u/Jazzlike_Tooth929

My friend runs a company doing decent revenue. Things are going fine.

But every week he sees another LinkedIn post about how some 23-year-old built a $10M ARR AI business in 6 months, or how Company X just replaced their whole ops team with agents, or how if you're not "AI-native" by 2027 you're done.

They've tried ChatGPT for a bunch of stuff. They've experimented with a few tools. But they genuinely don't know if they're doing the right things, the wrong things, or just expensive things.

The questions that keep him up:

• Where should AI actually go first in the business?
• Is what we're doing real strategy or just toys?
• Are competitors quietly building moats while we play around?
• How do I know what's signal vs hype?

They don't want to hire McKinsey for a $500K deck. They don't want to hire a fractional CTO who'll just tell him to "use Claude more."

Curious — is he alone in this? What's your relationship with AI as a founder right now? Are you confident you have a strategy or are you just vibing it?

I’m a former McKinsey principal and I’m starting an AI strategy agency to help middle market entrepreneurs create their AI roadmaps and strategy (specializing in companies from USD 1M to USD 50M ARR).

McKinsey trained me on how to do business with gigantic enterprises but middle market is new ground for me.

Looking for advice from this group: How to reach out to middle market CEOs and where to find them?

Should I do cold email outreach? Instagram ads? How do you guys find new services and solutions? Where do you look for when you want strategy consulting? Google?

Thanks

I’m a former McKinsey/QuantumBlack principal starting an AI agency. We build custom AI agents for enterprise to automate complex workflows and increase revenue/reduce costs.

I thought perhaps partnering with PE firms would be a good idea. The incentives seem to be very well aligned.

Looking for advice from this group: how to position myself? Which PE firms are the most likely to find value in my offer? How to reach out to PE firms and where to find them?

Thanks