Jonathan Slain isn’t talking about AI. He’s using it to cut roles, capture margin, and rebuild how his firm operates from the ground up. In this session, Greg sits down with the founder of Autobahn Consultants to unpack the moves he’s already made: dedicating staff solely to AI advantage, eliminating a position most firms are still hiring for, and surviving a $156,000 AI-powered fraud that nearly worked. Jonathan shares the playbook, the mistakes, and the math.
What you’ll get from this session:
- The structural changes one firm made to go from AI-curious to AI-native
- Why hiring dedicated AI staff matters more than buying AI tools
- A $156,000 fraud story every founder needs to hear before it happens to them
Why it matters:
- Most boutique firms are protecting headcount AI has already made redundant
- The firms that restructure now capture margin their competitors are still leaking
- AI fraud is already targeting professional services firms and most are not prepared
TRANSCRIPT
Greg Alexander: Hey everybody, this is Greg Alexander. Welcome to the Pro Serv Podcast, brought to you by Collective 54. If you’re new to this show, this show is dedicated to helping you do three things. Make more money, make scaling easier, and make an exit achievable, and it’s dedicated exclusively for founders of boutique professional services businesses. So, if you are in the business of marketing, selling, and delivering expertise, this is for you.
And on today’s episode, we have a Collective 54 member, Jonathan Slain, and Jonathan and I recently spent some time together, and he brought up some really interesting Fact-based decisions and operational changes that he made to his business to… I guess, reconstitute his firm, to take advantage of AI. And I wanted him to come on, because… many of our members, and even more broadly than that, still in the experimentation mode as it relates to AI. Jonathan’s much further along, and many of our members are looking for people that are actually doing, as opposed to studying, and Jonathan is one of those guys, so I reached out to him and asked if he would come on the show to discuss those things. And he was willing to do so. So, here we are. So, Jonathan, for those that don’t know you, would you please introduce yourself to the audience?
Jonathan Slain: Thanks for having me on, Greg. Jonathan Slain, I founded Autobahn Consultants close to a decade ago. We do strategic planning, executive recruiting, and AI projects for our clients. I know that there’s a lot of companies that do each of those three things. I think there’s a few companies that may do two out of the three, but Autobahn is trying to be unique in providing all 3 to the clients that we work with and serve.
Greg Alexander: Speaking of the clients that you work with and serve, would you please explain that?
Jonathan Slain: Our ideal client is looking to grow. We call the business Autobahn Consultants, because I happened to be driving on the Autobahn in Germany when we needed a name for the business, but helping companies go fast and grow fast without crashing. That’s the tagline. So, typically, companies are at $5 million and they want to go to 10 million, $10, they want to go to 100 million, and many of our clients are at $100 million and want to scale to a billion. A lot of them are either family-owned and operated. Many of them are also owned by private equity or have visions of selling to private equity, but really, growth is the common denominator for our clients.
Greg Alexander: Any particular industries?
Jonathan Slain: We have concentrations in construction and healthcare, and then beyond that, most of our business has grown through referrals, so really, can work with a range of industries.
Greg Alexander: Okay, sounds great. Alright, let’s jump into the question. So… Jonathan, when we spoke, what caught my attention is that you have eliminated the associate project manager role at Autobahn. Walk us through what that means in practice.
Jonathan Slain: Right, so we look at our business, we… I don’t know if you’ve ever seen an inverted org chart, but most org charts have the boss at the top. The top leader, the CEO, founder of the company is at the top, and then there’s people who work for them, people who work for them, and then at the bottom are the entry-level positions in the organization. At Autobahn, one decision we made was to flip our org chart. So, if I were to show you our org chart, at the very top of our org chart is the client. They’re really our boss. Like, they’re the ones that really have the power to fire everybody at Autobahn Consultants. All we’ve done Is that closest to our client, at the top of the org chart, it used to be that the closest person to the client was our assistant project manager. They were the front line for Autobahn, and with our work, we do strategic planning, we do recruiting, our assistant project managers are accountable for helping to prepare for all of our meetings. They’re often the front line in dealing with clients and getting back to them. We’ve inserted a layer between that assistant project manager and the client. And that layer is AI. So now the AI works for the assistant project managers, which means that a year from now, our belief is that we won’t need to hire another assistant project manager. That we’ll be able to use AI to take out a lot of the entry-level things that, up to this point, our APMs had done for Autobahn.
Greg Alexander: Okay, very good. So what made you pull the trigger on that? Was there a specific moment where you realized AI could absorb that work?
Jonathan Slain: We have been having a debate at Audubon, and our firm has about 20 team members. We’ve been having a debate about where to start with AI in terms of which team members, and the debate ranged from, it would be best for the company to take out the higher order work. Like, the more that we could replace time spent by the top-level consultants in our business, that would be the biggest pickup in, in savings for the business. The problem with that is it’s also the most complicated work to take out with AI. On the other end, the things that an assistant project manager does at Autobahn, like, one example is, when we have meetings with clients, Greg, they make fun Photoshops of the clients. So we’ll, for example, we’ll want to do Photoshops of all the clients, playing Jeopardy. And up to this point, the assistant project managers would spend 2 to 4 hours per meeting finding the pictures of the clients. uploading them to Photoshop, finding Jeopardy! backgrounds, and then merging the client photos into the Jeopardy! background. And now we’ve been able to create an AI agent. We just tell it the client’s name, it goes and pulls their photo from LinkedIn, we tell it the theme is Jeopardy, it goes and pulls photos of Jeopardy, and it creates all of those Photoshops that used to take 2 to 4 hours. now, are done in more like 10 minutes. And so, by doing that, we’ve won back all this time from the APMs. long way of answering, we’re starting with, eliminating the APM role, just because it’s easier. We wanted something where we could build momentum and sink our teeth into it, and so we’re starting there. I understand that it’s not the highest order work to replace, but we’re building a muscle here.
Greg Alexander: Listen, progress over perfection. That is a great starting point, and that was a great, example. Thank you for sharing that. So let me go to the next question, which is… How did your team react? You know, cutting a roll is a hard message to deliver.
Jonathan Slain: Everybody at Autobahn, that we are hiring, or that is still on the team, really wakes up every day trying to figure out how we can use AI to do things better, faster, cheaper. We are embracing it, so it didn’t come as… nobody’s scared about it. Our, two APMs that are currently on our team. they understand that, they’re still going to have a role. We’re just going to more quickly progress them up the ladder. They’ll move to being project managers faster, they’ll move to being senior project managers faster. What we’re really saying is that we don’t want to have to hire another APM going forward, and then something I learned from you is we need to figure out how to detach revenue growth from headcount growth. And the whole team understands that if and when we do that, it benefits all of us. We will all share in having bigger margins as a company, and so everybody’s in for it together. Like, in Autobahn language, we say we’re on a road trip. And so everybody’s on this road trip to figure out how we can, to use AI more, because then we can take that extra margin and spread it out amongst the whole team. So everybody’s actually really bought in.
Greg Alexander: Yeah, okay, fantastic. You talk about the third monitor theory. Explain that for members who have not heard about it.
Jonathan Slain: So, we… we were just talking before we started the recording, Audubon, we have a second book coming out in April, and that book is called Rock Your Business. We have it a chapter called The Third Monitor. The idea there is that in most modern offices, most, administrative, most office team members are working on two monitors these days. And so, the idea would be, we should invest in a third monitor for everyone in the company. That, uses monitors. I understand if you’re construction workers and you swing a hammer and you don’t have monitors, that’s cool, but for all the people in the office, get a third monitor. So, one monitor would be in the middle. It would be whatever work that you’re actually working on. A second monitor is for reference. You should be looking at an email you’re referencing on that. You should have a web browser open to be referencing something. On the third monitor. I want you to have an AI application open. And that’s to remind you that you should be using AI to do whatever it is that you’re doing, better, faster, cheaper. And so, it could be that you have an instance of ChatGPT open, it could be an instance of Claude, of Gemini, if you’re making a slide deck. There’s a lot of different, nuanced programs you could use, but just… I want that constant reminder, and then, as a leader, I’m walking around our office, and I’m just looking and making sure that everybody’s got AI open on their third monitor, and otherwise, I’m giving them a hard time, and I’m encouraging them, if they don’t see AI open on my third monitor, to give me a hard time.
Greg Alexander: I mean, just a very simple, practical thing, just to set a culture inside the company that, you know, we’re going to be partnering with AI agents every day, every minute of every day, to do our jobs. I just… I loved it, and I wanted to emphasize it. That was in Chapter 8. For those that are listening to this that want to pick up Jonathan’s book, I would encourage you to do so.
Greg Alexander: Okay, you also recommend hiring dedicated AI people, and you say hire three. Knowing most CEOs will negotiate you down to one, what does that person actually do at Autobahn?
Jonathan Slain: So we… the most often asked question is. what’s their background, what does their role look like? So, for us, just to personalize it, we had a summer intern Hudson Chenk, he, went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which happens to be my alma mater. That’s why we love getting interns from Carolina, so we’re both proud Tar Heels. Hudson was finishing up a double major in business and computer science when he interned with us. And then after graduating, we tricked him into coming back to Autobahn to work with us full-time. So, his background, again, was business and computer science, and now that he’s here at Audubon, he’s working on two things. The first is he’s leading the charge on helping to eliminate the assistant project manager role by creating tools and AI agents that can allow us to do that role better, faster, cheaper, or at least not have to hire additional ones as we continue to scale. The second thing is that he’s working with our clients to help support their efforts in figuring out AI projects that will move their business forward. So there’s a lot of, talk right now about, the philosophy of AI, why it’s important. Our, our approach is actually just to do projects with our clients. To create something that will add value is the best way to get them to believe in AI, instead of trying to sell them on it, just actually building something that adds value.
Greg Alexander: Yeah. You know, one thing that you reminded me of that sometimes is easy to forget when you’re thinking about digital labor as opposed to human labor. is that who matters more than what? And that’s a great example of that North Carolina Tar Heel, you know, having a flexible mind, you know, business and computer science, those are two different fields, and being able to apply that uniquely, that’s a good reminder. You know, another example that you had shared with me when we spoke is Jennifer. Which is, I think, an AI assistant that you fed something like 200,000 documents to, or something like that. I forget the exact story, but I wanted you to share it with the members, so would you tell us a little bit about that?
Jonathan Slain: Sure, so, Jennifer, and it’s J-E-N-N-I-F-U-R, was my cat when I was growing up, so… Long-haired cat, Jennifer, it’s an inside joke around Audubon, and it doesn’t have anything to do with our, usual car-themed, naming convention. But we fed Jennifer about 200,000, files. our whole catalog of everything that we’ve produced at Autobahn. Word docs, PDFs, slide decks, MP3s, movie files, everything that we’ve produced. And now what we’re doing with Jennifer is we’re using her as an internal RAG model. Where, if we need something to prepare for a meeting, say we have an upcoming meeting with a client. It used to be that we would go into OneDrive, and we would search through folders of clients that were similar, and we would look for things that we’d created for them, and maybe we would pull an old slide deck. But then we would ask around and be like, hey, has anybody ever created something that looks like this? I need to create something for a presentation, and I don’t want to start with a blank Word document or a blank, spreadsheet. And, so the search begins. And then nobody ever named the files right. We’ve had naming conventions, they weren’t in the right folders, people saved the stuff on their personal, folder, or people saved it on another computer, and we could just never find all the stuff. And for us, as a boutique professional service firm. Our assets are all of our IP. So now Jennifer has helped to democratize everybody’s access to the IP. Because our project managers and our assistant project managers, the newest members of our team, they haven’t been here for 10 years. They don’t, know that 8 years ago, I happened to create this exact same presentation for another client. And they can ask me, but then even if I could remember, nobody can remember like Jennifer can. So Jennifer has read all the files, she’s got instant recall, and has been able to be like, hey, here are the 8 different files that you might consider to build out this presentation. And by the way, I already whipped up an 80% good version of what I think you’ll need. And then we can focus on adding value. Not in trying to collate all these different files, from all over the place.
Greg Alexander: Yep. Another great practical example, something that all of our members can do, because we’re all swimming in those documents and living in SharePoint hell or OneDrive hell. And, you know, that saves a tremendous amount of time. Remember, in ProServe, the measure of productivity is output per hour. The more your people produce per hour. The more you’re going to produce for clients, the more you can build, that’s how you scale, etc. So things like that are so practical. So, a lot of our members hear all of this, or will hear all of this, and think, that sounds great, but I’ll get to it next quarter. What do you say to that member?
Jonathan Slain: I think we have to circle back first to this idea that I want everyone listening to go out and hire 3 people on their AI team. And I think you alluded to this earlier, usually when I say that. People immediately react, and they’re like, I… Can I start with one? And, that’s what I want. So I figure if I start at 3, then maybe we back it down to 1, and that’s fine. But the reason that I like 3 is that in such a nascent industry, and AI is so new and fresh, I think it’s necessary and helpful to have three people to bounce ideas off of each other. So, around here, it’s like, what support will that person have in figuring out how to help the company move forward, and what it looks like, that’s where I think that we need three. If you’re already a tech-forward company or tech-minded, and can provide that, then maybe one works. And one is better than none, would be the opinion. I… I really see it, mostly for the… the law profession and the accounting profession in ProSurf. I think those, have a lot at risk to start, because they’re industries where, quickly, the tools available are democratizing the ability to get great feedback and counsel. And every 3 months, it’s just getting better and better and better. And the other problem I see for those specific, subsets of ProServe. is that people typically don’t love paying those bills. And so, if there’s a way that people can start to take some of that out, I think that they’re going to find it. And then for the rest of us, I think we have to figure out quickly, including myself. how can we add value, in ways that are different and better than what’s been possible up to this point? And this one, this one, my favorite, thought here is that it’s not like when we went from typewriters to computers. This change is more like when we went from candles to electricity.
Greg Alexander: So it’s moving that fast, and it’s that tectonic.
Jonathan Slain: And I don’t think a lot of people even understand it yet. Like, you… like, if you wanted to try to tell me, Greg, we’re not gonna get computers, we’ve got typewriters, so we’re gonna let other people get computers, and we’ll figure it out, I would… I could maybe even understand that, and I think that could work. But nobody was like, hey, we’re just gonna not get, electricity. We’ll let everybody else mess with that, and we’ll just keep using candles. And I think that this transition to AI is more like that, and that’s, I don’t think people are seeing that.
Greg Alexander: You know, I mean, I’ve been around long enough to remember the world before the internet. I started my career in.
Jonathan Slain: I thought you were gonna say you’ve been around long enough to say you remember before there was electricity.
Greg Alexander: No, no, it’s certainly not that long. But I can literally remember, you know, like, retailers saying, well, people are never going to buy anything online. you know, and then, I mean, look what happened. I mean, when’s the last time we’ve been into a Toys R Us? Like, it just doesn’t exist anymore, I mean, so… and I think this is even more profound than that, and it’s moving quicker than that.
Jonathan Slain: By the way, that last idea is from Ethan Malek, who, I don’t know if you’ve read Ethan’s book or podcast, so I want to make sure he gets credit. I don’t want the audience thinking that I came up with the candle-to-electricity analogy, but the interesting part there is that even with the retail example that you just gave. It’s…
Greg Alexander: The cycles are moving even faster now, because of…
Jonathan Slain: how ubiquitous, information flow is. So, because things are communicated faster, because we’re in a 24-7 news cycle, like, even with retail, you could get away with, trying to pretend like it wasn’t going to go online, but now with how viral, AI tools can be. It’s just going to move faster and faster.
Greg Alexander: Yeah. You know, the example that I like to use in this part of the dialogue that I have with people is that right now, most of AI, not all, is human to agent. And if you think about… Word of mouth, being human to human. Because in Boutique ProServe, the best leads are the leads that travel, you know, word of mouth, referrals, things like that. Then it’s moving to human to agent, so if somebody’s looking for, you know, the service that you provide, how are you going to show up in that world? Where I think we’re headed very quickly, maybe even by the end of this year, there won’t be a human in that word-of-mouth dialogue. It’ll be agent to agent.
Greg Alexander: So one agent talking to 10,000 agents. So, think of the speed of becoming viral in that environment. You know, how quickly did information move human to human? Then it sped up human to agent. Once it goes to agent to agent, my gosh, it’s gonna spread so quickly.
Jonathan Slain: One interesting thing, have you seen rentahuman.ai?
Greg Alexander: So now…
Jonathan Slain: So now, you’ll have to check it out, but now there’s agents can go to rentahuman.ai. and they can rent a human to do things in the real world that the agent can’t do. So imagine a world where you’re throwing an event, you have an agent that helps you to plan your parties and to do all of those things. and your agent realizes that it needs somebody to deliver 100 folding chairs and set them up on your lawn. Now the agent can go to rentahuman.ai and book a human to come and bring out the chairs and set them up and pay them. and you, would just, give your agent a budget, give it use of your credit card, but, I even think that the… and that’s already here, so I completely agree with you, and, it’s an exciting time.
Greg Alexander: It is. So let’s talk about this crazy $156,000 fraud incident that you had to deal with. Tell us a little bit about that story.
Jonathan Slain: I feel a lot better, telling the story since we were able to recover $136,000 of the $156, so it’s only a $20,000 lesson that I learned that hopefully I can share with the audience. It was a lot more raw when it was the full amount, but a year ago in… January of 2025. The bad guys were smart, and over, the long holiday weekend, they got into our email system. And they sent emails that looked like they were coming from me to someone on our team, and directed that team member to pay an invoice of $40,000. They even set it up so that I wouldn’t see any of those emails. They were able to use rules to put them into a folder that I never saw. And then they even were able to give our team member a number to call to verify that we wanted to move ahead with the transaction. And when the team member called. It sounded, like our team being like, yeah, we should go ahead and pay those. So they were using AI, and I don’t know which AI tool, to spoof voices from our team, and to convince our team member to go ahead and make the fraudulent transaction. And then over the course of 3 days during the holiday week, when, shame on me, I wasn’t logging into our bank accounts and checking, they were able to convince a total of 156,000. Out of our team. After we realized what happened, I called the bank. And the bank was like, yeah, you should have had protection on your account. You should have had at least 2 signers to be able to send every ACH. We have that now, Greg. But that… that information and idea would have been shockingly more helpful before the transactions. We called our insurance. And we were like, what kind of coverage do we have? And they’re like, you really don’t, but what you should do is get, social engineering fraud coverage. And that’s the industry term I’ve learned for when they social engineer a situation and trick you into doing something that you wouldn’t have otherwise done. So now we have that coverage, but again, if my insurance agent had called me, or, I would have preferred that they forced me to get the coverage, that that would have been great, but we didn’t have it. And we now have hired an MSP and have much tighter protections over the ability for the bad guys to get into our systems in the first place. than we did before. But so those were the three, legs of the stool that we didn’t have under control, didn’t do a good job with, and I want the audience, like, if… take nothing else from this podcast. have a conversation with your bank, your insurance company, and your MSP to make sure that you’re protected. Because imagine a world where, 6 months or a year from now, they’ll be spoofing videos where you can’t even tell the difference. So what is… what does that look like, or how do we protect against that?
Greg Alexander: Yeah. You know, I mean, pre-AI, you did what you were supposed to do. Somebody had to call a telephone number and get an authorization. Post-AI, somebody mimicked your voice. That’s the amazing thing about that. So you were doing all the things you were supposed to do. But those rules were defined before AI. And now, in this world where people can fake out anybody, and I agree with you, I think video is just around the corner, it’s gonna get worse and worse. All the more reason to outsource functions like this to an MSP. I mean, Jonathan is a management consultant. He’s not an IT department, right? So. he’s not going to keep up with all this stuff, and he shouldn’t. He should just give that work to somebody who that’s their job to do so. They’ll have the insurance and the protections and stay current on all those best practices, but I wanted to make sure that I brought that up. I didn’t want to end on a downer, but it’s just such a great example of, you know, how… The world is changing so quickly, and something like that can be so costly. I’m so glad to hear that you recovered the funds. Did the FBI get involved?
Jonathan Slain: We… so, I sent the form to the FBI with the information, and all you ever… all I ever heard back was an email that was like, hey, we have a ton of cases, you’ll probably never hear from us or get anything back. And then 3 months later, was checking my bank balance, which, I usually do daily, but again, hadn’t been, and saw a deposit for $136,000 from Fraud Recovery. And so, that’s all I know, is that, maybe they caught the bad guys, I’ll really never know, but luckily we got it back. Again, if we hadn’t been able to recover most of it, then I don’t know if I would have the, the intestinal fortitude to tell the story.
Greg Alexander: Yeah. All right, well, let’s wrap this up with one final question. So, Jonathan, for members that are listening to this, and, you know, you want them to walk out of this thing with maybe one first step. To go from, you know, the aha moment of my industry, professional services being restructured around AI, I get all that, but maybe I don’t even know the first step to take. What would your recommendation be to get started?
Jonathan Slain: I started with making a hire. I’m back to, it’s about who. Not what. It really, I think, is an investment in the future. And so, I know… I wish there were an easier first step, like a baby step. But for this, because of the speed at which I think we both agree things are going to move, I don’t think a baby step is warranted if you’re really serious about this. So, making an investment in the right hire. And I’m really talking about a recent college graduate, so happy to expand on that further, for what it could look like, but it’s not a huge investment, but a more material investment than just reading a book, or going to a class, or attending a summer. It’s just moving too fast. I think all of those other pieces of advice would just be, way below, way behind where people really need to be, if they’re really going to advance their businesses and grow. And again, Audubon, we’re all about helping companies grow fast without crashing, and so if you’re asking me, it’s invest in the person. That’s the next step.
Greg Alexander: Yeah. Great recommendation, and one thing that I might add is the reason why I asked Jonathan if he had any industry specialization in his firm, and although he serves a lot of industries, he does have some concentration in construction. And when you think of construction, you don’t necessarily think of AI. You know, you would think that that’s an industry that… where this doesn’t apply. And I’m bringing that up, because sometimes I talk to members, and they’ll say something like, hey, you know, AI’s really not going to affect me because I’m in XYZ industry. It’s just not true. It’s going to affect… every industry, and, you know, we need to keep an open mind about that. So, well, listen, let’s wrap it up here. There’s so many more questions I could ask you, but you’re going to be our featured role model, and I want to save those questions to the role model session, and let members ask the questions directly of you. But, listen, on behalf of the community, I just want to speak for all the members. You know, we’re looking for people that are taking action and actually implementing, not just talking about it. And you’re so far ahead of many. You’re well on your way to becoming what we call an Era 3 firm, so on behalf of the members. Thanks for coming on and making a contribution.
Jonathan Slain: Always a pleasure. Thank you so much, Greg.
Greg Alexander: Okay. Alright, a couple calls to action for listeners. If you’re a member, and you want to hear more about Jonathan’s story, maybe ask your questions, look for the meeting invite, and we’ll have that private member Q&A coming up soon. If you’re not a member, and after listening to this, you might want to become one, go to Collective54.com and fill out an application, and we’ll get in contact with you. But until next time, I appreciate you working me into your busy schedule and giving me a little bit of your attention, and I wish you the best of luck as you try to grow, scale, and someday exit your firm.