The argument in one line.
The profitable opportunity isn't building new AI agents but maintaining and fixing the broken systems businesses bought during the hype cycle, which you can monetize through a six-pillar audit-and-retainer model.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- A consultant or agency owner with 3+ years of B2B sales experience who wants to pivot from building new AI tools to selling maintenance contracts to businesses with broken implementations.
- A technical founder or CTO at a mid-market firm who's been hired to clean up failed AI projects and needs a repeatable playbook to upsell maintenance retainers alongside the cleanup work.
- A service provider (cloud, security, or software consulting background) who already has enterprise relationships and wants to add a high-margin, recurring AI audit-and-maintain revenue stream.
SKIP IF…
- You're a solo developer or individual contributor without existing enterprise sales experience or a book of business — this playbook assumes you can access decision-makers and close six-figure retainers.
- You're interested in building and shipping AI products yourself — this is explicitly about selling maintenance and cleanup services, not creating new AI systems.
- You operate in a vertical where most businesses haven't yet bought into the AI hype cycle (early adopter markets, emerging geographies) — the thesis depends on widespread failed implementations already in the field.
The full version, fast.
The real opportunity in AI right now isn't building new agents � it's cleaning up the broken, hype-driven systems businesses already bought. You lead with an audit (or call it a readiness assessment) that exposes problems across six monetizable pillars: migrations and upgrades, performance and cost, monitoring and observability, security and threat patching, knowledge and skill hygiene, and compliance and governance. Each pillar gets sold three ways � paid audit, upfront fix, and recurring retainer � and framed around pain prevention rather than technical jargon, so you're talking wasted money, bad AI decisions, and breach risk instead of optimization. Tier your retainers, partner with established consultancies to reach enterprise clients, and stack pillars to charge more.
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00:00 – 00:31
01 · Hook — the untapped market
Frames the contrarian: forget building shiny agents, the lucrative niche is AI maintenance. Stakes the credibility (12 years consulting Fortune 100/500).
00:31 – 01:36
02 · Doom & gloom — the coming AI crash
Deloitte stat: 40% of AI agent projects cancelled by 2027. Most current systems built on hype + shiny tools instead of strategy + architecture + fundamentals.
01:36 – 03:06
03 · The two-phase playbook: Audit → Maintain
Lead every AI engagement with an audit (readiness assessment) just like cybersecurity or cloud-migration consulting did. Audit exposes the six pillars to monetize.
03:06 – 04:51
04 · Pillar 1 — Migrations & Upgrades
Year-old n8n/duct-taped stacks are now legacy. Rebuild as MCP-orchestrated Claude Code agent architectures. Don't rip-and-replace — strategy first, augment what works.
04:51 – 06:36
05 · Pillar 2 — Performance & Cost
Slash bloated invoices by right-sizing models (Haiku/Sonnet/Opus per task) and caching. Vibe-coded apps are a developer gold mine — the bill should pay the retainer.
06:36 – 08:34
06 · Pillar 3 — Monitoring & Observability
Nobody's watching the AI they shipped. Set up quality-score, drift-detection, cost-per-task dashboards. He demos his own Command Centre; for enterprise use Braintrust/Langfuse/Helicone.
08:34 – 10:43
07 · Pillar 4 — Security & Threat Patching
Agents read emails — attack surface 437,000+ deep. Poisoned MCP servers and skill repos everywhere. Red-team checklist, harden MCP, monitor CVEs, store tokens in a vault.
10:43 – 12:33
08 · Pillar 5 — Knowledge & Skills Hygiene
Skills + knowledge bases rot. Automate updates from real-world signals (e.g., post-sales-call context refresh). Versioned skills library, eval reports, compatible MCP servers.
12:33 – 13:40
09 · Pillar 6 — Compliance & Governance
Niche but lucrative for GRC people — GDPR, data privacy, audit trails. Automate workflow-by-workflow compliance scans. Audit trails before regulators arrive.
13:40 – 14:39
10 · Sell pain prevention, not features
Reframe every pillar around what the client is afraid to lose. 'I'll migrate your stack' is dead — 'your AI is making bad calls and nobody knows' lands.
14:39 – 15:41
11 · Pricing — audit + upfront + retainer
Free or paid audit as foot-in-the-door (cloud-cost-optimization style — one client had $45K/mo of unused services). Then upfront fee, then recurring retainer.
15:41 – 16:56
12 · Tiered retainers — get to Tier 3
Tier 1 / 2 / 3 packaging. Five Tier-3 clients = $50K/mo. Fractional-AI-employee positioning. Start at Tier 1, never sell yourself short — your value is knowing the six pillars exist.
16:56 – 17:40
13 · Final move — partner up, don't lone-wolf it
Enterprise doors open through partner consultancies. Twelve years of his enterprise income came from partnerships. Soft CTA to his community + on-screen videos.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- Forty percent of AI agent projects are projected to be canceled by 2027 according to Deloitte — most were built on hype and trends rather than audited business strategy.
- The lucrative play right now is not building new AI agents — it is cleaning up the broken, half-built systems businesses bought during the first hype cycle.
- Leading with an audit is not just a sales tactic — it is the strategic move that exposes which of the six monetizable pillars actually apply to a given business.
- AI maintenance as a product category will outlast every tool trend because every technology adoption wave produces a cleanup wave that is larger and longer-lasting.
- Many businesses are still paying for AI workflows that were overpriced and inefficient when they were built — performance and cost optimization is a retainer you can sell without a new build.
- Security and compliance are not pillars businesses think to audit but are almost universally broken in original AI implementations, making them the highest-urgency entry point.
- Structuring the engagement as audit plus upfront plus retainer captures three separate revenue events from the same client relationship without requiring any new products.
The maintenance retainer beats the build contract
What it teaches
Mansel Scheffel's contrarian case for AI maintenance consulting: audit first, then sell a recurring retainer across six monetizable pillars to businesses drowning in half-built AI.
01Hook — the untapped market — Frames the contrarian: forget building shiny agents, the lucrative niche is AI maintenance. Stakes the credibility (12 years consulting Fortune 100/500).
- The lucrative play in AI consulting right now is not building new agents — it is cleaning up the broken, hype-driven systems businesses bought in the last two years, because 40% of AI agent projects are projected to be cancelled by 2027.
02Doom & gloom — the coming AI crash — Deloitte stat: 40% of AI agent projects cancelled by 2027. Most current systems built on hype + shiny tools instead of strategy + architecture + fundamentals.
- Most of what businesses are running was built on hype and trends rather than strategy and fundamentals — the structural fragility of that foundation is the business case for the maintenance retainer.
03The two-phase playbook: Audit → Maintain — Lead every AI engagement with an audit (readiness assessment) just like cybersecurity or cloud-migration consulting did. Audit exposes the six pillars to monetize.
- Leading every AI engagement with an audit — a readiness assessment modeled on how cybersecurity and cloud-migration consulting scaled — exposes the six pillars that justify a long-term retainer.
04Pillar 1 — Migrations & Upgrades — Year-old n8n/duct-taped stacks are now legacy. Rebuild as MCP-orchestrated Claude Code agent architectures. Don't rip-and-replace — strategy first, augment what works.
- Pillar one is migrations and upgrades: year-old duct-taped stacks are now legacy, and rebuilding them as MCP-orchestrated architectures is the first billable deliverable.
05Pillar 2 — Performance & Cost — Slash bloated invoices by right-sizing models (Haiku/Sonnet/Opus per task) and caching. Vibe-coded apps are a developer gold mine — the bill should pay the retainer.
- Pillar two is performance and cost: right-sizing models per task and caching can dramatically reduce a client's monthly AI bill — and that savings should pay the retainer.
06Pillar 3 — Monitoring & Observability — Nobody's watching the AI they shipped. Set up quality-score, drift-detection, cost-per-task dashboards. He demos his own Command Centre; for enterprise use Braintrust/Langfuse/Helicone.
- Pillar three is monitoring and observability: nobody is watching the AI they shipped, and setting up quality-score, drift-detection, and cost-per-task dashboards is a gap every business has.
07Pillar 4 — Security & Threat Patching — Agents read emails — attack surface 437,000+ deep. Poisoned MCP servers and skill repos everywhere. Red-team checklist, harden MCP, monitor CVEs, store tokens in a vault.
- Pillar four is security and threat patching: agents that read email have a massive attack surface, poisoned MCP servers exist in the wild, and red-teaming plus CVE monitoring is a defensible, recurring service.
08Pillar 5 — Knowledge & Skills Hygiene — Skills + knowledge bases rot. Automate updates from real-world signals (e.g., post-sales-call context refresh). Versioned skills library, eval reports, compatible MCP servers.
- Pillar five is knowledge and skills hygiene: skills and knowledge bases rot over time, and automating updates from real-world signals — post-call context refresh, versioned libraries — is what keeps AI output accurate.
09Pillar 6 — Compliance & Governance — Niche but lucrative for GRC people — GDPR, data privacy, audit trails. Automate workflow-by-workflow compliance scans. Audit trails before regulators arrive.
- Pillar six is compliance and governance: GDPR, data privacy, and audit trails are niche but lucrative for regulated industries, and automating compliance scans before regulators arrive is the highest-margin pillar.
10Sell pain prevention, not features — Reframe every pillar around what the client is afraid to lose. 'I'll migrate your stack' is dead — 'your AI is making bad calls and nobody knows' lands.
- Sell pain prevention, not features — 'your AI is making bad calls and nobody knows' lands far better than 'I'll migrate your stack,' because clients feel the fear of the first and cannot visualize the second.
11Pricing — audit + upfront + retainer — Free or paid audit as foot-in-the-door (cloud-cost-optimization style — one client had $45K/mo of unused services). Then upfront fee, then recurring retainer.
- The pricing sequence is audit first (free or paid as a foot-in-the-door), then an upfront implementation fee, then a recurring retainer — the audit pays for itself immediately by surfacing waste the client did not know existed.
12Tiered retainers — get to Tier 3 — Tier 1 / 2 / 3 packaging. Five Tier-3 clients = $50K/mo. Fractional-AI-employee positioning. Start at Tier 1, never sell yourself short — your value is knowing the six pillars exist.
- Five Tier-3 retainer clients at the right rate generates $50,000 per month — and enterprise doors open through partner consultancies, not cold outreach.
13Final move — partner up, don't lone-wolf it — Enterprise doors open through partner consultancies. Twelve years of his enterprise income came from partnerships. Soft CTA to his community + on-screen videos.
- Twelve years of enterprise consulting income came primarily through partner consultancies, not direct sales — positioning yourself as an AI maintenance specialist inside an existing partner network is faster than building a solo pipeline.
Terms worth knowing.
- AI maintenance retainer
- A recurring monthly engagement where a consultant is paid to monitor, optimize, and update a business's AI systems on an ongoing basis — analogous to a managed services contract for traditional IT infrastructure.
- agentic workflow
- An automated sequence of AI-driven steps where a language model takes actions, makes decisions, and calls tools across multiple stages to complete a task — operating with more autonomy than a single prompt-response exchange.
- observability
- The practice of instrumenting a software system so that its internal state, performance, and failure patterns are visible through logs, dashboards, and metrics — allowing engineers to diagnose problems and optimize behavior using real data rather than guesswork.
- monitoring and observability (AI)
- The discipline of tracking how an AI system behaves in production — measuring which skills run, how often, which models are used, error rates, and output quality — to detect failures, reduce costs, and ensure the system is doing what it was designed to do.
- skill hygiene
- The practice of regularly auditing, pruning, and updating an AI agent's installed skills and knowledge bases — removing unused or outdated components, correcting stale context, and ensuring that only relevant, accurate information drives the agent's behavior.
- knowledge base (AI context)
- A structured collection of documents, guidelines, and reference material made accessible to an AI agent so it can ground its outputs in organization-specific facts, policies, and domain knowledge rather than relying solely on its training data.
- compliance (AI systems)
- The requirement that AI workflows handling personal or business data meet applicable legal and regulatory standards — such as GDPR for European user data — including rules about data storage, processing consent, and audit trails.
- GRC (governance, risk, compliance)
- A discipline and consulting category that covers an organization's framework for managing corporate governance policies, identifying business risks, and ensuring adherence to legal and regulatory requirements — increasingly applied to AI deployments.
- GDPR
- The General Data Protection Regulation — a European Union law that governs how organizations collect, store, process, and transfer personal data about EU residents, with significant financial penalties for violations.
- value-based pricing
- A pricing strategy where fees are set based on the economic value delivered to the client — such as cost savings, risk avoided, or revenue enabled — rather than on the time or materials required to do the work.
- fractional consultant
- A specialist hired part-time or on retainer by multiple clients simultaneously — providing executive-level expertise at a fraction of the cost of a full-time hire — common in AI, finance, and marketing.
- Braintrust / Langfuse / Helicone
- Third-party platforms for monitoring and evaluating AI model performance in production — offering features like prompt tracking, output scoring, cost analytics, and latency dashboards used by engineering teams at larger organizations.
- prompt injection / poisoned MCP
- A security vulnerability where malicious instructions are embedded in data an AI agent reads — or in third-party tool integrations it connects to — causing the agent to execute unintended actions or leak sensitive information.
Things they pointed at.
00:30linkDeloitte TMT Predictions 2026 — 40% AI agent project cancellation stat
07:26toolCommand Centre (his own AI operating system dashboard)
08:12toolBraintrust (observability)
08:15toolLangfuse (observability)
08:17toolHelicone (observability)
10:14channelHis own skills/security teardown video (linked in description)
15:22channelValue-based pricing video (description link)
17:10productHis AI operating system community
Lines you could clip.
00:07
“There is an entire untapped market that is far more lucrative than that and actually a lot easier to manage.”
00:47
“Most of this was built on hype and trends and shiny tools that the business didn't actually need.”
01:32
“When you focus on the shiny stuff instead of the strategy, the architecture, and the fundamentals…”
06:05
“Anyone who's been vibe coding their apps and throwing in all these agentic things without knowing a single thing about coding — you can come in as the developer who actually knows what he's talking about.”
06:48
“All those things that have been built — if no one was ever monitoring them, how the hell would you know if this thing is working?”
08:53
“Every single system that has been built in the last year has some form of security issue in it right now.”
13:56
“People will always do anything to avoid pain.”
14:26
“Instead of saying you'll set up observability for them, you tell them that their AI is making bad calls and nobody knows about it.”
16:46
“Don't ever sell yourself short, because your value is in the fact that you know these six pillars exist.”
Word for word.
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metaphor
00:00Right now, most videos are focused on Claude Code building your shiny new things, but there is an entire untapped market that is far more lucrative than that and actually a lot easier to manage. In my twelve years of consulting with Fortune five hundred and one hundred companies, this has made me a small fortune because it's always going to be around no matter what tech you are using.
00:16So in this video, we're gonna focus specifically on AI maintenance and how you can use it to make a ton of money in your niche. First up, we need to set the scene though with a little bit of doom and gloom. So there are lots of stats floating around online, one of them being from Deloitte that says 40% of AI agent projects are gonna be canceled by 2027.
00:32There are many of these stats out there, and they're all based on different things mostly around people starting off in the wrong way. There are several reasons for this happening that we'll get into very soon, but one of them was because most of everything that people have right now is . As you can see from our little house over here, that most of this was built on hype and trends and shiny tools that the business didn't actually need but they needed because a whole bunch of kiddies online on YouTube told them it was the .
00:58But unfortunately for them, it turned out to just be hype because those people had never worked in businesses. So that's what happens when you firstly take advice from the wrong crew, but secondly, when you focus on the shiny stuff instead of the strategy, the architecture, and the fundamentals behind why you're actually about to do the thing that is gonna change your entire business.
01:16One of the reasons for any AI engagement, I always lead with the audit specifically for this strategic reason. We wanna make sure that whatever we are giving these people is actually gonna give them some return on investment and that it's an actual problem in their business as opposed to this hype that we're looking at with this little over here.
01:32So when we're looking at maintenance, we pretty much do the exact same thing. We just do it through a different lens.
01:37We start off with the audit or readiness. Now historically, whenever I was doing this with cyber security or cloud, whatever the tool was at the time, it would always be focused on readiness. When people were all leaving their on prem to go to the cloud, it would be cloud readiness assessment and things like that.
01:52So you can change this word from audit because some people don't like it. You call it whatever the hell you want as long as it makes sense toward people being ready or improved or whatever it is they need. But the idea behind this is that you are going to give them the strategy that they need specifically for all of the things that are broken because you don't want to make the same mistake that the guy before you made where he just went in there and yoloed his way and burnt his name.
02:12You want to make sure that whatever these people have going on in their environment gets solved properly. So we do the audit because that exposes all the avenues or the six pillars that we can use to make money from this situation. And we're gonna dive into each one of these six pillars down here to understand what type of money we can make in them and how we would actually position ourselves so that we come across as something valuable to the business as opposed to somebody who's just reading off of the script.
02:35More importantly though, there is money to be had in the audit. There's money to be had upfront in the maintenance, but then there is also a retainer option over here.
02:41So there are three different opportunities that you can use to get more money. And even more so, you don't have to be an expert in every single one of these things.
02:48You can pick and choose and add as many as you can possibly cater for. The more you have, the more valuable you're obviously going to be and the more money you can charge. But you can also narrow this down and go all in into one thing as you'll soon see.
02:58So first up, we have pillar one, and this is migrations and upgrades. And this is really, really lucrative because of how the landscape has drifted over the last year. If we look at where we were a year ago, we were busy doing n n n make that basic plumbing with AI plugged into it to go and do these cool things that now Claude can do in, like, twenty minutes.
03:16So the whole architecture behind how businesses are running their operations has significantly changed because of AgenTic and MCP and various other things that go into the modern day workflow. So for pillar one here, you would come in, you would assess their environment, and figure out just how old their current workflows are, how much they're costing them, as opposed to how much simpler they could be, how much more advanced they could be that would lead to other branches of making their business easier, things like that.
03:42It's all about breaking it down into what is still working because maybe it's still working for some of the things. You don't want to just rip something out because you need to throw the word agentic on it.
03:51That's not what I'm suggesting here. You use the audit, again, the strategy to define what isn't working, what is legacy by modern standards, and then the after period is what can be augmented to make their business even better, more performant, more cost efficient, to make their staff even better, things like that.
04:08That is part of this migration and upgrade plan, not simply going in there and destroying something because it's outdated. But one thing I can guarantee you is a lot of these original processes over here are massively non secure.
04:19They have massive compliance problems. They're missing a ton of context for these systems to actually be beneficial. So when you look at the after picture over here, where we're kind of building on this AI operating system model that we've been talking about on this channel, it's way better for a business because we can stash skills, we can have knowledge, we can essentially capture everything for each member of the team and have it augmenting the role of the person who is using it.
04:42Because sure, this entire landscape has changed, but there are a lot of other things that form part of this landscape or any environment that we're working in. And that's what brings us into pillar two, which is performance and cost. And this is pretty straightforward.
04:55Right? People got these original systems in there. They cost x amount of money.
04:58Are they running the best way that they could? Probably not. Have they ever come in again to fine tune the model to change any of the prompts that were originally in there, pull things out?
05:07Probably not. So many businesses are probably still paying for things that they don't need or things that are massively overpriced or inefficient by today's standards. So your goal would be to come in there and sort that problem out.
05:17But again, it's not just about the tools here. It's about the strategy behind the entire scenario of the business in order to make it more performant and more cost effective at what it's doing. So when you look at the after state, even if it is using modern agentic workflows and things like that, you've seen how Anthropic is cutting down those usage limits.
05:34AI is going to get more expensive. So part of your role here is to come in and make sure that any skill or any workflow that is running is using the correct model. It's not just all thrown on Opus running the most expensive thing possible with a really long skill chain that's also inefficient.
05:48Your idea would be to shine your expertise on the floors in their system as a whole. Figure out how you can make it cheaper, how you can make it run faster with lesser models, more efficiently with lesser models, things like that.
06:00All ties in with pillar one as well. And just to note something on this for any developers out there, you guys have an in front of you because everyone who's been vibe coding their apps and throwing in all these agentic things without knowing a single thing about coding, you can obviously go in there as the developer who actually knows what he's talking about and fixes up all of their code, all their broken workflows, and that ties in with the performance and the cost and the upgrades and the maintenance of this web app or whatever it is that they built for them because you guys actually know what you're talking about and you know what efficiency looks like.
06:28So if you are a developer and you're looking to branch out into something like that, this is definitely one of the ways to go. Few of my friends are doing this right now and making a small fortune doing it. Next up, have pillar three, which is monitoring and observability, and for some reason, this is a very non talked about thing on YouTube, but it's vital because all those things that have been built, if no one was ever monitoring them, how the hell would you know if this thing is working?
06:48How would you know if your customers are getting the experience that they need? But more importantly, how do you know that whatever you built is doing what it's supposed to be doing in the best possible way?
06:57You don't know what's failing, when it's failing, or how it's failing, or why it's failing. Those things are, again, how we feed into the upper layers of these pillars. Pillar two, cost efficiency.
07:07If you had observability, you could see how many skills run, how often, what models they're using, how often they fail, how often they hit the cache, things like that. That all helps you understand it. So it's not just about your client understanding this.
07:18Most of the time, they don't really care about this. It would be whoever is in charge of the tech and the monitoring, of course. But having this layer helps you understand those sorts of things.
07:26And when you understand those sorts of things, you can make your life a hell of a lot easier. So this panel that you're looking at right now is the command sense that I've built specifically for my AI operating system. The video is on the screen now if you wanna check out how to do this for yourself.
07:38But with this, we have all of the observability that we need for any Claude environment so I can make decisions based on actual data and not some form of YOLO. I know exactly what my skills are doing when they're doing it. I know the security of my entire AI operating system environment, same for how much context I'm always using.
07:53I understand my MCP service, everything that goes into it. So when I need to make a decision on whether I need to change something or optimize something, I have the data to prove it over the last thirty, sixty, ninety days, whatever I might need. It all lives inside here.
08:07So for you having this as the consultant who goes in there to try and fish out all this information to be the maintenance guy, you need to set up some sort of observability, whether it's taking this dashboard from the video that I just spoke about, or if you're in a much larger business, of course, you're gonna use something more established.
08:21You wouldn't be working with someone's personal AI operating system here. You'll be using something like Braintrust or Langfuse or Helicone, although I think they just got bought by someone. But the point is you would have a more formal point of observability that would link into their larger infrastructure.
08:35Because as you see over here, when we understand the quality of the output that we're getting from the AI, it means that we can make the right decisions based on that objective data. On to pillar four, which is security and threat patching. Again, ties into the whole thing because every little system out there needs security, and my god, this is gonna be so valuable as a niche to be in, AI security, anything related to it, especially when mythos and all of the higher models get released.
08:58Cyber attacks are just gonna come up more and more often. More importantly though, the vulnerabilities that get exposed are just gonna explode and obviously people out there who aren't technical, they're not gonna be reading this stuff, they don't stay up to date. If they don't have anyone in house who is taking care of this sort of thing, you would be the person to come and do that for them.
09:15And I can guarantee you that every single system that has been built in the last year has some form of security issue in it right now because everyone again who was building this sort of thing didn't factor this kind of stuff in. More importantly, people who went out there and yolo their way into OpenClaw and other such solutions, the amount of poisoned MCP servers and skill repositories out there is ridiculous.
09:33So everyone who's going out there and just bringing in all these skills to their environment, all they're doing is opening themselves up for exposure. If you've seen my video on skills and how to build them and the other two skill videos that I have, you'll know that that's one of the worst practices you can do again specifically because you should be only putting skills in your environment that you actually need and that's usually built off of the strategy, the foundation that we talk about.
09:55Don't just go out there and connect to repos and things like that because someone told you it's a cool skill. You might not even need it. But your role would be pretty simple here.
10:02You would come in and do a security assessment on whatever their environment is currently set up, find any loopholes or problems with compliance and vulnerabilities and things like that that can be exploited, and then you just patch them. It's really that straightforward. Thankfully, with the correct skill, in terms of their own personal environment, you can order that in less than five minutes.
10:19I've built a skill that's on one of the videos that I'll link down below. More importantly, you can add to the expertise by making sure that they understand what good looks like when it comes down to security, data privacy, and things like that.
10:30So there are many different consulting layers that you can also add on top of the basic technical work here because a lot of businesses really don't have that capability, and most people don't even think about this kind of stuff. Next up, pillar five, and this one kind of ties in with the first pillar, but it's specifically for knowledge and skill hygiene.
10:44So these two tie in with one another because the skills are built off of the business knowledge, and ultimately it lives next to the skills that it can go out there and do this repeatable workflow. But what a lot of people are doing is they're working off of knowledge that was accurate six months ago but is no longer accurate.
10:58So one of the things you could do here is obviously automate this entire process for them so that their skills and their knowledge gets automatically updated based off of the latest context. For instance, if somebody has a call, they get off a sales call, whatever it is that they were speaking about on that call updates the context or knowledge about that specific client.
11:15That's just one working example, but the idea behind a much larger system for this would be for every person who is a part of this business, you would find out where their global knowledge base is, and that would be automatically maintained and kept well over time. So for instance, if they're creating content and nobody went back after the first time somebody built the system to update a voice, to change any words that they didn't want in there or any styles of content, to update their brand and what it looks like, what it sounds like, all of those things need to regularly be addressed because AI evolves over time, so does the brand image.
11:45And a company changes faster than it ever has, which means systems and knowledge and all of those moving pieces need to change along with it. So our after screenshot of what this would look like, you would have a lot of structure behind where everything is stored, why it is stored there, what is stored in an actual knowledge base with versus what lives in the actual skills.
12:03You would also have a skills library because most people just have stuff thrown in their environment because, again, someone told them that they needed it. That's ridiculous. You need to get rid of all of that stuff that they're not using.
12:12You would do audits on this regularly, get reports. As you're the person managing this, you would understand exactly what they need and when they need it. And as a result of this, you're not just fixing their skill hygiene and their knowledge, you're also making them more secure because they no longer have things that could be exploited that don't need to be there or systems that don't need to be there.
12:29So these layers all tie in with one another. Then we have compliance and governance, and this is obviously quite niche because you can't just walk in there as somebody who's never done anything with either of those things and be like, yes. I will make you compliant.
12:39That's not gonna work at all. So this, I realize, is a little bit more niche, but if you are in the GRC space or in some form of compliance, you can make a ton of money doing this.
12:48This market is literally going to do this because as more AI models come out and things change over time, nobody really has any idea how to manage any of this stuff. If you can go in there and not only make it faster for them but also easier, you've pretty much sold yourself.
13:01This is also really important from a data privacy perspective because a lot of people using these systems right now, they don't understand the problems that they're creating for themselves with data privacy, GDPR, other things like that depending on whatever region in the world that they're in. If they are handling data or putting data through systems, they don't know what they don't know.
13:18So your role would be to come in there and expose this kind of information to them, show them what they are doing wrong and the trouble that it can cause them and how they can become compliant. And again, you can automate this all super easily. If they have several workflow skills, whatever it is that they've got in their environment, you can have a skill that runs through all of that, understands what each workflow does, and then shows you a report of where this could be breaking compliance or governance or security and privacy and things like that quite easily.
13:43In just a few minutes, you would have that report. So audits might be boring, but you can definitely make a lot of money from them. Now something that's really important is you don't wanna walk into a business and say something like, I'll migrate your stack for you.
13:53They don't give a shit that kind of thing. You need to frame every single one of these things that I just spoke about about pain prevention. Focus on the things they're afraid of or the things that they don't know about because in there is the pain that they're trying to avoid.
14:06People will always do anything to avoid pain. So instead of talking about optimizing their costs, you talk about how much money they're wasting in their systems because they haven't bothered looking at it. Instead of saying that you'll set up observability for them, you tell them that their AI is making bad calls and nobody knows about it.
14:21More importantly, they don't know how this could be affecting their clients or their sales or their team. Focus on the layers of pain within that because observability is boring and really no one cares about it. Same for security incidents.
14:31You don't want to focus on the security audit. You focus on the fact that even one incident can cost them millions of dollars and destroy their entire business and reputation. Things like that.
14:40Always focus on the pain prevention behind your marketing when you're trying to sell this sort of thing. In terms of what to charge for this, there are obviously different methods that I spoke about earlier in this video, so you could charge for the audit. You could also lead with a free audit for specific thing like a quick security review that would take you a few minutes to do that.
14:57One of the things we used to do in cloud is we used to do a cost optimization checker, and that was simple. You just go into an AWS panel and check all the services that they switched on and map that to whether they actually used any of them. Often, would turn out that they weren't using a bunch of them.
15:10One of the places we went to, there was, like, $45,000 of services that were being charged every month and nobody was actually using it. So obviously, it depends on the size of the business.
15:19I'm working in enterprise most of my life, but for smaller clients, money is money. They are still wasting money in accordance with their level of the business.
15:27Point is find out what you can cater for, and then you price according to that. I've got a whole video on value based pricing, which I'll also link down in the description below. But once you've come up with your number for perhaps doing the initial migration or just this whole package upfront, you would then be able to track in this retainer model so that you have recurring revenue from these people because clearly if their system's been abandoned for the last year, they don't have anyone internally who's championing this, so you come in as the person who augments this for them.
15:54Obviously, prices here are pretty arbitrary. It depends on the size of the client, how much revenue they're bringing in, how valuable you are to them as in how many of those pillars you can stack behind you and your skill and expertise and things like that. So what I wanted to do was just give you a breakdown of how this might look based on tiers.
16:09It's a very popular approach at the moment to have these different tiers that people can choose what they want from you. Your goal would obviously be to get as close as you can to tier three because then even if you've got like five clients in a small enough business, you would have 50 k a month, and believe me, this stuff stacks because even something like this is way cheaper than having a full time AI employee right now who knows what he's talking about.
16:29So this whole fractional approach can really work for you. Again, comes down to the clients that you're working with and how experienced you are. You're probably going be starting off with tier one if you're brand new to this sort of thing.
16:38But don't ever sell yourself short because your value is in the fact that you know these six pillars exist as opposed to people who are just going out there and not doing anything with them in the first place. Then one final thing for this video, those of you who do want to make more money than this, obviously, your easiest way to do that because you're not gonna get in front of enterprise clients very easily as a solo consultant without partnerships.
16:58So if you're starting out, the best thing you can do right now is find partner consultancies within your area that need augmentation from you. They have access to larger clients that ultimately you want to get to, and believe me, partnerships have served me over the last twelve years. They're the reason that I made most of my money in enterprise because they opened those doors.
17:15But I also made friends, I built relationships, and those all opened up extra doors for me as well. So that's probably the best thing that you can do. You don't always need to be the here.
17:23Oftentimes, it's the worst play because it takes you much longer to get to where you wanna go. So I hope this video was helpful to you. If you have any questions, leave them in the comments below.
17:29Otherwise, check out the videos on the screen now. They'll definitely help you in your journey. If you want any more guidance, I do have a community around this and building your own AI operating system for yourself or your clients.
17:37Thanks for watching. I'll see you guys in the next one.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Everyone is chasing the wrong end of the market. While the agent-builder thumbnails fight over the same shiny-object buyers, an entire wave of businesses has already bought half-finished AI on hype — and nobody is being paid to keep it alive. Mansel calls that the real gold mine: not agents, but the audit-then-maintain consulting playbook the cybersecurity industry has been running for twenty years.
Named ideas worth stealing.
01:36model
Audit → Maintain (Two-Phase Playbook)
- Phase 1: Audit / readiness assessment
- Phase 2: Maintain across the six pillars
Borrow the cybersecurity / cloud-migration consulting structure: never propose work without an audit first. The audit is itself a paid deliverable AND the discovery engine that surfaces all six pillars of follow-on work.
Steal forAny consulting offer Joe sells around MCN, agents, or AI infra — lead with a paid 'AI readiness audit' instead of a fixed-scope build.
04:00list
The Six Pillars of AI Maintenance
- Migrations & Upgrades (legacy n8n/zapier → MCP-orchestrated)
- Performance & Cost (right-size models, cache, prompt fixes)
- Monitoring & Observability (quality score, drift, cost-per-task)
- Security & Threat Patching (MCP poisoning, CVEs, token vaults)
- Knowledge & Skills Hygiene (versioned skills, fresh context)
- Compliance & Governance (GDPR, audit trails, policies)
Six independently monetizable service lines. You can specialize in one or stack all six; more pillars = more value = more billable.
Steal forProductize MCN+ consulting offers as a six-pillar menu — clients pick the pillars, you bill against the menu.
02:35list
Three Revenue Layers
- Audit (one-time, paid or loss-leader)
- Maintenance / migration (upfront project fee)
- Retainer (recurring monthly)
Every engagement has three layers of monetization stacked on top of each other — audit gets you in the door, project fee is the meaty middle, retainer is the long tail.
Steal forRestructure any of Joe's done-with-you offers (LFB Line, MCN+ consulting) into audit + upfront + retainer instead of one-and-done.
15:41model
Tiered Retainer Pricing (1 / 2 / 3)
- Tier 1: starter, fewer pillars
- Tier 2: more pillars, more depth
- Tier 3: full-stack fractional AI, ~$10K/mo target
Standard tiered SaaS-style retainer table — let the client self-select, anchor on Tier 3. Five Tier-3 clients = $50K/mo recurring.
Steal forMCN+ tier pricing — anchor with a 'fractional AI employee' Tier 3 even if 80% buy Tier 1.
13:40concept
Pain Prevention Framing
- Don't say 'I'll optimize your costs' → say 'you're bleeding money in systems no one is watching'
- Don't say 'I'll set up observability' → say 'your AI is making bad calls and nobody knows'
- Don't say 'security audit' → say 'one incident can cost millions and destroy your reputation'
Every pillar is technically boring. Reframe each into the specific fear it removes. People always do more to avoid pain than to chase gain.
Steal forRewrite every MCN+ / Mod feature description from 'we do X' to 'you stop bleeding Y'.
16:56concept
Partner-First Enterprise Strategy
- Find partner consultancies in your area
- They have the enterprise relationships you don't
- You bring the augmentation skill they lack
Solo consultants almost never crack enterprise alone. Partner consultancies are the unlock — they bring the door, you bring the expertise.
Steal forStop thinking of Modern Creator as solo — line up 2–3 partner consultancies who'd resell MCN tooling into their enterprise book.
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
17:10next-video
“I do have a community around this and building your own AI operating system for yourself or your clients. Thanks for watching, I'll see you guys in the next one.”
Soft community CTA at the very end, after two minutes of substantive packaging/pricing advice. Heavier reliance on end-screen 'videos on the screen now' rather than hard pitch.
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
PRIMARY CTAWhere the creator wants you to go next.
Visual structure at a glance.
