3 College Kids Help Companies Use AI for $15K/Month - Ep. #344

James Larson (0:00)

The smallest one was 10 grand a month, the medium plan was 15 grand a month, and the highest was 25 grand a month. And they ended up closing at 15 grand a month. We were looking at the 25 grand plan, and we were like, we're like, okay.

Chris Koerner (0:13)

You're like, I'm sorry, sir, that's actually not available. That's just a price anchor. I learned about it from Alex Hormozi. You're not actually supposed to pick it.

James Larson (0:21)

This took their employees about an hour per proposal. It cut it down to about more or less five minutes.

Carter Wirig (0:28)

Ask for money, and you get advice, but ask for advice, and you get money twice.

Chris Koerner (0:33)

I don't want people to watch this and be like, oh, he had a rich uncle. How nice, right?

Carter Wirig (0:36)

No.

Chris Koerner (0:37)

Okay.

James Larson (0:37)

Never met him before.

Chris Koerner (0:39)

Meet James, Brenden, and Carter. They are 21 to 23 years old college students, and four months ago, James was on a treadmill listening to an episode of this podcast, and an idea hit him. So he called Brenden, and they texted every single contact in their phones asking for advice. And one of those texts turned to a $30 million construction company, paying them $15,000 a month. No office, no employees, no rich uncle, no connections, just college students. And one of them dropped out of BYU to do this. And by the end of this episode, you're going to know the exact text they sent. Please enjoy.

Why don't you guys tell me what you do? What is your business?

James Larson (1:16)

Yeah, so we run certified AI partners.

Simply put, we become a company's AI department. So think like an IT department kind of that handles everything IT, but we just do everything AI. But rather than locking things down, we unlock things and unlock their capacity to grow with AI.

Chris Koerner (1:35)

Okay. What gave you this idea?

James Larson (1:38)

Funny enough, we, just super quick background, we all kind of did our own AI companies before. I was selling voice agents to HVAC companies. Brenden was doing AEO for companies and Carter was selling open claw. But, so we're all kind of looking for ways to grow and make more money because we were selling to small businesses. But funny enough, like I said, I was listening to your podcast with Corey Gannon and he talks about doing an AI assessment for companies and like a light bulb just struck. I remember I was working out in the gym. I was like, that is genius. And so I got home the next week. I was on a trip and I called Brendan up. I was like, we should do this. And so we started walking into local companies, offering AI assessments, identifying opportunities.

And then from there, we're like, you know, why are we going for small fish? Why don't we do this for bigger fish? So we kind of moved to like mid market companies.

And from there, from doing AI assessments, we're like, well, why don't we just become their AI team rather than selling one-off automations and pricing each one? Let's just do everything for them. And so that's kind of how it started, just a little bit long-winded answer.

Chris Koerner (2:48)

Okay, so when you say you start, what you started at was walking into small businesses. What did that actually look like? Were you physically walking into businesses and what types of businesses were they?

James Larson (2:57)

Yeah, it was just here in Provo and it was any and all kinds of businesses like orthopedics, dental offices, insurance companies. It was like, hey, I'm James, he's Brenden.

Can we do a free AI assessment for you? It takes 15 minutes. And then I kind of got our foot in the door and they're like, okay, well, how about we do a bigger one? And then we just kind of kept hitting a wall with the smaller companies of they had the problems, but they didn't necessarily have the budget. And so that's kind of when we pivoted to bigger companies.

Chris Koerner (3:29)

Okay, what did that look like? Like what types of businesses did you start walking in at that point?

Carter Wirig (3:35)

So we kind of realized, we were like, okay, with these smaller businesses we're walking in, we're able to find the owner easily, right? But with these mid-market companies, there's a little bit more of a barrier to entry, right? And so what really has been working for us is using our existing networks. And so reaching out to everyone we know in our contacts and saying, hey, who do you know that owns a business of this size that needs help with AI? So literally sending out hundreds of messages to all of our contacts and asking them that question. And so that's been our number one source of clients and leads, is just using our existing network.