If you have searched for an AI consultant in the last six months, you have probably seen two prices and nothing in between. McKinsey-tier firms quote $30,000 retainers before they will look at your business. Upwork freelancers will do "something with AI" for $500 and leave you with a list of tools you cannot use. Neither one is built for a 10-person team trying to save the owner ten hours a week.
There is a third option, and it is the one I built my practice around. It is a $997 flat-fee AI Efficiency Audit, with a 45-hour turnaround, and a guarantee that identifies at least 5 hours per week of repeatable work to automate, or you do not pay.
Here is why that pricing structure beats the alternatives for almost every small business owner I talk to.
The $30k Retainer vs. The Needs of a Small Business
Enterprise AI consulting is priced for enterprise. The $30,000 floor on a McKinsey or BCG-style engagement is not arbitrary. It pays for a partner-led discovery process, a multi-week scoping phase, and a deliverable that assumes you have a 200-person operations team to receive it.
If you have 5 to 50 employees, you do not have that surface area. You have a sales process, a service-delivery process, a billing process, and maybe a hiring pipeline. Each one has between 3 and 8 handoffs. Total automation opportunity, measured in hours saved per week, is real but bounded. Spending $30,000 on a plan that maps an operating model you do not have is not investment, it is theater.
The actual math: at 50 employees and a $75 per hour blended cost of time, 5 hours per week per role saved is roughly $20,000 in annualized labor. A $30,000 consulting engagement that takes six weeks to deliver pays back over a year and a half. A $997 audit that delivers in 45 hours pays back the first week.
The Problem with Generalist Upwork Freelancers
The other end of the market is worse. Generalist freelancers on Upwork or Fiverr will sell you "AI consulting" for a few hundred dollars and deliver a slide deck of trending tools. There is no standardized deliverable, no estimate of hours saved, no guarantee, and no implementation order. You receive a list, you do not receive a plan.
The hidden cost is your time evaluating it. Every owner I have audited has tried this route at least once. The result is a Notion page full of tool names and a calendar that looks exactly like it did before. Cheap is expensive when the deliverable does not move you.
The $997 Flat-Fee AI Efficiency Audit
What I sell is different in three specific ways.
First, it is productized. Same scope, same price, same deliverable for every buyer. The price is $997 flat. There is no scoping call before the scoping call, and there is no retainer.
Second, the deliverable is concrete. It is a 2 to 3 page ranked plan. Each line item names the specific AI tool to use, the workflow it replaces, the estimated hours per week it saves, and the order to implement. You can hand the plan to the person on your team who will actually build it, or to me for a follow-on.
Third, the philosophy is workflow design, not tool selection. Most AI advice fails because it treats AI as a tool problem. It is not a tool problem, it is a workflow problem. The owners who get results from AI are the ones who chained two or three tools together (an Anthropic Claude step here, a Make.com scenario there) so the output of one becomes the input of the next. The audit identifies where those chains exist in your business and where they should.
The 45-Hour Turnaround
The structure of the engagement is built to compress time, not extract it.
Step one is a 45-minute discovery call, recorded with Fathom. I ask about your team, your tools, your top frustrations, and the workflows that consume the most owner-time today.
Step two is the deliverable. 45 hours later, you receive the ranked plan. It is 2 to 3 pages. Specific tools are named. Hours-per-week estimates are attached to each workflow. The implementation order is explicit. Citations point to specific moments from the call so you can verify nothing was invented.
Step three is a 30-minute walkthrough call. I hand it to you and answer the questions that come up when you actually read it.
That is the whole engagement. There is no scoping retainer and no open-ended follow-up. The premise is simple: I will show you what I would do, in 45 hours, and you decide whether to do it.
The 5-Hour Weekly Savings Guarantee
The risk-reversal is the part most owners ask about twice, because it does not exist anywhere else in the market.
If the audit does not identify at least 5 hours per week of repeatable work that can be automated with current AI tools, you do not pay. The guarantee is not a partial refund and it is not a retry. The math has to work or the engagement does not happen.
5 hours per week is 250 hours per year. At $75 per hour blended owner cost, that is $18,750 in annual time freed. The $997 audit pays for itself in the first workflow you actually rebuild. The guarantee exists because every audit I have run since launch has found more than 5 hours, often substantially more, and I am willing to put the fee on that pattern.
CEO of FieldCommand (CRM for trade contractors) and an active AI implementation practitioner. Andrew has run $997 AI Efficiency Audits and shipped deployed AI workflows for owner-operator businesses with 5 to 50 employees since 2024. Every claim on this blog is sourced from a real implementation, not a theory.
Ready to find your five hours?
If you are tired of $30,000 quotes you cannot justify and $500 freelancer decks you cannot use, the audit is built for you. 45 minutes on a call. 45 hours later, you have the plan. 30 minutes to walk through it.
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