The Solo Consultant's AI Playbook

Most AI products promise to 10× your output. This one promises to give you back the hours you're losing to the work around the work.

You bill somewhere between $100 and $250 an hour. The hours that pay your rent are the strategy work, the deliverables, the judgment calls. The hours that don't are everything around them — proposals, kickoff emails, meeting prep, deliverable drafting, case-study harvesting, the LinkedIn research before the Thursday call.

A meaningful slice of those around-the-work hours are AI-tractable. Not all of them — anything that requires your taste, your judgment, your client relationship is yours. But a real chunk can move from 40 minutes to 4. The compound effect is whether you bill 25 hours a week or 35 with the same calendar.

This is the playbook for that.

What you get

An 8-chapter PDF (~50 pages, editorial design) covering:

1. The Operating Model — three categories of consulting work, and the screen to run before any AI tab
2. Lead Research — pre-call dossier in 90 seconds; better discovery questions than your competitors
3. Proposals — discovery call to signed proposal in 20 minutes (cross-references the Proposal-Closer Prompt Pack)
4. Client Onboarding — kickoff email, week-one questions, the internal doc that saves you in week 3
5. Meetings — 5-minute pre-brief, 5-minute debrief from transcript, 2-minute follow-up
6. Deliverable Drafting — where AI helps and where it kills your reputation; the right workflow
7. Case Studies & Newsletters — one wrapped engagement, three pieces of marketing, fifteen minutes
8. Quarterly Retrospective — pipeline pattern read, ICP refinement, the one change for next quarter

Plus:

• Appendix A — every prompt from every chapter, copy-paste ready, in a separate prompts/ folder
• Appendix B — short, opinionated take on Claude vs. ChatGPT for these workflows, plus tool recs
• Bonus: AI Operator's Cheatsheet — single-page printable that compresses the 8 chapters into one dense reference. Print it. Stick it next to your monitor.

Who this is for

Solo consultants, fractional operators, and small agency owners (1–5 people) who already use Claude or ChatGPT but haven't figured out how to make AI actually save the hours it's supposed to. The persona this book serves has done at least ten engagements; if you haven't, the workflows will land on theory you don't yet have the scar tissue to map them onto.

Who this isn't for

• First-time consultants. Bookmark for later.
• Anyone looking for a “how to build an AI agency” book. There are many of those. This isn't one.
• Anyone expecting AI to replace the parts of your work that require judgment. It can't, and this book argues against trying.
• Anyone who reads books and doesn't apply them. The whole premise is running the workflows on real engagements. If you won't, this book costs more than it returns.

What it won't do for you

It won't ship deliverables for you. It will get you to a 70% draft in a tenth of the time. The 30% is still on you. That 30% is where the bill rate lives.

Why Claude-first

Claude consistently produces sharper, less-padded business reasoning on structured tasks like the ones in this book. Every chapter also includes a ChatGPT compatibility note at the bottom. Both work; Claude wins on nuance. Appendix B has more on when to reach for which.

Format & delivery

• Instant download, ~550 KB zipped
• Main book: PDF (~50 pages, editorial design)
• Bonus: AI Operator's Cheatsheet (1-page PDF, dense, printable)
• Appendix prompts: raw .md files for paste-and-go
• All deterministic Typst-rendered output — no AI-generated layouts, no stock illustrations
• Free updates for life — we ship new versions based on buyer feedback

Pairs with

The Proposal-Closer Prompt Pack is the deeper version of Chapter 3. If proposals are your main bottleneck, that pack ($37) is the more direct fix. The two products are designed to layer — the playbook gives you the operating model across the whole engagement; the prompt pack drills into the proposal step.

FAQ

How is this different from a “100 ChatGPT prompts for consultants” pack?
Those are lists of standalone prompts. This is an 8-chapter book that gives you the operating model — when to use AI, when not to, how the workflows fit together — and then drops the specific prompts inside each chapter with worked examples. The prompts are copy-paste ready in Appendix A; the book is what makes them stick.

Do I need Claude to use this?
No. Every prompt works in ChatGPT too.

Is this a course?
No. It's a book. No videos, no community, no live anything.

Refund policy?
We don't do refunds on digital products once downloaded. If the book genuinely doesn't work for your situation, reply to your purchase receipt — we'll make it right.