• The pivot
• The Deloitte stat that flipped a switch
• The SMS
• The five calls
• The numbers
• The system
• What I actually learned
• The offer

“What once felt overwhelming now feels exciting.”

That’s what Lewis, the director of a construction and landscaping business in Melbourne, sent me last week after he received his AI Assessment pdf. It was the line I needed; proof that the experiment I’d run over the previous 10 days had actually worked.

Here’s what happened.

§The pivot

A few weeks ago I was deep into building a mentoring program called The Durable Man; essentially a productised version of every major mistake I’d made and what I’d learned from each one. After 17 days of daily Instagram posts, the verdict was in: this wasn’t the business I wanted to build, and my wife had been quietly telling me as much for weeks.

She kept dropping breadcrumbs about AI. Not as hype, but as opportunity. What was it going to mean for our family? Where could we get involved? How were we paying attention?

So I started paying attention.

§The Deloitte stat that flipped a switch

I came across an Instagram reel where someone made an offhand comment about how the major consulting firms publish reports that small entrepreneurs can mine for opportunities. I went looking, and within a few minutes I had Deloitte’s November 2025 report on AI adoption among Australian small businesses open in front of me.

The headline: 1 in 3 Australian businesses don’t know where to start with AI.

That’s not an access problem. AI tools are everywhere and mostly cheap. It’s a clarity problem. Most of the AI content online is downstream of that; implementation tutorials, agent demos, “build this in an afternoon.” But the question that comes before all of that is the one nobody’s answering: where do I even start?

§The SMS

On Monday morning I sent the same message to roughly 25 friends:

“Hi, how are you? I’m launching something new and want to test it on people I trust first. It’s a free AI business assessment. You get a personalised report showing exactly where your business should start with AI and which tools will move the needle. Takes 20 minutes of your time, normally $1,000, free for my first few. Let me know if that’s of interest.”

The reply rate was extraordinary. Some came back with a polite no; AI scares them, or they don’t see the fit. A few weren’t ICP at all. My friend Nick runs a removals business and gets replaced if he doesn’t reply within five minutes; not really an AI problem.

Five booked a call.

§The five calls

Tuesday through Friday I ran 20-minute Zoom calls with:

• Mat — a landscaping business owner spending hours each week reconciling labour metrics on invoices.

• Lewis — running construction and landscaping, struggling to give prospective customers design mockups without burning his designers’ time.

• Paul — a retail operator with 300 suppliers, three businesses, and a marketing function he never gets to.

• Tom — running a mould inspection business with admin overhead eating into client work.

• Pete — a chartered accountant whose billable rate is $450/hr and whose week is full of work that doesn’t touch that rate.

Each call followed the same structure. Tell me about your business. Walk me through your week. Where does your time disappear?

§The numbers

The smallest opportunity I identified was $1,560 a month — Mat’s labour metric automation, achievable with off-the-shelf tools and a Zapier integration.

The largest was $17,400 a month — Pete’s billable hours leaking into administrative work that AI can compress dramatically.

Every business in the trial saw an identified monthly ROI that exceeded the cost of the report several times over. Pete put it cleanly: “Firms would comfortably pay $1k for something like this.”

§The system

It’s deliberately simple:

• 20-minute Zoom call (recorded and transcribed)

• Claude analyses the transcript through a prompt I’ve built specifically for this

• Gamma turns the output into a clean, visual PDF

• Delivered within 48 hours

Every report has two tiers: four low-hanging-fruit recommendations the owner can implement themselves this week, and three longer-term projects that justify a deeper engagement.

§What I actually learned

The numbers are the headline. The deeper thing is this: time is the scarcest asset most business owners have, and almost none of them are auditing it. AI’s real value right now isn’t replacing what people do; it’s giving them their week back.

Every owner I spoke to had a clear answer to “what would you do with the time?” Marketing. Family. More proactive client work. Building the next thing.

I also tried building something else this week: a fully AI-driven content service for skin clinics called Rova. I shut it down after a few days. The conclusion: AI-generated content is about to flood every feed, and the antidote will be the opposite; real people, real stories, real numbers. Which is what this is.

§The offer

The AI Business Assessment is now live at jakewoodhouse.io/ai-assessment** **.

• $999 AUD, payment upfront

• 20-minute call, 48-hour PDF

• Report-Pays-For-Itself guarantee: if the monthly ROI I identify doesn’t exceed the cost of the report, you get a full refund

If you run an Australian business and you’d like clarity on where to start, book in. If you know someone who would, forward this.

The gap isn’t access. It’s knowing where to start.