This should come to no surprise to you by now, but AI has made words really easy. The fact that anyone can now generate the materials we used to hold sacred in about ninety seconds has us surrounded by a wall of confident, frictionless, and utterly forgettable beige.
But when a resource becomes infinite, the thing that becomes scarce is judgment about that resource. Knowing which true thing to say, to whom, at the moment it matters has never been more valuable.
Comms people are standing in the exact center of this, holding the ability to make people feel something and believe something in a world where everyone else is producing sludge. The clients paying big bucks are paying for the person who can tell them how to use the right words, connect them to the right relationships, and can blend both with the creativity to get the right audiences to care on the right channels.
But this post isn’t about AI slop. It’s about the opportunity to start looking at our world of consulting as mispriced. So let's fix that.
The million-dollar solo business? That's you now.
The Wall Street Journal today reported on the rise of million-dollar, single employee companies, made possible by using AI to run businesses entirely alone. One founder launched last December and is already at 10,000 paying customers, on track for $10 million this year with no staff. Stripe says the number of solo operators on its platform doing over $1 million doubled between 2023 and 2025; the ones crossing $10 million nearly tripled. The bar to build a real business has never been lower.
Some comms consultants may read that and think, “I’m not selling a product.” But I’d argue that you are the solo operator this story is about.
AI just dissolved everything that used to cap a one-person consulting practice at a couple of clients. Capacity is now freed up thanks to AI assistants like Town to help you run your admin, Monologue to turn a voice memo into a first draft, GammaAI can frame messaging into a deck, Calendly can handle the scheduling, Ramp for AI assisted invoicing, and Claude for background research that used to eat your days. This means the ceiling on how many clients you can carry, and how much you can make, just jumped. I’ve spoken to many consultants over the last few weeks that are having six-figure months because they’ve built a lean, AI-leveraged practice that lets their judgment reach five times as many clients (and still have a life).
BUT the same tools minting all these solo companies are the reason every one of them sounds identical. "Everybody has the sword," one founder in the WSJ article said, and everyone can unsheathe it now. When anyone can spin up a company in a weekend, the market floods with businesses that are competent, fast, and utterly interchangeable. The one thing none of that AI can do is make a company sound like a person. AI is the shortcut on production but it is not the shortcut on trust. Helping someone find and hold their real voice in a sea of sameness is the single thing comms people do better than anyone else.
So you’re in luck: your ability to meet demand just got uncapped at the exact moment demand for your specific skill exploded. There has never been a better time to be a comms person willing to sell.
How to sell like a million dollar consultant
Selling has been the long-known death sentence for many consultants. Over the past four years of consulting, here’s where I’ve learned to make selling feel easy and dare I say… fun.
Learn to see the need before they can name it
This feels obvious, but when you try to put this into practice it can feel a bit paralyzing with all the swirl happening on socials, the news, and trying sort through what is actually needed.
Think of it this way: founders rarely walk up and say "I need a communications strategy." They say "our launch fell flat," or "investors don't get what we do," or "our quote in that story sucked," or "my best engineer left and I don't know how to tell the team." Those are all comms problems wearing other costumes.
Listening to the market now requires a different filter when you’re trying to sell. You have to hear the comms problem underneath the business problem. This usually shows up looking like a new executive hire, a rebrand, a crisis, entering a new category, a founder who suddenly has to be a public figure and has no idea how. BUT the consultants who are killing it right now in this area know how to show where they know how to fix it. (some great examples below)
No more labor rates. Position yourself as a luxury item.
As hard as it might sound when you’re building a pipeline, I think a superpower to getting work fast is to disqualify ruthlessly. Premium positioning starts with being selective about who you're for. You cannot be a luxury item and be available to everyone at once.
Nobody buying a premium good asks how long it took to make (maybe except for my couch that has taken 15 weeks to be delivered, but that’s a story for another day). I spoke to a consultant last week who charges TOP dollar, but only does month-to-month contracts. This gives them the flexibility to extend projects that need more time to do it right, rather than trying to meet a 3 month deadline with no results at the end.
Everything about how you present should reinforce scarcity and value rather than availability and effort. A few things I’ve noticed the highest-paid consultants do consistently:
They anchor high, and they anchor first. The first number a client hears becomes the ceiling in their mind. So set the reference point before you name your price. "A mid-size agency would scope this at $45–60K. A full-time senior hire is $200K+ a year before you've onboarded them." Now your retainer sounds like the reasonable, elegant option because it is.
They price against the cost of inaction. The most powerful number in the room isn't your fee. It's what the problem is costing them every month it goes unsolved. "If your positioning is confusing enough that even one enterprise deal stalls, that's more than a year of working with me." Frame the investment against the loss, not against your labor.
They show proof before price, always. Lead with one specific result — a launch that landed, a category you helped define, a founder you made fundable — before any number enters the conversation. Value has to be established before cost, or cost is all they can see.
They never discount. They rescope. The second you cut your rate to win someone, you've told them your first number was fiction. When budget is tight, shrink the engagement, not the rate. Protect the number like it's oxygen, because your rate is your positioning.
They talk like it's an investment, not an expense. Retire "cost," "hourly," "what's included." Use "investment," "engagement," "the outcome you'll own." And after you say the number, stop talking. Silence signals confidence.
Doing this means you’re refusing to let your work be priced like a commodity when it isn't one.
Build a pipeline so you're never desperate
Desperation is the enemy of premium pricing. The consultant who needs the deal negotiates against themselves. The one with three other conversations happening holds the line. A pipeline is what lets you charge like a luxury item, because it means you can walk away.
This requires a system, and it's simpler than you think:
Start with the comms advantage: your network is enormous and full of non comms people. Think about what our job actually requires. To do it well, you've had your hands in everything. You've sat in on the product roadmap, briefed the CFO before the board meeting, coached the sales team on framing to the enterprise, kept legal from killing the good line in an announcement, and built real relationships with reporters, analysts, event organizers, investors, and founders across a dozen industries. Almost no other role touches that many rooms.
Most people build a career going deep in one function. You built one going wide across all of them, which means you know, and are trusted by, people that most others could ever get a meeting with. This web of relationships is the single most valuable asset you own. These other functions you’ve worked with in the past don't need to be convinced you're good — they watched you be good. So map your real network: every business leader, every vertical, every media and investor relationship you've built over your career. Your pipeline is already bigger than you think — you've probably just never looked at it as a pipeline.
Become the antidote to beige, in public. The fastest way to attract premium clients is to publicly demonstrate the exact judgment they're missing. Pick the five problems your ideal clients have and write about them. Every time you show taste in public, you're running a silent audition, and the founders who need you are watching.
Reach out with a point of view. When you do go direct, lead with something true about them — their recent raise, their launch, the way a competitor is out-narrating them. That way, you're demonstrating, in the first three sentences, that you already see something they've missed vs. asking for a meeting.
Run it like a pipeline. Track every relationship through simple stages — conversation, proposal, won, or not-yet — and spend time every week looking at where things are stuck. This is the least glamorous part and the one that separates people who consult from people who build a business. Founders do this. You're a founder now.
Move beyond the secret weapon
For your whole career, you've been the person making everyone else sound brilliant and watching someone else get the credit and the equity. This is the moment you stop being the secret weapon and start being the CEO. You already have the one skill that AI made priceless, so start selling it for what it's worth.