The Part that Comes After the Idea
over at AI Consulting Made Simple wrote something worth your time this week. The diagnosis is sharp. Small businesses are drowning. AI implementation is missing. The consultant who shows up with something usable wins. Go read it.
She’s right about all of it.
But the piece ends exactly where the real work begins.
Here’s the instrument panel she didn’t include.
The Audit Comes First
Before you build anything, you need to know what’s breaking. Most new consultants skip this and jump straight to solutions. That’s backwards.
Run five questions with every new client before you touch a tool:
What task do you do every single day that eats 30 minutes or more? What do you write over and over that says roughly the same thing each time? Where do things fall through the cracks when you’re busy? What does onboarding a new client currently look like, step by step? What’s the one thing you keep saying you’ll systemize and never do?
Those five answers are your entire service offering. Right there. You don’t need a discovery session that lasts two hours. You need a focused conversation that produces a short list.
Pick the top two items. Start there. That’s the engagement.
The Stack You Actually Need
Keep this simple. Three tools cover most small business consulting work.
Claude for writing, drafting, and prompt-building. Not because it’s fashionable. Because it handles nuance better than most alternatives and small business owners have complex, messy communication needs. An email reply system for a plumber reads differently than one for a therapist. The tool has to flex. This one does.
Make.com for connecting things. When a client needs a repeatable workflow, something that runs automatically, something that takes data from one place and moves it to another, this is where you build it. No code required. The learning curve is short if you start with simple two-step automations and work up.
Loom for delivery. This is the one most people forget entirely. You build the system. You record a 4-minute walkthrough of exactly how to use it. You send the Loom link with the deliverable. That video is the difference between a client who uses what you built and a client who abandons it in three weeks and tells people it didn’t work.
Notion for packaging, when the client needs a home base. Not every client does. Read the room.
That’s the stack. Four tools. You don’t need more than this to run a legitimate practice.
The Prompt Is a Product
Darlene mentions prompts. She’s right that they’re central. But here’s the part that matters most for your business model.
A prompt is not a deliverable. A prompt with context, instructions, a worked example, and a 3-minute Loom is a deliverable.
Here’s a real example. Email response system for a solo service business:
The prompt structure:
You are a professional writing assistant for [business name], a [type of business] based in [location]. Our tone is [warm/direct/formal]. When I paste an email below, write three possible responses: one brief, one detailed, one that asks a clarifying question before committing. Label each clearly. Here is the email: [paste email here]
That’s it. That prompt, customized with their business details, saves 20 to 40 minutes a day for anyone who gets significant email volume. You charge for the customization. You charge for showing them how to use it. You charge for the 30-day check-in where you refine it based on what’s not working.
A prompt is a product when you treat it like one.
The Packaging Method
This is what separates consultants who get referrals from those who don’t.
The deliverable is never just the thing you built. It’s the thing you built, a one-page document explaining what it is and how to use it, and a Loom walkthrough. Every time.
The one-page document needs three sections only. What this does. How to use it. What to do if something isn’t working.
No more than one page. If you can’t explain it in one page, you’ve overcomplicated it. Go back and simplify.
The Loom walkthrough should be under five minutes. Show your face in the corner. Talk like a human. Walk through the exact steps. Then shut up and stop recording.
Clients who receive deliverables this way use them. Clients who receive a raw prompt in a Google Doc do not. The difference is in the packaging, not the quality of the underlying work.
Pricing Without Apology
This is outside Darlene’s scope but it’s part of the instrument panel so it goes here.
Do not price by the hour. You will lose.
Price by the outcome. The email system is $X. The content workflow is $X. The client onboarding kit is $X. The monthly retainer for ongoing builds and refinements is $X per month.
What should X be? More than you’re currently thinking. A business owner who saves two hours a day has just been given back ten hours a week. That’s worth real money. Price accordingly.
Start at $500 for a single workflow deliverable and move up as you build the portfolio. Retainers start at $750 a month for two deliverables and one refinement session. Those numbers feel high until you do the first one and realize how fast it takes to build.
The Move
Pull up the five audit questions. Think of one business owner you know right now. Run through what their answers would be. You’ll have two deliverable ideas before you finish the exercise.
That’s not theory. That’s the work.
ABOUT THE 55/35 METHOD Veteran intuition meets modern velocity. Pattern recognition from decades of cycles applied to today’s tools. We move fast. But we move with weight.
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V➤ Darlene told you what to sell. Now you know how to build it, package it, and price it without apology.