Hey there,

When Dan joined The AI Consultancy Project, his only free time was 9:30 p.m. to midnight.

He was a Customer Success Manager with three young kids at home, so between the job and dinner and bedtime and making sure his wife got a break once in a while too, there was no space left. Those three late-night hours were it.

And he’d been spending them thinking about how to quit his job.

He didn’t dislike the work. He was good at it, and he liked his coworkers. But his higher-ups had told him there was no real path to significant salary growth there, for reasons that had nothing to do with his performance. He’d hit the ceiling at this company, and that was that.

Dan wasn’t technical and had never run a business. What he had was a hunch about AI and a handful of spare hours in his week.

Today he runs an AI consultancy from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where he moved with his wife and kids so they could live a relaxed life near the beach and learn Spanish.

Yesterday I said pivoting is the normal condition now. Dan is what that looks like when somebody actually does it. His journey took about a year. Some of our 1,400+ students go faster, some go slower. It’s different for everyone, but the destination tends to look the same, because it’s built around those Four Freedoms we talked about yesterday.

“I knew AI was gonna change the world”

Dan had been playing with ChatGPT since early 2023, right after GPT-3.5 came out. He subscribed to every AI newsletter he could find and took all the free courses, but it stayed a hobby.

What kept nagging at him was something he noticed in ordinary conversations. Talking to friends, family and coworkers, he realized he already knew far more about this than the people around him did.

That gap inspired his pivot. He just needed a way to turn knowledge into income, and that’s what he joined The AI Consultancy Project to find.

“I really started talking to more people and still getting a lot of nos”

At first, he got a little too excited and went off-script. (We’ve all been there.)

He skipped ahead in the curriculum, built his website before he needed one, set up his Stripe account, and did all the business-looking things instead of the steps in the order I laid them out.

Once he came back to the curriculum and worked the progression, things started to click. But, like all good things, it took time.

Dan’s first real discovery call was with the owner of his daughter’s gymnastics gym. He went in too big, pushed a large proposal too fast, and got a hard no. The owner told him to call back in a year.

His second was with the owner of his daughter’s swim school. He’d learned from his first encounter, so he came in tighter and started smaller. She seemed interested. Then, she ghosted him.

Two swings, two misses. Seven months passed between joining and his first paying client.

“I actually showed them: this is what I can do”

Dan stopped talking in generalities and started showing people a specific thing.

Instead of “I can build automations for you,” he could open a laptop and say: this is what I built, can you see how something like this would work for your business?

His first paid gig came from a family member: A custom GPT to manage Instagram content for a small business. It was something he’d never built before, and didn’t pay much. He ran it for about five months and learned an entire skill on a relative’s dime.

Then a stranger paid him.

He met that stranger through Deborah, a fellow student in our programs, who introduced him to a gym owner she knew.

Discovery call Friday. Proposal Saturday. “Yes” and payment Monday.

Three days from first introduction to money in the bank.

He found his niche

Once he had some momentum, Dan did something many consultants resist: He specialized. In his case, he targeted gym owners with AI services that help them bring in more revenue and retain more members.

He stopped being an AI consultant and became The Gym AI Guy, offering voice agents, lead generation, marketing automation, trainer videos, and review management. He set a goal of helping 500 small gym businesses in 2026.

Niching down often feels like shrinking your market, but it does the opposite: It takes you out of a sea of sameness.

He quit in January. His old employer became a client.

About a year after he joined, Dan and I went to lunch because we both lived in the Denver area. (Side note: I hosted a big Denver IWAI meetup earlier this year, too!)

He told me things were going great but he didn’t have time for all the clients coming in.

I told him it was time to take the leap: keeping your job, even at 30 hours a week, is holding you back from increasing your income.

Here’s what he posted in our Slack later that week:

His last day was January 30. The following Monday he was a full-time AI consultant. Within days he’d hired his first contractor to help with gym outreach around Denver.

Bonus twist: His old employer became a client.

From Denver to Puerto Vallarta

When I first told Dan’s story, I ended it by saying his family was considering moving to the beach.

A couple of months after his last day at the old job, they did it.

Dan, his wife, and their kids left Denver for Puerto Vallarta. He runs the consultancy remotely and full time from there. The kids are learning Spanish and a new culture.

And another fun community connection: they found the short-term apartment they landed in thanks to another IWAI student, someone Dan met in our private Slack.

The community connections blow me away. Nobody designs a curriculum module for “and then a classmate will find you somewhere to live in Mexico.” But that’s what happens when you put 1,400+ people together who care about each other and want to build a better future for everybody!

He also scored a Fractional Chief AI Officer retainer worth $50,000 to $70,000 a year with a multi-location gym. That’s one client – less than half of his revenue – and it’s nearly a full-time income by itself.

5 things he did that you can model

Many people’s first year won’t look like Dan’s – some will move slower, some will go faster. But everything that worked is repeatable:

Follow the program. He skipped ahead, built the website and the Stripe account, and lost months to looking like a business instead of becoming one.

Build one specific thing you can show. The generalities got him two rejections. The demo got him clients.

Take the small warm-network gig. The family job barely paid and taught him a skill he then sold repeatedly.

Leverage the community. Deborah’s introduction became a signed client in three days. A classmate found his family an apartment.

When the old job becomes a constraint, pay attention. Dan was working 30 hours a week at a job that capped him, then working 9:30 to midnight on the thing that didn’t.

What will your pivot story be?

Dan did it in about a year, at night, around three kids, even after getting most of the early moves wrong.

Tomorrow I’ll introduce you to Sarah, who was laid off with no clear plan, didn’t think of herself as technical at all, and signed a $724,500 contract nine months later.

To your next big thing,

– Rob Howard
Innovating with AI
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PS. Spots are limited, and AI Consultancy Project enrollment opens to 175k+ readers on Monday morning.

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