Build Your Website for the AI, Not the Human: Richard Hickman on Coaching the Coaches

This week on the Unscripted Small Business Podcast, host Jeremy Rivera sits down with Richard Hickman, founder of Piqued Consulting, a marketing agency built specifically for high-ticket coaches. Richard’s clients are established coaches — usually solopreneurs around $20K a month — who’ve hit the referral ceiling and need a predictable way to grow. His playbook is refreshingly concrete, and it runs from CRM foundations all the way to getting your business quoted by ChatGPT.

From Russian Hacker Cases to Coaching the Coaches

Richard’s “villain origin story” starts in cybersecurity. He went to school for digital forensics and spent years as a consultant on civil and high-profile hacking cases — good money, but being on call 24/7 didn’t survive becoming a husband and, overnight, a stepdad to five kids (they’re now up to six). His wife is a public-speaking coach, so he applied the back-end systems he’d built and sold in his cyber firm to her coaching business. Her clients — also coaches — started asking for the same help, and Piqued Consulting was born.

Start With the Foundation: CRM and Speed-to-Lead

The very first pillar for every client is the same: bring in a real CRM and marketing automation (Richard prefers GoHighLevel). Most coaches are running communications off a personal cell phone, which breaks the moment they hire a setter. Step one is a centralized company phone number, an integrated calendar with show-up sequences, and lead automation — because speed-to-lead is everything.

“We don’t want to turn on ads if you don’t have a follow-up system in place,” Richard says. Get communication in one place, automate bookings and reactivations, and build a pipeline to track leads — then you’re ready to scale.

Don’t Turn On Ads Until the Math Works

Step two is paid ads, because that’s how you break past referrals — but only once the offer is dialed in and priced correctly. Richard won’t usually work with a coach whose offer is under $4,000–$5,000, and the reason is simple math: acquiring an online-coaching customer often costs several hundred dollars, so a $200 offer can never be profitable to scale. He pushes for payment upfront (or half now, half in 30 days) and steers coaches far away from pay-on-results arrangements.

Build Your Website for the AI, Not the Human

When the conversation turns to LLMs, Richard reframes SEO as AEO — answer engine optimization. The goal is to be the business ChatGPT names when a prospect asks how to solve their problem. That changes how you write.

“You need to be building your website to where it’s not necessarily geared towards a human being visiting it, but an AI visiting it.” — Richard Hickman

His tactic: title a blog post as the exact question your prospect would type into ChatGPT, then answer it thoroughly.

“Who reads blogs anymore? AIs do. Perplexity reads your blog. ChatGPT reads your blog.” — Richard Hickman

To make it practical, Richard built a free tool: at coachingaiaudit.com you enter your niche and the number-one question your clients ask, and it checks whether you’re referenced across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude — then gives you pointers to start showing up.

The Most Underutilized Channel Is Email

For retention, Richard’s answer is email marketing — the channel most coaches avoid for fear of “being that guy.” His rule, borrowed from Gary Vaynerchuk: jab, jab, jab, hook. Send value at least once a week so that when you finally make an ask, it lands. Love him or hate him, he says, Grant Cardone emails constantly — and people stay subscribed because the value is there.

Don’t Rely on One Channel

Richard’s hardest-earned lesson: never build your livelihood on rented land. He points to the brief government-mandated TikTok outage — creators with millions of followers but no email list watched their entire business freeze overnight.

“Social media is great, but don’t rely on it, because it could go away in an instant and we’ve seen it happen.” — Richard Hickman

Collect the email and the phone number. An audience you own is the one that survives the next algorithm change or platform shutdown.

Coach to Advisor: The Retention Shift

The classic consulting trap is that once a client succeeds, they no longer need you. Richard’s fix is to reposition from coach to advisor — helping a client get to $10K a month is step one, not the finish line. Build the relationship deep enough that you stay valuable at $50K and beyond, moving from weekly coaching to a quarterly advisory role.

Where to Find Richard

Connect with Richard at Piqued Consulting and on Instagram, run your free AI-visibility check at coachingaiaudit.com, and keep an eye out for his new show, The Business of High Ticket Coaching, launching soon.