The realization

I’ve spent the last several years inside an MSP. Recurring revenue. Setup fees. Quarterly business reviews. Stack standardization. It’s a boring, beautiful business model — and it’s the exact model almost every “AI consultant” on LinkedIn is ignoring.

Most AI consulting pitches I see right now are project-shaped: “I’ll build you an agent for $20k.” One and done. Hand it off. Hope the client doesn’t email you at 11pm when the webhook breaks.
That’s not a business. That’s a freelance gig wearing a blazer.

So when my partner and I sat down to sketch out what we’re actually building, I kept coming back to the same thought: the MSP playbook already works. I just need to point it at a new problem.

The wedge: AI receptionists

Every SMB I’ve ever walked into has the same two problems at the front door:

1. Phones get missed.

2. The person answering them is too expensive to be doing it.

An AI receptionist solves both in a way a business owner can feel in week one. Missed-call revenue is the easiest ROI story in the world — you don’t need a deck, you need a before-and-after screenshot of their call log.

That’s my wedge. Not “AI transformation.” Not “agentic workflows.” A thing that answers the phone, books the appointment, and costs less than the part-time person doing it badly today.

Once I’m in the door with that, everything else — intake automation, quoting, follow-up sequences, internal agents — becomes a conversation about expansion, not a cold pitch.

This is the exact same move an MSP makes when they lead with “managed antivirus” and end up running the whole stack two years later.

What I’m still figuring out

Honestly? Lead gen. I have a network from the MSP world, but that’s a warm-intro game, not a scalable pipeline. The newsletter is part of the answer. LinkedIn is part of the answer. But I don’t have a repeatable top-of-funnel yet and I’m not going to pretend I do.

If you’re reading this and you’ve cracked outbound for a services business in the last 12 months — reply to this email. I’ll trade you an hour of automation advice for an hour of whatever you learned.

That’s the whole playbook this week: steal the parts of a business model that already work, point them at a new problem, and don’t overthink the wedge.

See you next Wednesday.

— Pat