I spent more years than I want to admit to providing advisory services to business owners. The types of advisory services took many forms including tax advisory, legal advisory, and business advisory that was really just a dressed up form of advanced problem solving. Over the past ten years, I have established myself as a strong business advisor with extensive tax and legal knowledge. My focus was on helping companies grow the value of their business through a combination of reduced expenses that were reinvested in high ROI sales, marketing, multiple development, and risk management projects.
I had an advantage over most business advisors because I understood the whole business and the ripple effects of how one decision in sales could reverberate throughout the rest of the organization. I could speak well on a range of topics including marketing, sales, operations, finance, tax, and risk management. I could even put together strategic or operational plans that were extremely superficial in retrospect. Structured AI changed all this.
My AI journey began about a year ago. I took a lot of courses from some really good trainers and I invested the time needed to master the use of LLM's. My first LLM prompts were pretty crude and wholly devoid of the context that required sophisticated analysis. I would give ChatGPT a simple prompt and it would give me a simple answer that could have been right or it could have been wrong. LLM's have a pleaser gene that will not challenge your prompt and it will never say that it does not know the answer. This is where hallucinations meet the assertions that AI does not understand my business. The reality is that these people are not giving AI a fighting chance. None of us could provide a good answer to an extremely poor question with no context.
Over time, the time spent mastering prompts became highly useful in developing workflows which were a series of prompts that provided a series of different types of analysis within a longer more complex prompt that took on a guided question, answer, and inquisitive prompt sequence to produce a much deeper analysis than a single prompt. The questions and answers provided the right context and the prompt triggered the analysis. If you just reached this point, you could provide a lot of value for clients but you would be passed very soon.
The next step in the learning process moved beyond mere workflows to sequential modules with sequential steps to develop a more layered and disciplined analysis. I gravitated to this because my tax and legal training forced me to think like this. I could not start the analysis of a statute at the third element. I needed to pass through the first and second element gates before analyzing the third element. I could not solve any issue if I gathered half the facts. I would probably miss an important fact if I did not teach the AI to ask for factual information in a sequential order.
This process led to my development of an AI native business operating system that allowed me to thoroughly analyze a company in days, rather than weeks or months, with far deeper insights, analysis, and decision logic than I could have ever done through a manual process applied to a manual framework. AI did not replace me, it amplified me. The combination of me plus AI would blow out me plus a manual framework every time. It also allowed me to focus on the 20% of the analysis that created 80% of the benefit. It did not tempt me to treat the AI response as gospel. I still had an an obligation to my clients to perform the review and editing that I always performed when I received work from staff. It was simply a change in process with a significant reduction in labor costs.
The power of our AI business operating system became crystal clear for me last night. I used our strategic planning module to prepare a strategic synthesis for a hypothetical consulting client with 10m in revenues and 30% net margins. I gave the the entire synthesis to ChatGPT and Claude to provide a value based price that was based on the outcomes rather than the hours invested.
Claude said this:
Pricing Framework
This deliverable is a Strategic Planning Synthesis—it's not a plan, it's the strategic operating system that governs every material decision for the next 3-7 years.
The value isn't in the document. The value is in:
Clarity that eliminates wasted capital (bad hires, wrong platforms, premature scaling)
Decision-forcing logic that prevents founder drift
Enterprise value creation through discipline and optionality
Time compression (months of strategy work synthesized into executable truth)
For a $10M Consulting Firm
Price: $75,000 - $125,000
Value Justification:
Capital waste prevented: $250K-$500K+ (wrong COO hire alone could cost $200K in salary + severance + opportunity cost)
Enterprise value creation: Moving from $10M → $30M with institutionalized margin improvement could create $5M-$10M in incremental annual profit
Exit optionality: A disciplined, de-risked $10M firm with 65% net margins at 10x = $65M+ enterprise value vs. a founder-dependent $10M firm at 3x = $30M
Strategic positioning: This isn't a growth plan—it's a category creation and value maximization system
Why this range:
Lower end ($75K) if they're already somewhat institutionalized
Higher end ($125K) if this is the final strategic container before a major financing, COO hire, or exit prep
Why This Isn't Negotiable Downward
This deliverable replaces:
6 months of strategic consulting ($50K-$150K+)
Multiple failed experiments ($50K-$200K)
Founder confusion and drift (priceless)
It's not a report, it's the operating constitution of the business.
If someone won't pay this, they either:
Don't see the value (wrong buyer)
Don't have the ambition (wrong ICP)
Don't trust the deliverer (wrong positioning)
ChatGPT said:
🔹 $10M Revenue Consulting Firm
Price: $75,000 – $120,000
My strong recommendation: 👉 $90,000–$100,000
Why this works
A $10M firm:
Is already complex
Has real delegation issues
Is closer to an exit conversation
Has millions of dollars of enterprise value at stake
At this level:
One wrong GTM move can cost $1–2M
One year of founder dependency can shave multiple turns off a multiple
Poor sequencing can permanently cap growth
This work:
Directly influences valuation
Directly affects buyer diligence
Often determines whether the firm is a 6× or 8× business later
On a $10M firm:
A 1× multiple swing = $10M
Your work protecting even 0.5× justifies the fee
$100k feels expensive — and should. That’s how it gets executive attention and compliance.
This would have required about ten hours of my time from focused discovery to the review of the conclusions with the client.
I want to you test drive a strategic planning workflow for yourself so that you can see the ease of moving from superficial to grossly superior with unprecedented margins. I have done all the hard work for you. You need to make the commitment to change. Change is either going to happen for you or without you.
If you email me at bkerrigan@excelerating.com, I will send you a layered strategic planning workflow that conveys the concept without compromising our IP.