Since we spoke I've cut it down to three things and gone all in on two of them.
Josh, when we spoke on 19 August you said go all in on the consulting and the community, and you told me you'd cut the noise out of your own business to do the same, and honestly that's what we've done in the nine days since. So rather than the whole story this is the one page, which is what the business is now, what came in, who carries what, and where a coaching seat fits.
Three things now, and my time goes on the two you said to back.
| Package | What it is | Where it is today |
|---|---|---|
| NavAIgate | AI consulting and training. I'm the client face, Tom builds what I hand him. | Autodesk is the main client: €150,000 of internal tooling delivered, two more builds on the go, one of them in corporate UAT since 26 August, and the GPLS partner hackathon in delivery. The agency which works with MrBeast Mobile closed on 27 August. |
| Community | The Skool community: live builds on members' real problems. About 45 businesses; annual membership is €700. | 700 lessons cut down to 500 and put into chapters with a script for every one, scripts done, recording now, due live next week. Tom runs the classroom, the video and the publishing, and I record. |
| BluPlai | Customer-engagement SaaS, live, about ten paying. | No longer the number one thing. The partner is formalised as of August, and one piece of it is coming off as a small €5-a-month whiteboard that the hackathon uses. It needs very little of me because it is one codebase. |
| Cohort One | The incubator with Jakub. | Paused on 26 August. Nothing new gets started. |
My own score, nought to ten, as I drew it for Mara on Thursday.
NavAIgate takes most of me and that's the point, the community is Tom's to run and mine to record, BluPlai gets an hour here and there because anything built in it updates the whiteboard too, and Cohort One is paused. Coaching sits next to NavAIgate, and the four hours a day come out of what the community and BluPlai used to take.
The work that matters, and all of it came off work we'd already delivered.
| Client | Work | Value | State |
|---|---|---|---|
| Autodesk | Internal tooling built for Autodesk (EDGE): a community-of-practice platform on AWS with SSO and its own data layer. | €150,000 | Delivered |
| Autodesk | CSM Production Insights: a €5k proof of concept, then the enterprise MVP. Corporate UAT live 26 August. | €75,000 | POC delivered, MVP in UAT |
| Autodesk | Adoption Analytics phase 2: plain-English questions over usage data, with the QBR decks generated from the answers. | €70,000 | Booked, in delivery |
| Autodesk GPLS | Partner hackathon and Partner OS: 1,200 partners, three days, three locations, with NVIDIA, Microsoft and AWS involved. | Day rate | In delivery |
| The agency which works with MrBeast Mobile | AI training on site in Napa in late November, plus proof-of-concept builds on a revenue share, so they pay nothing up front and we share what closes. | Training fee plus share | Closed 27 Aug |
One further proposal from the Autodesk side, about a month's work, is with them for pricing and isn't counted above.
We stopped being one person doing everything on 24 August, which is the day Tom signed.
| Who | Does | Since |
|---|---|---|
| Me | Client face, sales, the live builds on the calls, and coaching. | Always |
| Tom Moore | Video, the Skool classroom, and the client builds I hand him. Contractor, never client-facing. | 1 September |
| The agents | They run the classroom build, the email and the publishing. Tom writes the plan and they execute it, which is how the classroom got rebuilt in a day. | Live |
Yes, I've got the time, and here's exactly where it comes from.
I already coach about 50 businesses a month across the community calls and the client training rooms, so the four hours a day the seat needs isn't new time, it's time that has just come free: Tom takes video, classroom and client delivery from 1 September, BluPlai needs very little of me, and Cohort One is paused. I'm based in Germany on CET, so I can cover Europe, and even when I travel I stay on European hours, so the calendar holds.
The people I coach today go from someone starting with nothing to an owner growing a business that already works, and what I do well is proving it in the real world: we build the thing on the call, on their actual problem, and they leave with it working. It's the range of people I've sat with over the years that makes me useful as a coach, because I've usually seen the exact spot they're in.
What I'd coach is what I'm doing this month, which is closing and delivering enterprise work like Autodesk, running a business on agents so one person can do the work of a team, and pricing on outcomes rather than hours, and if a coach or a member needs something built or checked against a real client setup, that's a quick one for us. Mara has seen all of it.
And because new client work comes in every month, the people I coach hear what is actually happening in real businesses that month rather than the same lesson again. Sometimes the same lesson is exactly what they need, and the rest of the time they get to see what success looks like for someone a bit further on than them, and what it took.
If you're adding another business coach for Europe, I'd like it to be me, and I can start in September. A 20-minute call any morning CET and I'll run the first session on your calendar.
Dan · dw@navaigate.dev · navaigate.dev