Home · Notes · September 14, 2026

Why I Charge $1,000 for a 45-Minute AI Assessment

September 14, 2026 · 4 min read

Nobody pays $1,000 for one hour of your time. Plenty of people pay $1,000 for an answer to a painful question: where in my business does AI actually pay for itself?

What the 45 minutes cover

We get on Zoom and I ask three things: what's manual, what's piling up, and what have you already tried to automate that failed. That's it. No audit software, no 20-page questionnaire beforehand.

Afterward you get a written report: your pain points ranked by time and money lost, plus exactly where AI fits and what each fix is worth. The report is yours to keep no matter what.

Why it isn't free

Free discovery calls attract everyone and commit no one. I've watched paid assessments do something free calls never do: one client bought three at once — one for each part of his operation. Nobody buys three of something out of politeness. That purchase told me the demand was real.

There's a second reason. Your fifteenth assessment is dramatically better than your first, and getting paid for every rep in between is how a practice compounds instead of starving.

The $1,000 goes toward the build

Here's the part that makes it a no-brainer instead of a gamble: every dollar of the assessment credits toward whatever we do next. Implementation, training, a second assessment for another department. You were going to spend that money anyway once you saw the report.

Who it's not for

If you want hourly consulting, I'm not your guy — hourly is the same work with the opposite positioning, and it punishes everyone. And if there's no fit, I'll tell you in the first fifteen minutes and you keep the notes. A bad-fit report helps nobody.

But if something eats hours of your week that you hate doing, 45 minutes is the cheapest way to find out what it's worth to fix.