If you run a team rather than consult for one, every phase ends with a line for you. You’re on the client side of the same process, and the playbook doesn’t change.

Hey there,
Yesterday we talked about time to ROI for our AI Consultancy Project students: nine people who earned back their investment on their first few clients, sometimes 100x over.
Today is about how they actually did it.
Sarah, Michelle, George, Thiago and the rest came from different backgrounds, different industries and very different starting points. But ask them what made the difference and you hear the same answer: following the process. It’s the same step-by-step approach I used with my own clients for years, and it’s the backbone of The AI Consultancy Project: the ROI with AI | PROOF Process™.
So today I’m going to show you the actual steps each of them went through, so you can see exactly what they did and when:

The process: the five phases of PROOF, with one of yesterday’s students in each phase, and the seven-year client relationship where I used it myself.
The starting line: the nine places students start from, and how to tell which one is yours.
Day one: what you’d actually do first, once the doors open tomorrow morning.

If you run a team rather than consult for one, every phase ends with a line for you. You’re on the client side of the same process, and the playbook doesn’t change.
Part 1: They paid me $1.9M, starting with this $2,475 invoice

My past client was called Fit Small Business: a website that creates helpful content for small business owners and makes its money on ads. They were scaling very fast, to 80 million readers in just a few years, and their website was turning into a “technical house of cards.”
They’d outgrown the $200-$300/mo. cookie-cutter website providers, but they weren’t ready to hire a pricey in-house team or even know how to vet one. That’s the situation our students find their clients in today, and if you run a team, it may be the situation you’re in right now.
We didn’t start with the massive result. We started small and ROI-focused, and then earned the right to keep working as the business scaled, because every client relationship moves at the speed of trust.

Phase 1 – P – Prime for ROI: agree on 1 number in 0-7 days
Success Looks Like:Agreed on a testable ROI hypothesis. An AI demo shows how you test it.
The usual AI demo promises “productivity 