The Anatomy of a $100K Month

Seven different routes to the same number, and what it actually takes to build one

August 9, 2026
Read Time: 6 minutes

A hundred thousand pounds in a month sounds like a completely different universe when you're sitting on your first few audits.

But when you break it down mechanically, it stops being an abstract goal and starts being a maths problem. And more importantly, it stops being one path and starts being seven.

That's the thing most people miss about AI consulting. They think there's a single route: get clients, do audits, repeat. But the businesses actually hitting six figure months are usually running two or three revenue lines simultaneously, and each one has completely different economics.

So let's break down every route properly.

Route One: Pure Audits

The simplest model. You do assessments, you deliver the roadmap, you hand it over.

Audits realistically price between five and fifteen thousand depending on company size and complexity. If you're running purely on audit revenue, you're looking at roughly six to seven audits a month to hit a hundred thousand.

That's achievable, but it's demanding. Six audits a month means you're constantly in discovery, constantly interviewing, constantly delivering. It's the highest volume, highest effort version of this business.

The advantage is that it's almost pure profit. No contractors, no delivery team, no implementation overhead. What you charge is essentially what you keep.

The disadvantage is that you're on a treadmill. Every month starts at zero and you have to fill it again.

Route Two: Audits Plus Partner Implementation

This is where most people should start, and it's dramatically more efficient than pure audit volume.

You run the audit. You identify the opportunities. Then instead of walking away, you partner with a technical firm or contractor to deliver the implementation, and you take a cut, typically fifteen to twenty percent of the build value.

The economics shift immediately. Now every audit has a tail attached to it. A five thousand pound audit that leads to a forty thousand pound implementation earns you the audit fee plus six to eight thousand in referral margin, without you touching the technical delivery.

You're still doing six or seven engagements a month to hit the number, but each one is worth substantially more, and you're not carrying delivery risk.

Route Three: Audits Plus Your Own Implementation

If you have the technical capability, or you build a small team who does, the numbers change dramatically.

Now you're not taking a slice of the implementation. You're capturing the whole thing.

At this level, you could theoretically hit a hundred thousand from a single large engagement. Realistically, it's more like three audits a month with implementations attached. Three engagements instead of seven. Less selling, less discovery, more depth per client.

This is the highest revenue per client model, but it comes with the most operational complexity. You're now managing delivery, timelines, technical risk, and client expectations across builds. Margins are lower because you're paying for delivery capacity, but the top line is significantly higher.

Route Four: Corporate Training and Upskilling

This one is massively underrated and almost nobody in this space talks about it.

Businesses don't just need systems built. They need their people to actually know how to use AI properly. Most employees are still using ChatGPT as a search engine, if they're using it at all.

Corporate training programmes range from five to fifteen thousand a month, depending on the size of the organisation and the frequency. That might be one session a week for a smaller company, up to three sessions a week for a larger one.

The work is upskilling employees. Teaching them how to use Claude, ChatGPT, and the tools relevant to their actual role. Showing them how to improve their own workflows rather than waiting for someone to automate their job for them.

The economics here are excellent because it's leveraged delivery. You're selling one to many. Thirty people in a room, one session, one fee. And it's recurring by nature, because training isn't a one-off event. It's a programme.

It also pairs beautifully with audits. You come in, assess the business, identify the gaps, and then a portion of the recommendation is almost always capability building rather than technology building.

Route Five: Recurring Maintenance

We've covered this before but it belongs in this breakdown because it's the most passive component of the entire model.

Every implementation you deliver needs maintaining. Models change, integrations break, processes evolve. Maintenance contracts typically run from five hundred to five thousand a month depending on how many agents or systems you're managing.

Stack enough of these and you have a floor under your business. Ten clients on two thousand a month is twenty thousand of recurring revenue before you've closed a single new deal that month.

This is the piece that turns a consulting business from a treadmill into an asset. And critically, when something breaks, you don't have to fix it yourself. You bring in a contractor. You own the relationship, not the labour.

Route Six: Advisory Retainers

Different from maintenance, and often overlooked.

Once you've delivered real value to a business, you become their AI person. Not their AI vendor, their AI person. The one they call when they read something in the press and want to know if it matters.

Advisory retainers typically sit around two and a half thousand a month. A couple of calls, ongoing access, and you keep them informed about what's actually relevant to their business as the landscape shifts.

It's low effort, high trust, and highly renewable. And it keeps you positioned inside the account so that when the next implementation opportunity emerges, you're already there.

Route Seven: Productisation and Software

This is the long game, and it's how the biggest outcomes get built.

When you've done enough implementations in a single vertical, you start noticing that you're building the same things over and over. Seven out of ten solutions an accounting practice needs are identical to the last accounting practice you worked with.

At that point you have a choice. Keep building bespoke every time, or productise it.

You build software that solves those recurring problems at a fraction of the delivery cost, but you can still charge close to what the bespoke build was worth. Your margins go from consulting margins to software margins.

This is genuinely how most good software companies should start. Not with an idea and a hunch, but with a hundred paying engagements that told you exactly what to build.

It's slower. It requires capital and technical resource. But it's the route that turns a consulting business into an asset with real enterprise value, and it's the route that produced outcomes like Didac's acquisition.

How These Actually Combine

Here's the important part. Nobody hits a hundred thousand a month through one of these routes in isolation. They stack.

A realistic composition might look like this:

Two audits at ten thousand each. Twenty thousand.
One implementation delivered through a partner, netting eight thousand in margin.
A corporate training programme at eight thousand a month.
Twelve maintenance contracts averaging two thousand. Twenty four thousand.
Four advisory retainers at two and a half thousand. Ten thousand.

That's seventy thousand of relatively predictable revenue, which means you only need thirty thousand from new business that month rather than a hundred.

That's the actual anatomy of it. Not one enormous deal. A base of recurring revenue with new business layered on top.

Revenue or Profit?

Worth being honest about this. A hundred thousand a month is revenue, not profit, in most configurations.

If you're purely doing audits and training, it's very close to profit. It's you, your time, and minimal overhead.

The moment you're outsourcing implementations or building a delivery team, that changes significantly. Implementation carries real cost. Software carries real cost. Your margin might drop from ninety percent to forty or fifty percent depending on how much you're delivering versus brokering.

Neither is better. It depends on whether you're optimising for profit per hour or for building something with enterprise value.

How Long Does This Actually Take?

Let's be realistic.

For most people building this properly, eighteen to twenty four months is the honest timeline to consistent six figure months.

Can it happen faster? Absolutely. We've had someone close a hundred thousand pound deal within sixty days of starting. Technically that's a hundred thousand pound month inside two months.

But here's the nuance that matters. He then worked with that client for months afterwards. He wasn't closing an additional hundred thousand the following month. One big month is not the same as a business that consistently produces them.

Consistent six figure months require infrastructure. Recurring revenue. Delivery capacity. A pipeline that refills itself. Partners you trust. Systems that don't collapse when you take a week off.

That's what takes eighteen months to build. Not the first big number. The ability to repeat it.

The Real Point

The reason I wanted to break this down properly isn't to make a hundred thousand a month feel like the goal. For a lot of people it isn't, and shouldn't be.

The point is that AI consulting has far more revenue routes than most people realise when they start. They come in thinking it's audits, and audits are just the entry point.

Audits. Partner implementation. Direct implementation. Corporate training. Maintenance. Advisory. Productised software.

Seven distinct ways to generate revenue, all built on the same foundation of understanding a business and knowing where AI genuinely helps.

You don't need to run all seven. Most people shouldn't. But knowing they exist changes how you think about the business you're building, and which direction you push when you find the thing you're actually good at.

Find your niche. Find the routes that suit how you want to work. Then rinse and repeat.

See you next week,

– Andrew