The OG Revenue Model that Fuels Solopreneur Success Going Forward

Back in 2005, I made a drastic decision after a near-death experience.

After spending the previous four years building an innovative real estate business fueled entirely by digital marketing and processes, I walked away.

This was the business that generated more personal income for me than if I had made partner at the big law firm I left in 1998. And I simply stopped doing it.

I tried to work out a sale of the business. It didn’t work because it was so dependent on me that there was nothing there without me.

That was the crux of the problem.

I was the marketing engine behind the business, and no one else understood how it worked. I was also the entire management layer, who still worked personally with investment-level clients. But I had no transferable systems for any of it.

And then I shifted to a model that better suited my talents and temperament. The fairy tale ending followed: I made substantially more money every year, sold the business and made substantially more than that, and received recognition as a pioneer in digital business and marketing.

Emergency brain surgery led me to quickly realize that the real estate business was only designed to prove I could make a lot of money at something other than the practice of law. I didn’t love the work by any means, and I decided that life was too short to do things solely for money.

So I became properly aligned and profited highly from it, which I think is no coincidence. But I wrongly blamed client services as the source of my previous discontent.

Even though I went on to build three seven-figure businesses and one eight-figure firm without doing client work at all, I had simply moved into a smarter model where others handled the systems while I handled marketing and drove product development. And at the time, selling software was highly lucrative.

In the last few years, I’ve been back to working with clients in a coaching capacity. It’s been deeply satisfying because I can now have a real impact on the desired outcome when I get personally involved, as opposed to only teaching (which I enjoy for other reasons).

And now I have technology that functions the same way my human collaborators did in the previous businesses. It allows me to do what I’m good at, and handles what I struggle with.

In short, if I were brand new to the game in 2026, I’d still start off with client services. And this is what most people do, for very good reasons.

But now, with the right application of automation and artificial intelligence, you don’t need to shift into products in order to efficiently manage the business as a solo and profitably scale.

More importantly, outcome-based services may be the only highly profitable revenue model that remains viable going forward. Let’s dig into my reasoning on that.

The Sure-Fire Path to 7-Figure Small

For years, the standard path for expertise-based businesses followed a logical progression:

1. Start with client services (validate demand, generate revenue).

2. Hit a time ceiling (you can only serve so many clients).

3. Create information products such as courses to scale (trade margin for volume, leverage your time)

This worked, and it made sense. Your time was the limiting factor, so you had to choose: Stay small with high-touch services, or scale with lower-touch information products.

In fact, my Personal Enterprise strategy recognizes client work as the smart starting point, while laying out a path to productize sooner rather than later. Diversification of revenue streams is the justification, but under the surface is the reality that solo services simply don’t scale.

That once-enduring truth has begun to disappear over the last decade. You don’t hit the time ceiling with services as quickly, thanks to automation. And now with AI, perhaps not at all on the way to 7-figure revenue.

Here’s the thing. The trend toward powerful solo and very small client service businesses started before AI went mainstream a few years ago. Which means we’re now at the cusp of something truly revolutionary as AI adoption skyrockets among savvy solopreneurs.

According to 2022 U.S. Census Bureau data, client services dominate the million-dollar, no-employee business category. The data reflects 16,279 one-person client services businesses earning $1-2.49 million annually. Another 2,465 hit $2.5-4.9 million.

Not info products. Not courses. Not software. Client services.

And that data comes from before AI made service delivery three to five times more efficient, and opened the door to developing entirely new revenue models built on delivering desired outcomes.

Sequoia Capital, the VC firm behind Apple, Google, and Airbnb, recently published an analysis explaining why they’re betting on services over software in many markets. Its key insight:

Services deliver actual outcomes. The client doesn’t have to implement — they get the result they paid for.

They call it “services as software,” a complete inversion of the software-as-services model that has dominated both the VC and bootstrapped entrepreneurial landscape for 20 years. And it may coincide with altered demand for courses and other information products as well.

Think about the difference:

Software/Course approach:

• Gives the customer the tool or information, but

• The customer still has to figure out how to use it;

• The customer is responsible for the implementation; and

• The customer owns the outcome risk.

Client services approach:

• The provider delivers the completed outcome;

• The client gets the result without the implementation burden;

• The provider is accountable for success; and

• The risk transfers to the expert.

This distinction has always mattered. But now, AI is:

1. Providing knowledge for essentially free, and

2. Eliminating the reason people get burned out and frustrated by a client services model.

Here’s what used to be true: A client engagement required 40 hours of your time. You could serve maybe four or five clients per month at full capacity. To make more money, you had to either raise prices (often uncomfortable) or create digital products (a different business entirely).

Here’s what’s true now: AI handles 80% of the execution work. You provide 8-10 hours of strategic judgment and oversight. You can serve 12-15 clients in the same timeframe.

Traditional model:

• 40 hours per client project

• Maximum four clients monthly

• Revenue ceiling: 4 × $10,000 = $40,000/month

AI-augmented model:

• 10 hours of your judgment per project

• AI handles the other 30 hours of execution