Episode Details

I sat down with Mark Fershteyn, who spent seven years building a B2B SaaS company, raised $8 million, and eventually walked away from it — because on nights and weekends he started doing AI consulting and training for companies, and in six months of part-time effort it surpassed the $500K ARR his seven-year startup had built. Mark breaks down the exact offer ladder he's using to make money with AI trainings and implementations, starting with paid in-person workshops as low as $500 a head all the way up to six-figure AI transformation builds. We get into how he prices workshops, why he treats them as a lead magnet instead of the main event, and how one good workshop turns into a $25K-$50K custom build for a company. By the end of this episode, you'll have a clear playbook for turning AI knowledge into a paid workshop business, even if you're starting with zero audience.

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Timestamps 

00:00 - Intro

00:30 - Mark's $8M SaaS wind-down after 7 years

02:00 - Consulting income beats 7 years of ARR in 6 months

03:00 - The 7 different AI offers he's tested

04:00 - How in-person workshops are structured and run

05:00 - First workshop: $500/head, 15 people via Eventbrite

06:00 - Why the 45+ demographic is hungry for AI training

07:00 - Walking through the live offer-ladder diagram

08:00 - Workshop + assessment pricing: $15-25K

09:00 - His ICP for workshops and when he says no

10:00 - Advice to niche down by industry or persona

11:00 - Charlotte realtor example and per-head pricing

13:00 - Working backward from client value to set price

15:00 - What he upsells after the workshop

16:00 - Building custom AI operating systems for teams

17:00 - Case study: 7-hour staffing process cut to 15 minutes

19:00 - Build pricing: $25-50K over three to six weeks

20:00 - Why he avoids maintenance retainers

23:00 - His ideal offer ladder and a future $49 entry offer

26:00 - Advice for starting workshops with zero experience

28:00 - Using a cheap public workshop as lead gen for six-figure deals

Key Points

Mark's AI consulting and training side hustle surpassed $500K in ARR in six months of nights-and-weekends effort, beating the mid six-figure run rate his seven-year, $8M-funded SaaS company had built — which is part of why he wound the company down.

His first paid workshop was $495–$500 a head, four hours long, and pulled 15 people through nothing more than Eventbrite and cold LinkedIn outreach asking people if they knew anyone in the area who'd be interested — proof you don't need an existing audience to start.

His offer ladder runs free artifact or skill, to a paid assessment, to an in-person workshop priced $15K–$25K for a half day to two days, to a custom AI operating system build priced $25K–$50K over three to six weeks, with a retainer as the optional final rung.

Workshops aren't the real business — they cap out at a couple hundred thousand dollars a year because of the hours involved. The real money is in the custom builds a good workshop uncovers, so he'll sometimes turn down a workshop entirely if there's no clear upsell path behind it.

His pricing rule: work backward from the value the client will realize in the low, mid, and best case, then charge roughly 20% of that number — a CEO of a 150-person company can support a much higher price than an individual realtor because the multiple on outcome is bigger.

He deliberately avoids sitting on retainers collecting maintenance fees, saying that if he's still needed for ma