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Hey there,
Sarah saw the layoff coming.
She was running IT for a 150-person video game studio, which sounds far more technical than it was. She is not an engineer and never has been.
Then the industry started sliding, and her CEO made a last-ditch play: he asked everyone at the company to come up with AI projects. Sarah built one: a content marketing system running on avatars of the studio’s own video game heroes.
Somewhere in the middle of building it, she fell in love with AI.
Despite valiant efforts, the company ran out of funding. Last June the studio shut down and she was out of a job.
“No severance plan. No real network connections, because I am a lazy introvert. No pipeline. No clients. Just a lot of desperate spray-and-pray job applications going nowhere, along with the sinking feeling that a W-2 was no longer going to be ‘the way.’ Fast-forward to me Googling ‘how to start a consulting business’ and trying not to panic.” Twenty-odd years of building a career, and it ended because somebody else ran out of cash.
Nine months later she signed a $724,500 statement of work as an AI consultant.
Yesterday you met Dan, who got there in about a year. Sarah did it in nine months, and she started from a layoff.
“I started out not thinking I was techie at all.”
Sarah never sought out the tech industry or an IT job in general. For a long time she didn’t think of herself as someone who belonged in tech at all.
“I started out not thinking I was techie at all. I was working as a wilderness therapist, an outdoor educator, [then] going into classroom teaching, and then from there learned I was pretty good at fixing the Wi-Fi in our portable, which was in the back corner of the school campus.” “When you have a classroom full of middle schoolers, you get really good at making sure that the internet is always working, because the second it goes down, chaos ensues.” That’s how a lot of careers actually evolve. She got good at something because 30 kids were about to riot if she didn’t.
From there, she moved to the Bay Area and spent six years running IT at the studio. She got a glimmer of hope from a cool AI project… Then the company folded.
“Is it okay to make an investment of this magnitude in myself?”
Sarah didn’t come to us first.
She started on YouTube, working through AI influencer channels. Then a Skool community with modules on basic AI animations.
“I wanted something deeper, and I also felt like those Skool communities were quickly kind of [falling obsolete], where I could tell that AI’s already in a different place now than the curriculum.” She was subscribed to a stack of AI newsletters at the time. One of them mentioned Innovating with AI.
She enrolled and opened her consultancy, called Pathwarden, but not before pondering the question that stops most people:
“My hesitation was mostly around my self-worth. ‘Am I going to be able to do this? [Can] I afford this? Is it okay to make an investment of this magnitude in myself?’”
Her “nonexistent” network still got her a first gig
Her curriculum path told her to start with her warm network, so she did, despite having described that network as “nonexistent.”
A friend in healthcare needed a prototype for an organ donation app. She built it with a no-code app, and two people from our community helped her with the UI and the product requirements. Now her friend is now using that prototype to raise seed money.
Then her husband took her to a conference, and she met her biggest client.
“I didn’t plan to turn it into a $700K contract.”
In December she landed an 8-week business process and data audit. The scope called for somewhere between three and 10 stakeholder interviews.
Sarah did more than 30.
She spoke with every exec, every department lead, and every person who actually does the work. Those meetings were recorded, synthesized with Claude, and turned into 78 recommendations across five business units, each scored on revenue impact, process improvement, customer experience, risk and enablement.
She charged $10,000 for the whole thing.
“I didn’t plan to turn it into a $700K contract. I just didn’t know how to do a half-assed audit.” The audit wasn’t a sales tactic. She overdelivered because overdelivering is how she works, and the huge contract was a natural consequence.
She’ll also tell you she overworked it:
“I put in way, way, way more time and effort than I think was actually necessary… if I were to do this over again, I learned a lot in that process, and I would be way more efficient.” “She signed because the spreadsheet made sense.”
The executive team was excited about AI. The CFO was not excited about paying for infrastructure she couldn’t tie to an outcome.
So Sarah showed the math.
She created a custom ROI calculator modeling every recommendation against projected value. It showed $882,000 to $907,000 in estimated annual return. With buffer calculations included, breakeven was estimated between months 7 and 16.
“[The CFO] didn’t sign because of a compelling vision deck. She signed because the spreadsheet made sense.” There was one more obstacle: The client wanted the exciting AI, but not the identity management and data segmentation underneath it, which sounds boring and expensive. Sarah reframed it to solve that:
“I stopped pitching infrastructure and started pitching prerequisites. ‘You already approved Walter AI for call analysis. Here’s what has to exist for Walter AI to function. This isn’t an IT project. It’s the foundation for something you already said yes to.’” “That changed every conversation we had after that.” $724,500 over 21 months, split 50/50 with a partner she met via IWAI
$724,500 over 21 months. A full technology transformation across a $6.3 million financial services group: an SEC-registered wealth management firm, a SaaS platform, an education company and an insurance agency.
Seven phases. 24 projects. 94 tasks. And Decision Gates built in, so the client can re-choose at every stage instead of being locked in for 21 months.
She’s clear that the gates protect both sides:
“They always have an off-ramp… Fortunately, this off-ramp protects us as consultants, too. If we want to exit early, we can!” She splits the engagement 50/50 with Samuel, her fractional CTO partner. He runs technical architecture, she runs strategy, client relationships and AI implementation.
She met Samuel through another student in our Slack.
“Without that connection through Jan, I wouldn’t have had the technical partner I needed and this roadmap wouldn’t have gotten built.” Sarah is blunt about how much of this Claude helped with. It handled strategy documents, financial models, the audit report, the executive presentations, the ROI calculator logic, the recommendation scoring, and the roadmap architecture.
“Without Claude, this engagement wouldn’t exist. Not because I don’t understand the work, but because one person cannot produce hundreds of pages of analysis, financial modeling, and strategic documentation at the quality level required to earn a contract like this. AI didn’t replace my thinking. It made my thinking deliverable.”
4 things she did that you can copy
Sarah’s numbers are hers. Most first years don’t look like this one. But nothing she did is unique:
Do the small gig, and do it better than anyone expects. A $10,000 audit scoped for 10 interviews became 30-plus interviews and 78 scored recommendations. In her words: “The deliverables earned the trust. The trust earned the contract.”
Build the financial case every single time.“Nobody signs a big number because your slides look good. They sign because the math works and they believe you can execute.” The ROI model closed this, not the roadmap.
Sell the prerequisite, not the infrastructure. Nobody wants to pay just for the “plumbing.” Everybody will pay for the thing they already said yes to.
Leverage the community and templates. Jan introduced her to Samuel. Shawn, Jackie and Bron were who she called to think out loud. And she used our MSA and SOW templates rather than writing contract language from scratch mid-deal, which she says “saved me weeks and made me look like I’d been doing this for years.”
And underneath all of it: she decided she was worth the investment.
“I thought I had no tech skills at the outset of this. This is really possible for anyone at any stage of comfort with tech.”
Today: her own schedule, a partner she chose, and a path to VP of Technology
I asked which of the Four Freedoms matters most to you right now: Time, money, relationships, or purpose.
Last June Sarah lost all four in a single afternoon. That’s what a layoff does.
Today she sets her own schedule, works alongside a business partner she chose, and has a path to VP of Technology at the end of this engagement if both sides want it. She’s also eligible to apply for our certified consultant directory, which she was more excited about than the $724,500 |