example. So.

I already have a few job descriptions. I've already got some that I've already used. I've got resumes that I've matched the requirements that I'm looking for. Let me feed that into the engine. Let me ask it questions. Let it ask me questions about what I'm looking for. And now all of sudden you have a conversation. So you've gone from asking for it to do something to now being a co-pilot and coordinator with you and working with you to do stuff. And that's like the first step to get into that stage of like, hey, help me build an agent. The next step after that starts getting into

Yeah.

Can I automate this thing so I can just click a button and have it just kind of spit out an answer already knowing the full context of everything else that I want to have done in place?

Yeah. And that's where I want to go next, but let's maybe tie off on the use case for solos, right? Maybe I'm new or I'm just starting to play with, you know, one of the things, a hundred percent of my content, right? I fed all my podcasts in there. So it gets and understands kind of my natural language, the way I speak, it understands how passionate I am about escaping these types of things. But where I've really found some good value is using it as a thought partner.

Mm-hmm.

Right.

Mm-hmm.

Meaning, Hey, I'm thinking about doing this with the collective. What am I missing? Or can you go find me other examples? Is this price point in this area and start to get some back and forth? It doesn't replace the human, but we don't always have access to somebody. And it's just from a, again, a thought partner driving through process has been incredibly helpful. And I think that's an underappreciated aspect, or maybe I just don't hear people talking about that part enough.

great example.

That's right.

Yeah, I think you're right. I don't think people are looking at us that thought partner as a sounding board, one that's available for you 24 hours a day. I think to your point, it's great to be able to have that conversation with somebody, but you have a limited amount of time with another human. got to coordinate it. AI is there for you 24 hours. You can get to a point where you feel pretty confident, and then you can go bounce that idea off a person and expert in that field or that area. Say, hey, this is where I was leaning towards.

Now it's a 10 minute conversation rather than a two hour time, which you probably wouldn't be able to get with that individual anyways, because they're busy living their lives too, right? So I think those are really good use cases. I think some of the other use cases that are kind of out there from an office perspective, from a front office perspective, we talked a little bit about, about like lead gen, right? Scraping websites, getting databases. think sales outreach is a great example of putting stuff out there for personalized emails, right? Getting that out there.

If you're not necessarily strong on the sales side of it and you're like, have great ideas. I don't know how to get it in front of people. AI can be a great way to sit down and say, how am going to get lead gens? How do I put the sales pitch together? How do I create mockups of what this thing could look like? Use AI, use the tools that exist to kind of do that for you. And then go in as a human and do validation. Make sure it looks right. Make sure it has your language. Make sure you kind of update it and then feed it back into the system so the next time you do it, it already kind of knows that.

Right? So that kind of keeps learning from you. CRM lookups, right? Being able to continue to kind of going back to your existing client list and being able to go back and say, hey, we've sold them on this. Can we sell them on something else? That's another great way. And then there's more of the back office type stuff that I think has been really good for contract negotiations. I think whenever you have a contract, you should probably put it in through chat, say, hey, read a pass through this. Tell me what I'm not seeing here.

And then have that come back to you and say, here are some key points that you should be looking at. Scheduling, reminders, blog posts. I think you use it for some of your LinkedIn posts that you probably do for helping you write some of those things. I found it very useful when I'm talking to prospects for it to be a researcher. Research this company. Here's a domain name. Go research this company. If you find this person, research them.

yeah, yeah, yeah.

Find out what you can tell me from their LinkedIn profile. Tell me everything I need to know about every single person I'm gonna meet today before I get in there so that way I already have a familiarity with who I'm talking to and what they might be looking for and interested in, which sets me up to have a much more successful meeting with the client before we even have our first conversation, right? So I have a researcher at my fingertips.

Yeah. I, it's, it's good. If I don't give you a concrete example of that. Cause with the podcast now I've always been, uh, when I look for guests, it's something that intrigues me one way or the other. even if I don't have a direct tie into the escapee world, I know there's value somewhere. And so that's been super helpful. said, Hey, I've got, you know, I've got a guy coming on the podcast tomorrow. He's 25. So definitely not Gen X.

You

But his background, right, he was a division one quarterback in football, decided after a senior year to transfer to walk on to play basketball and then developed the nickname chief energy officer. And just what I wanted, and I'm like, I know there's a tie into Gen X that are stuck in corporate and what some of these young people are doing today. And so I threw it into my, my chat GPT and say, Hey, here's what I'm thinking. Right. What do you think based on all these other podcast episodes, you know, where I'm going with these like, yeah, here's

perfect here's the things this is here I would tie it in and then I can go through and say yeah that makes perfect sense so again it helps it just makes things cleaner more efficient and yeah and actually I'll give you one more example that you'd not proud you'd probably do this in your sleep but I created an agent just to every time it just it goes through my Gmail every time there's a

Mm-hmm.

email then with the reply it creates a contact in a Google Sheets form basically a mini CRM that now automates pulls it out hey here's what the was and here was the last interaction date with it so I know there's a next level I can say with follow-up and all these things but for me that was huge in just getting it so I don't have to scroll through my notes every single time now it's it's automated to start doing that

Right.

And it's fantastic use case. think that is the struggle with a lot of people who are trying to figure out how to use AI. They want to go to the nth degree. They're thinking, you know, especially those of us that came out of enterprise, it's like, oh, here's what Salesforce, you got to replicate Salesforce if you're going to do something. And you're like, you don't have to, right? Start small, do things at the level that you feel comfortable with. I would rather see a whole bunch of singles than a home run right off the bat because you're at least moving forward.

What ends up happening a lot of times is that you keep swinging for the fences and you keep striking out and then you just get frustrated, right? It's like, if you just go for that single, go for those doubles, go for the small wins, you're more likely to kind of see success after success and you're building on that success and you're starting to say, hey, I've added some stuff into the database. Now I'm going to have that database, pull some extra records. I'm going to add some extra value to it and I'm going to keep getting better and better at it rather than saying,

If I don't build an entire research organization, what's the point, right? I think that's the challenge with it.

Right, right, right. And again, just incrementally better. It didn't take me a ton of time. So that's one thing I've definitely figured out over five years is simplicity kills. Don't overcomplicate this at all. And it took a long time to figure it out. And I still have to remind myself to follow those rules.

Right. Right.

But let's transition a little bit. So most of this audience is thinking about if I work, I'm getting away from enterprise. If you still want to take AI into enterprise, there's opportunities. But for this discussion, let's talk about the small business, right? Because as much as I would argue that these businesses need a lot of help in a lot of different areas before AI is the solution, they all want to talk about AI.

Mm-hmm.

Right.

that the question becomes if I'm in any of these functional areas from finance to CRM to sales marketing, and I want to work with small business and leverage AI just because that's what they want to talk about. I may be framing this too deep, but so let's talk about small business needs with AI where you see the opportunity. And then let's talk about how we could potentially make money off of where those opportunities lie.

Yeah, a lot of small businesses, right? Their core business isn't AI. It's not technology. 99 % of them aren't technology companies. They are either, you know, they run an HVAC factory. The example I always use is that they make hammers for living, right? That's what they do. They're a factory. They make hammers. That's what they know how to do. They do that well. They might have an IT group that makes sure that their servers and their machineries and all that stuff is working, but they're not going to invest the time and energy to learn AI.

That's where they're looking for you or looking for help from our collective or for our team. Just sit there and say, Hey, I need this assistance. I need to figure out a way to do X, Y, Z. Here's my problem. Here's what I need help with. The reason why you hear a lot of people just talking about AI is that there's this assumption that it's magic. It's like, it's going to somehow solve all the, yeah, it's a silver bullet. It's going to solve all the things. Reality is, is that it's our intelligence that we put behind the AI as a tool that makes it really powerful.

The silver bullet.

Right? So if you have it, if you have a skill, if you have something that small businesses need, what you're really looking for when you say, I want to use AI to enable it is what you're talking about is scale. How can I use AI to take something that I already know how to do, build it into a machine, into a structure that can then be scaled to multiple groups. So I look at it and say, Hey, you know, the SAS models, the micro-SAS models that exist out there is kind of where you want to lean into. Right? So

I know how to do pricing really well. I know how to do marketing. I know how to create content really well. Well, how can you take what you know how to do really well? Build a structure around it so that way somebody can come to your website, come to you and say, hey, I have this problem. I need you to build a solution that allows me to click a few buttons, type in an idea. And behind the scenes, you're going through your workflow. You're going through your automation that you're doing, but you're having AI do it because you've trained that AI.

on how to do those steps in a certain sequence, in a certain order, to get some value back out of it. So that is the magic sauce that I think that we can bring to the table that we can then use to leverage to sell ideas to. So look at SaaS solutions that exist out there. Look at things that are gaps that exist within that structure. Say, hey, I want to come up with an idea that I know that all these different companies need access to. How can I sell it as a solution, software as a solution?

Right.

That I can then take to multiple different industries or multiple different Companies and say hey for X amount of dollars. I can give you this baked in Process that's already kind of built this vocally built for your needs that you have Right, and that's where that's real like intent and power comes in for for solos that are looking to scale to

Yeah.

beyond just what they can do for themselves, right? Because I think that's the challenge that I've seen a lot of. Once you go solo, you're capped at the amount of hours that you can put into something if you go purely hourly, right? Because you don't have the scale within one person to grow. AI and software allows you to go beyond what you can do as an individual because it all of sudden shrinks hours worth of work into minutes, potentially.

Right. And I think that's where, again, one of the things my thinking's definitely changed more since I started the collective and got to talk with folks like you and just hundreds and probably a thousand different conversations at this point was when I left corporate, my goal was I solo consulting first. And my goal was, all right, I want to find six figure consulting deals, right? May not be the first SOW, but over, I'm only looking for the big whales. Then I went into fractional leadership.

Mm-hmm.

And I'm like, I only want six figure opportunities, right? Can I do this for a year and then get six figures? And I left so much money on the table in the sense of maybe money is the right word, but deals and opportunity.

opportunities, you

opportunity because I didn't meet the client where they're at. And so what I've really, maybe just because I'm getting older and more experienced in this space, I have appreciation for the singles because the singles can add up in a hurry. You can score a lot of runs with singles. You can make a lot of money with singles and guess what? They don't take a ton of time. They're not as complicated and everybody still needs them. And so that's when I got with

Mm-hmm.

thought with you is, yeah, there's some big complicated reorgs that we can build, right? But there's also some smaller, the way I was thinking about it was AI enabled services, right? So if you're a CRM person, yeah, we can apply AI. Maybe you just do it on your own back end to help you. So you're only spending 30 minutes of work and you're able to charge for five hour. I'm not saying bill fraudulently, but I'm going to say, I'm going to charge you a thousand dollars to clean up your CRM because I know how to leverage these tools.

Yep.

And so that's where I think.

And they're paying for that value that you're bringing to the table because you know how to do it and you know what it looks like. Like I said, it's not fraudulent. It's not like it's not worth the value. What they're really paying for is your expertise. You're just using the tools to get to the answer quicker, right? It's complaining that somebody used a calculator to do long division. It's like it's still got you to the answer that you needed to get to, right? But you have to know that you had to do a division in the first place.

Yeah.

Right. Well.

and know what the answer looks like, right? Because if you get the calculator and it's programmed wrong and it's giving you wrong answers, right? That's where I think the 20 somethings can probably program it. They have no idea what even the answer should be or looking like. so, exactly. And so one of the other big changes that I went through was moving more from job description. This is what I did in corporate to.

Yeah. Yeah.

Right.

That's right. Right. Is it even in the right ballpark? Is it figuring it out right way? Yeah.

problem solving and outcomes. And it sounds so simple, but when you reframe it and say, small business owner, this is the problem I'm solving for you. And I've got friends that can help solve in other areas, but this is where I, my expertise and this is the problem solved. And this is the outcome that's going to happen. And this is what I charge for it. So you take the hourly, you know what it's going to cost you. know what the time is, but you also understand the value of solving that problem. Like the outreach emails for a small business firm, an owner that's doing all the sales.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Again, he or she could probably sit down and figure out how to do all the outreach. But if I could pay you to come in and say, Hey, I've already developed a program for small businesses using AI enabled to do this for outreach. We use your custom right. Value prop, all these types of things to build it right. It's five grand a month. We're going to send out, you know, 200 email. We'll process and get them into your CRM. If you don't have a CRM, what we'll build you a CRM. And.

where and that's where I'm trying to get more people to see is think of it this way versus just becoming a fractional AI officer for a midsize company, right? It's, it's, I don't know.

Yep.

100%. I think that's the trap that a lot of us have when we first leave enterprise, that we kind of get trapped in that billable hour or the structure of like, what is it that other enterprises would want to buy and how do they think about buying things? And we get stuck in that mindset. I think what I've seen, even in my short period of going this entrepreneur route, is that small businesses are very different. They're much more focused on ROI. And ROI is lot easier to calculate.

When you get to there and say there's a fixed cost for a solution and this is what that solution will benefit you in the long run, because they can put their head around that. If you go in there and say, I'm going to do this fractional thing, we don't know what the outcome is going to be. We don't know where it's going to end up. You're going to end up better, but we don't know exactly how it's going end up, especially in today's economy. People are going to want to know, like, you're going to charge me $5,000 for 200 emails. 200 emails translates to...

Yeah.

$5,000 or $1,000 per gig that I get through the pipeline, that's going to be a 5X ROI. Great, let's do it. Let's move forward on it. And there's not a huge decision. I ran into the problem that I think all of us do. It's like, we should all start off with the idea of going enterprise. And what ends up happening is that we end up getting stuck in this like, oh, we really like your solution. It's going to take us six months to go through procurement to figure out if you were even able to work with you. And you're like,

Yeah.

Okay, or I can go talk to the guys next door and be able to have a conversation with them. And if I can convince them that it's the right decision, the owner's gonna sign off a check and we're rocking and rolling, right? And it's like a lot easier to shut those. I'd love to get back to enterprise from the perspective of winning over some big clients to kind of help solve that, but I'm not gonna do it overnight. Nor do I really think that's where...

the real value proposition is going to be. That's more like gravy on top of things. I really do think it's going to be in the small business, medium-sized businesses. The $30 million company that's ready to rock and roll and say, do I get to that $70 million mark? I don't want to do a whole bunch of new hiring. I don't want to do a whole bunch of new expenses. How can I take the efficiencies of what I already have? Or how can I add new workflows into the processes that I already exist with?

and turn that into my next two, three, four million dollars one at a time, slowly over a period of time by cutting into costs or finding new channels to work within.

It makes perfect sense. And the one thing we don't talk nearly enough about also is risk, right? Because if you think about how do I solve that problem for the small business owner, again, those are the things they care about is how do I make more money? How do you save me money? How do you save me time? Or how do I minimize the risk? And if you look at how we approach the market, how are we going to go make money? I can come in as a full-time employee, man, that's an 18 month investment and you may or may not get what you have no idea, right?

Right.

That's right.

get pay off. Fractional and again I love the fractional and if you can get some of those gigs right place right time they're good cornerstone because it's a longer term engagement.

That's right. That's what I was trying to get at when I was saying, going back to enterprise. I'd love to have one or two of those just kind of there, right? But that's not where the innovation is going to occur.

Right.

And I think those are going to be opportunistic, but where the real return on this is, Hey, I'm going to solve a problem. It's not even fractional. It's a service we can do month to month. It's going to cost you X to do this and you can opt out whenever you want. The business owner is going to be like, sign me up. Yeah, I do have this problem. I do believe it. And what's it going to, what's the risk to me to test you solving this problem?

Right, right, right.

Not very much, right? And then once you're in with these small businesses, it's reoccurring revenue, right? If you've structured as a service, maybe the first one you have service plus implementation or however you want to structure it. But that's what I'm finding the path of least resistance, take out the risk, take out and again, leverage. Exactly. Exactly. Right. So

Making an easy yes for them, right? I mean, I think that the other challenge or the other opportunity that I think a lot of people ignore is how many small to medium sized businesses actually are, right? Like I think we get blindsided by like, there's always the Googles of the world and you're like, and those are the people who get all the headlines. But like, what is it? 74, 80 % of all businesses in America are small to medium sized businesses?

33 million, 33 million.

33 million small businesses, those are all people who are looking for ways to make more efficiencies out of what they already have. And those are all opportunities that exist for all of us to kind of go after to figure out where it's going. That's why, you know, I always kind of go through this thing, this battle where I'm always, I love teaching people about AI. You've seen that within me, within the collective group, within any conversation. I love talking to people because I do think it's...

Once you can educate people on how to use AI, opportunities will come, but there's just so much opportunity. I'm not worried about like, my God, if I teach somebody, I'm teaching a future competitor of mine. Like that's not what I'm concerned about. Like I do think this is one of those areas that we are on the, you know, the tide rises all boats type of situation where we're, as we all get better, as we all get smarter, we're going to only ask for more and more of it. So.

Right.

100%.

I'm out there trying to educate people. I'm trying to figure out what's that right strategy. What are the different tools that exist out there so other people can start using, even if it's not my tool, even if it's not come to me. Somebody goes to me and says, Hey, I have this problem. Can you build me an agent? I go, you know what? ChatGVT can do that for you. Let's build a custom GVT. Not even charge you for it. Cause it's going to take me 20 minutes of my time. Let's just do that. As you start using it, you're going to come back and say, Hey, can it also do this? Now we're going to start having that conversation about like.

Where can we go with it and how can we do things? So it is one of those situations where we all get, as we all get our digital IQ higher, we're all gonna get smarter about it. And that gives us the opportunities that we're looking for as solos to be able to sell to other clients. so I do encourage everyone who's starting to think about this, how can AI assist in what I'm currently doing? How can I start building solutions, not,

knowledge per se, right? Like, I think that's kind what you're getting at. It's like build solutions, come up with packages, come up with opportunities for product that you can then take. Yeah, productizing it, taking it back to people and saying, here's this thing that I want to build for you. It's going to cost you X and you're going to get five X in return. Let's get started on this immediately. And then you take that and you sell it to the next one and the next one and the next one. And you might have to do some customizations.

Practicing

I'm a big fan of like, building bespoke solutions for people but you can build a foundation that you can just leverage over and over again It's that much easier for you and then you get that constant revenue stream coming back over and over, right?

And you don't need that many, right? As we talked about, forget if it's earlier in this episode, right to charge two grand a month per business, right? And it's taken you an hour a month to do the work, right? know, 40 clients, right? It's 40 hours a month, not a week, 40 hours a month. You're billing $80,000, right? It's the math.

Right.

Hahaha

Right.

What I call it the stack, right? You just keep stacking these things. It's a hell of a lot easier and a lot less work in the long run than just keep hunting for those big fractional clients and no offense to my fractional. Cause again, I get it. I was that, but now like I'm like ding, ding, ding, right. No more risk, more repeatable partner. And the other beauty of the solo world is the partner.

capabilities, right? Because you and I can partner on something you probably partnering with six other people to go after these markets. And all of a sudden, you don't have to do any lead gen, then you can start to figure out where you want to double down, right? This is a really good path. One, I'm getting enjoyment out of it. Two, it's really good margins for me. And three, right, unless you want to build the Google, you don't need to have a ton of these clients for this to work.

That's right.

Right?

No, exactly. And I do think that that's a great point about the idea of partnering with people, right? Like we kind of mentioned this earlier. I know I'm not an expert on every single topic that could possibly be automated, but I do know somebody or I have access to somebody who is an expert in that area. So if I can take their expertise, take my expertise in AI, we can work together, partner on coming up with a solution. All of sudden we can have the

best dashboard for analytics that you can possibly have, because I have a data scientist who knows how to do that. I can have the greatest, you know, analyst of an AR system, because I have somebody who understands that space or a procurement team member who understands how procurement groups work and what they need to be able to get done. And all of sudden we can start putting these, all these pieces together and we have a solution that goes beyond just what one person can do. But yet it's, it's,

beneficial for all of us, right? It's not just one person who gets a win.

Yeah, no, it's everybody and that's again the beauty the other thing that I learned and folks coming out of a corporate is They need foundational help, right? It's not level to help they need right so if you've got a working knowledge of the business and you know, say I was a I don't know CFO right or

director of finance in a company, man, all the other areas that I touched, I know more than the business owners knows about those areas of the business than they have, right? So I think part of it, we get paralyzed by the fact, well, I'm, I only know this, I'm like, you know, a hell of a lot more than you think, you know, and what's going to help you in your journey is simplified dummy it down, because most of these smaller businesses need the foundational to get to the aspirational, right? So it's, again, I know it's, I

Right. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

I'm going to be repetitive until people hear me talk about this forever, but that's the path, man. It's just, it's the simple path. Again, if you want to build a big company and AI and want to go raise funds for it, whole different conversation. You want to make 10 to $20,000 a month. I'm like, man, find these smaller deals that you know how to do really well. That's going to solve a problem. It's got to solve a problem. It doesn't solve a problem. Then you're going to be working hard, especially if it's a need to solve problem.

Ha ha ha ha!

man it's it's a hell of a lot easier to get these things put together so

I will say that being right in the center of the AI conversation, especially, it's like AI can't be the solve. AI is the tool that helps you with the solve. So make sure you know what you're solving for is a great point. And then figure out how AI can help adapt that idea into something that can scale so that way you can get five clients each paying you $2,000 to $5,000 a month.

Yeah. And again, adds up and it gets you to a lifestyle that you want. And then you've forgotten about what corporate is and can't believe that you were doing that for a paycheck for all those years. anyway, well, Naveen, I want to be respectful of your time. This was always super interesting. I think we need to make this a reoccurring topic if you're open for coming back on. I just think it's moving so quick that I think there's value in making you a reoccurring guest on this thing.

Ha

So much fun.

yeah, definitely.

Yeah.

It is always changing landscape for sure.

Awesome. All Well, this was super helpful. People go make your money and be if I'd be remiss if I didn't tell where can people find you if they're curious about learning more and connecting with you.

Thank you so much, Brett.

yeah, you can look me up at www.explained.consulting. That's the best way to get a hold of me. I will be launching a few new AI products on that website pretty soon here, so keep an eye out for those as they start to happen. But yeah, we will definitely be in touch.

Awesome. Alright, appreciate it Naveen. Have a good rest of your day. We'll catch up with you soon.

Thanks, Brett. Thank you.