Why I Left $200/Hour Consulting to Build an AI That Does It Better
After 20 years billing enterprise clients for Salesforce work, I realized the model was broken. Here's why I'm betting everything on AI-native consulting.
The Breaking Point
It was a Tuesday afternoon in 2023 when I finally admitted what I'd been avoiding for years: I was part of the problem.
I was on a call with a mid-market company—let's call them Acme Corp—explaining why their Salesforce health check would cost $15,000 and take three weeks. The CFO asked a simple question: "Why does it take so long when you've done this hundreds of times?"
I gave the standard answer about complexity, custom configurations, and the need for thoroughness. But here's what I didn't say: 80% of what I do follows the same patterns. The same data quality checks. The same integration validations. The same governance reviews.
I was selling expertise that could largely be automated. And I'd known it for years.
The Math That Changed Everything
Let me share the numbers that kept me up at night:
- **Average health check engagement:** $12,000-$25,000
- **Time to deliver:** 2-4 weeks
- **Percentage that follows repeatable patterns:** ~80%
- **Companies that can afford this:** Maybe 20% of the market
Here's what that means: 80% of businesses that need platform health monitoring can't afford it. They're flying blind, accumulating technical debt, and setting themselves up for the exact disasters I was being paid to prevent.
The consulting model isn't just expensive—it's gatekeeping critical expertise away from the companies that need it most.
What AI Changes
When GPT-4 dropped, I started experimenting. Could AI handle the pattern recognition that made up most of my audit work? Could it identify the red flags I'd learned to spot over two decades?
The answer was yes—but with important nuances.
AI excels at: - Scanning configurations against best practices - Identifying data quality issues at scale - Detecting integration patterns that suggest problems - Generating remediation recommendations
AI still needs human judgment for: - Understanding business context - Prioritizing competing concerns - Making final deployment decisions - Handling edge cases that don't fit patterns
This isn't about replacing consultants entirely. It's about amplifying human expertise so one person can do what previously required a team—and making that capability accessible to everyone.
Building the Alternative
That's why I'm building BuildForce. The thesis is simple:
*Take the 80% of consulting work that follows patterns and automate it. Then give every RevOps team access for 1/20th the cost of a traditional engagement.*
Our AI runs continuous health checks across your Salesforce, ServiceNow, and HubSpot environments. It flags issues before they become disasters. And when you need to deploy fixes, it handles the grunt work while you maintain approval authority.
The goal isn't to eliminate human expertise—it's to democratize it.
The Bet I'm Making
I walked away from a practice that was billing $50K+ per month. Friends in the industry think I'm crazy. "Why disrupt something that's working?" they ask.
Because it's not working—not for the 80% of companies priced out of proper platform governance.
Building in public means showing the messy parts. I'll share what's working, what's failing, and the real metrics as we grow. No consultant-speak, no vaporware promises.
If you're tired of paying enterprise prices for expertise that should be accessible, let's talk. We're onboarding design partners now.
This is the first in a series about building BuildForce. Next up: the technical architecture behind AI-native health checks.