Hey hey! Somewhere in the back of your mind, a clock has started ticking.
You’ve watched AI write the proposal, the post, the follow-up email. It’s fast, it’s cheap, and it’s getting better every freaking month. And some quiet part of you has already done the math: if it can do all that, how long until it does what I do?
I’m going to answer that for real. I said this out loud for the first time at a retreat I hosted last week to a room of people who flew in to hear it, and you deserve to hear it straight too:
Coaching and consulting budgets at the director level and below are going to evaporate and turn to bots. Maybe senior manager, maybe director, depending on the company. But a cutoff is coming. Great news if you’re a bot.
And above that line? The opposite is happening. Humans are going to pay more than ever for other humans. I can see a future here that other people cannot see yet.
The walk I can’t stop thinking aboutI couldn’t tell you what my executive coach and I covered on any specific Zoom call this year.
And I pay her very, very good money. But I can tell you exactly what happened in the redwoods.
This past spring we were in Napa Valley for the in-person intensive she uses to kick off every six-month coaching cycle. We’d spent the day at wineries, talking through my business, and then we went hiking through the Redwood Forest.
Somewhere on that trail, she drew an analogy, completely on the fly, between the trees above us redwoods survive by communicating through their root systems and sharing resources and exactly what was happening in my business. It was the exact thing I needed to hear, in the exact moment I was standing in it. Experiential. Tangible. I will NEVER forget it.
Now, a bot could have generated that sentence, sure. It, however, CANNOT stand next to me in the forest, and experience that with me.
The human premium
So what are people actually buying, above that cutoff line, when they hire you? - Your judgment, live, in the moment, about their specific situation
- The feeling of being SEEN by someone who’s been where they are
- Access to you, and to everyone you know
- Accountability from a human they’d hate to disappoint
- An experience they couldn’t get anywhere else, from anyone else
That last one is the whole game. Value perception is built through experience, and nothing builds it like being in the same room.
It’s why I’ve redesigned my own offers around exactly this: if you’re going to work with me one-on-one, we’re going to spend real time together in person. That’s my X factor hypothesis. The je ne sais quoi a bot can’t touch.
It’s also why lead magnets are pretty well dead for high-ticket service providers. A PDF is the opposite of an experience. Here’s the part that should make you exhale: the icky, chase-people-down version of sales dies with the bots too. Good riddance. What survives is selling by matchmaking.
A peer, eye to eye with another human, about a problem you know how to solve.
What This Looks Like in Real Life
Kick off every engagement with a one-day, in-person intensive. Make day one a day they’ll still be describing a year from now. Get in the room. A lunchtime workshop inside an organization puts you, a human, at the table while your competitors sit in the inbox as a link nobody clicks.
Three months after an engagement ends, give a free check-in session nobody asked for. Surprise and delight. It’s a kindness first, and it’s also the most natural referral moment you’ll ever get.
→ Your Next Move
Find the redwoods moment in your offer: the one thing a client would still be talking about next year. Can’t find it? That’s your assignment this week. Design it. One experience. In person if you possibly can.
I believe that business is simple, but it’s not easy. This is one of the simple parts: be the human they’ll never forget and you’ll never compete with a bot on price. Somewhere in your contacts right now are ten people who would hire you if you showed up right. You know it.
Want to know where your business actually stands before the cutoff gets here? Take the Level Up 360. It’s a free diagnostic that shows you where you’re strong and where you’re exposed. We’ve got you.
| 
