The Business Plan

The operating plan for J&M AI Services. Every recommendation is priced on outcomes — hours and dollars recovered — and the plan is kept current as the market moves.

1. The one-sentence business

J&M AI Services helps owner-operators of established local & service businesses reclaim 5–15 hours a week and stop leaking revenue, by auditing their workflows and then building AI systems with them — starting at a fixed-fee $999–1,999 diagnostic and continuing as a monthly done-with-you retainer.

We are not “an AI automation agency.” That is the commodity trap — the moment you say “we build AI automations” you sound like every $50/hour freelancer on Upwork and price becomes the only lever left. We sell a named diagnostic and a named build system, priced on the outcome (hours and dollars recovered), guaranteed.

2. Why this works now

This section is the short form of the north-star thesis in the internal playbook — read that first.

• This is 0→n work, not 0→1. The labs invent the tools; J&M gets them used inside real businesses. J&M is a distribution/implementation company, so every new tool is inventory, not a competitor.
• The adoption gap is the market. Per Menlo Ventures’ 2025 State of Consumer AI: 61% of US adults have used AI but only ~19% daily, and only ~3% of ~1.8B global users pay for premium (ChatGPT converts ~5% of weekly users). Competent, wired-in use — J&M’s level — is a sliver of that, realistically well under 1% (directional estimate). The skill of “using AI well” is scarce among exactly the people who most need it: busy operators doing $30k+/month with no time to learn it.
• The delivery cost is near zero. The whole front-end runs on Claude (incl. Claude Design for the report), cal.com/Calendly, Zoom+Fathom, and Notion — tools J&M already pays for. Four to five hours of work turns into a $999–1,999 sale.
• Tool proliferation is a tailwind, not a threat. Every new “$15k/mo agency → <$100/mo skill” launch is more capability J&M can wield and more overwhelm for the DIYer. The moat isn’t the tools (anyone can buy those) — it’s being the expert who’s already hunted, learned, and wired them, running them behind the scenes, sold done-with-you on the decisions. You could change your own oil, or pay an expert; J&M is for the ones who pay the expert.

3. Ideal Client Profile (ICP)

Five questions define the ICP:

Inverted-ICP filter (J&M house rule): they must have both money and one visible fixable gap you can name before the call. If you can’t point at the leak, they aren’t ready.

4. The offer ladder

Three rungs. Each rung earns the right to the next. The core insight: the assessment is the natural front door to recurring revenue.

Rung 1 — The Assessment · $999 (solo) / $1,999 (team) · one-time, 1 week · credited toward what’s next

A leverage audit of the owner’s workflows. Three deliverables: 1. 45-min Discovery Call — a SPIN-structured diagnostic that pulls 5–7 concrete pain points out of the owner. 2. Custom Report (built in Claude Design from the discovery-call transcript) — 3–7 specific recommendations, each with the problem in their words, the exact tool/fix, weekly time saved, effort tier, and a 4-day quick-start plan. Priced and dated (“current as of”). Report spec (9 slides): financial-impact slide first (monthly net ROI staring at them on open), the effort-vs-impact matrix as the lightbulb slide (report prescribes top-left quick wins; top-right “major projects” is the named upsell slide), then quick wins → tool stack → 4-day plan → next steps. 3. 30-min Walkthrough Call — walk the report (expect ~half the call on the tool-stack slide), then close with the three questions: Do you want my help implementing this? Which will you tackle first? How urgent is it? Operators running this exact close report >50% take the done-for-you/with-you upsell — the answer routes them into Rung 2 or 3.

Credited forward: the $999–1,999 is credited toward a Custom Build or the client’s first month of Concierge. It de-risks the front door and pulls buyers up the ladder — the diagnostic pays for itself the moment they continue.

Guarantee (falsifiable, time-bound): If we don’t find at least one Quick Win you can ship in 7 days that recovers 5+ hours/week, the Assessment is free.

Is the 5-hour guarantee realistic? Yes — for this ICP, and the wording is what keeps it safe. - Finding 5+ hrs/week is ~easy for the target buyer ($30k/mo+, still in the day-to-day). It usually takes one task to clear the bar: hand-built quotes at 90 min/day = 7.5 hrs/wk; manual data re-entry 3–8 hrs/wk; lead follow-up + inbox triage 3–6 hrs/wk; weekly reporting 2–4 hrs/wk. If someone genuinely has no 5-hour pocket, they’re a lean/non-repetitive business you’d want to disqualify anyway — so the guarantee doubles as a qualifier, not a liability. - The promise is “find a fix worth 5+ hrs you can ship,” not “you will bank 5 hrs.” That distinction is deliberate — it makes the guarantee falsifiable on the fix’s designed savings, not the client’s subjective feeling. - The real risk is delivery, not finding. Three things to manage so the promise holds: 1. Measure the baseline on the call. Time the actual task (“your Tuesday quote block is 90 min”) so the guarantee is adjudicated on designed savings, not a vibe. The proposal generator already computes from their stated hours — keep it conservative (under-promise). 2. Anchor the week-1 win on a fix that needs no third-party approval (a quote skill, an email follow-up skill, an internal automation). Do not make an SMS fix (missed-call text-back) the 7-day anchor — A2P 10DLC registration takes days-to-weeks and will blow the window; ship SMS fixes once it clears. 3. Frame it as time-back-on-a-task, not lifestyle change — owners refill reclaimed hours, so quantify the task (“90 min → 5 min”), which is true and defensible, rather than promising freedom. - If you ever want to be more conservative, “3+ hours” is trivially defensible — but 5 holds for this ICP and reads stronger.

Why charge for the Assessment instead of giving it free: the price filters for serious buyers, funds the relationship, and makes the report a paid deliverable they act on rather than a free pitch they ignore — and crediting it forward removes the only real objection to paying.

Rung 2 — The AI Concierge · $1,500–2,500 / month · the core business

Done-with-you monthly retainer. The recurring engine. - Two 45-min strategy calls per month. Screen-shared working sessions where J&M builds with the client: Claude skills, context files, automations, live. ~1.5 hrs of call time/month. - Unlimited async support (Voxer/Slack) with a 12-business-hour SLA. - Hands-on-their-machine work (fixing a workflow where it lives, installing tools, debugging) runs over RustDesk attended sessions — client launches it, reads the code, watches J&M work. Beats screen-share-and-dictate for anything longer than 5 minutes, and it’s how the “priority remote support” line item gets delivered. - Shared Notion hub — every call logged with recording, top-3 takeaways, two-sided action items, and a quantified list of everything built. This is the renewal mechanism: the ROI is on paper, so they renew. - Run Audit → Optimize → Automate — on every workflow, every time. Fix the process before automating it. Never automate a broken process. - Why done-with-you is the core, not done-for-you: the client ends up owning the know-how, not just the systems — that’s the durable “run it without me” promise and the referral engine. Clients who explicitly want hands-off get Rung 3 (Custom Build) instead; don’t blur the two. - Pricing discipline: $1,000/month floor, target $1,500–2,500. At $1,500 for 1.5 hrs of calls that’s a ~$1,000/hour effective rate. If you close every pitch, you’re too cheap — raise until you hear “no.” Cap at 6 clients before quality degrades.

Rung 3 — The Custom Build (DFY) · $5,000–30,000 project (+ optional care plan)

For clients who want it done for them, not with them. This is the high-ticket lane: custom AI systems sold via a 4-call framework at $10–30k. Also houses the productized Local Visibility & Lead-Capture System (missed-call text-back, AI receptionist, review engine, booking) for local businesses, plus the demand-gen plays — Answer-Engine Visibility (AEO/GEO — get cited when buyers ask AI) and Paid Social Ads & Creative (Meta, via a Claude-native skill stack). These turn on after front-office capture is fixed (never pour demand into a leaky funnel); playbooks in the internal playbook. Sold only after an Audit or Concierge relationship exists, or via the full 4-call process for cold high-ticket. The 4-call runbook — Discovery → Strategy → Scoping → Contract, with the between-call actions — is in the internal playbook.

Paperwork (contracts): three MSA templates are ready — pick by who owns the build: client-owns (one-time, they own it), agency-owns / no annual fee (you keep the IP, charge once), agency-owns / with annual fee (you keep the IP + recurring license — the model for a Concierge-style dependency). Each signed MSA is paired with a per-engagement Statement of Work — deliverables, phases, timeline, and price, drafted from the scoping call — so the MSA governs the relationship and the SOW governs the project. A mutual NDA + DPA precedes any access to client systems or data, and every template gets state-attorney review before first use.

The funnel: $999 Audit → Concierge retainer → Custom Build upsell. Most revenue and enterprise value lives in Rung 2’s recurring base; Rungs 1 and 3 feed and expand it.

5. Positioning & the unique mechanism

Name the process so it stops sounding like a commodity and passes the “can I put ‘The’ in front of it?” test. J&M’s live positioning already names it: - The overarching promise: turn your business into an operating system — your real work, turned into pieces that run themselves. - The diagnostic: The Assessment. - The mechanism: one-click skills (agents that do the repetitive work) on a knowledge spine (the business’s memory, connected across tools, compounding each month), delivered via Audit → Optimize → Automate. - Lead with pain removal, then the mechanism: not “I’ll build you automations,” but “I take the guesswork and the 2-hours-a-day of admin off your plate — I turn your business into an operating system you own.” - Always tie back to dollars. Every recommendation is either money saved (hours × their stated hourly value) or money made (faster lead response, more closes). Get their hourly value on the call so the ROI math is theirs, not yours.

6. Go-to-market (channel sequence)

Sequenced, not scattershot: 1. Months 0–3 — warm + local + outbound. SE-Idaho network and referrals first (highest trust). Simultaneously: LinkedIn presence + cold outreach and Upwork for volume and reps. Scripts in the internal playbook. 2. Months 1–6 — referrals & proof. Every delivered Audit/Concierge produces a quantified result → testimonial → the next deal. The Notion hub is the case-study generator. 3. Months 3–12 — inbound. LinkedIn content (a proven follower-growth system), lead magnets, and local SEO/GEO compound so leads come inbound.

Primary metric: booked qualified discovery calls per week. Everything upstream (content, outreach) is judged on whether it produces those.

7. Unit economics & targets

Illustrative, conservative (not a forecast — validate against real close rates):

The math that matters: 6 Concierge clients at $1,500 ≈ $108k/year recurring off ~12 hrs/month of delivery, before any Audit or Build revenue. That is the whole game — Rung 2 at capacity, fed by Rung 1, expanded by Rung 3.

8. Validation gate & 90-day plan

Gate: don’t scale spend or systems until 3 paying Concierge clients prove the funnel end-to-end.

• Days 1–30: Finalize the Audit deliverable (Claude Design report template, question bank, analysis skill). Publish the offer page. Book & run first 5 discovery calls from warm + local. Land 1–2 paid Audits.
• Days 31–60: Deliver those Audits; convert ≥1 into a Concierge. Turn on LinkedIn content + one outbound channel. Book 8+ discovery calls.
• Days 61–90: Reach 3 Concierge clients. First quantified case study live. Decide whether to open the Custom Build lane based on demand seen in Audits.

9. Compliance & ethics (non-negotiable)

• Tool recommendations: disclose any affiliate relationship in writing in every report; never recommend a worse-fit tool because it pays more.
• Any SMS/texting automation (missed-call text-back, reminders) requires A2P 10DLC registration + TCPA consent before launch. Bake consent capture into every build.
• Client data: a simple DPA/mutual-NDA before touching a client’s systems or data.
• Remote access to client machines: written authorization in the engagement agreement first (add a remote-access clause to the MSA templates). Default to attended, per-session-code access (RustDesk, self-hosted relay); install unattended agents only for standing retainer clients with explicit sign-off. Servers via Tailscale + SSH so the client can revoke access in one click. Tooling detail in the internal playbook.

10. What could kill this (honest risks)

• Capacity is the constraint, not demand. The Concierge caps at 6; growth past that means either raising prices or productizing into the Build lane / hiring. Plan for it early.
• Commoditization of “AI automations” is real and coming. The defense is process, named mechanism, relationships, and vertical depth — not staying on the technical frontier.
• Under-pricing out of fear. Floors exist for a reason, raise until you hear “no.”
• Selling deliverables, not outcomes. Every artifact in this repo is built to keep the conversation on hours and dollars, not features.

Companion deliverables: the internal playbook (book the call), the internal playbook (run the diagnostic), the internal playbook (turn findings into a proposal), the internal playbook (build the fixes), the internal playbook (what to build with), the internal playbook (how it all connects).