Build Your Website for the AI, Not the Human — Richard Hickman on Coaching in the AEO Era

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I’m Jeremy Rivera, and on this episode of the Unscripted Small Business Podcast I sat down with Richard Hickman, founder of Piqued Consulting, a marketing agency built specifically for high-ticket coaches. What I love about conversations like this one is that Richard doesn’t sell hype — he sells order of operations. As someone growing my own agency after years as a solo consultant, I kept nodding along as he laid out exactly which part of a coaching business you fix first, and why turning on ads too early is one of the most expensive mistakes a coach can make.

Who Piqued Consulting Actually Serves

Richard Hickman is the founder of Piqued Consulting, a marketing agency built for one very specific customer: the high-ticket coach. As he describes his ideal client, it’s someone already in the coaching industry — usually a solopreneur, maybe with one or two employees, often making around $20,000 a month, who can’t seem to break through to a predictable sales system.

Those coaches are mostly living on referrals, and the referral ceiling is real. Richard’s whole model is helping them break through it and generate more predictable cash flow — not by chasing every tactic at once, but by fixing the business in a deliberate order.

The First Pillar: A CRM Foundation and Speed-to-Lead

The very first thing Piqued does with everybody is set a foundation — what Richard calls the first pillar. In practice that means bringing in a real CRM and marketing automation platform (he strongly prefers GoHighLevel). A lot of coaches already have some kind of CRM, but they’re not using it to anywhere near its capability.

The pattern he sees over and over: coaches still running the business off their personal cell phone. Step one is centralizing communication so nothing lives in one person’s head or texts. Get a company phone number everyone can see, so when you eventually hire a setter, they aren’t blind to the conversation history. From there, integrate the calendar to automate bookings and add show-up sequences that get booked calls to actually show up. Then lead automation — because speed-to-lead is a real thing.

“We don’t want to turn on ads if you don’t have a follow-up system in place.”
— Richard Hickman

If it’s going to take two days to reach a new lead, you’re not ready to spend. The last piece of the foundation is a pipeline to track leads — not a spreadsheet, not your memory, but an actual process. AI runs through most of that stack now; the one place Piqued keeps a human in the loop is copy, because every coach’s offer and voice is different and the coach has to review the material before it goes live so it never says something untrue.

Don’t Turn On Ads Until the Offer Is Ready

Once the foundation is in place, step two is paid ads — that’s how you scale past referrals. But Richard is blunt that most new coaches aren’t ready for it. The clients he works with already have their ICP dialed in and have sold their offer. New coaches who are still figuring that out don’t have the offer nailed down, so ads would just burn money.

On organic social, his rubric is simple: is your effort actually turning into leads? Organic is an important long game, but revenue-generating activity comes first. He points to Alex Hormozi’s “rule of 100” — if you’re not yet making $100k a month, you should be doing 100 cold outreaches a day, 100 minutes of content creation, and $100 a day in ad spend. Content alone is a slow build; as Richard put it, you might get one post to pop and pull a few leads, then it dries up. Consistency is what ad spend buys you.

Price to Cover Acquisition — and Skip Pay-on-Results

The most common failure Richard sees is underpricing — and it usually traces back to self-confidence. A newer coach hasn’t developed the confidence to value themselves and charge enough, so the math never works. Online customer acquisition will likely cost several hundred dollars per client. If your offer is only a couple hundred dollars, you can’t scale, because you’re fronting money to acquire customers you can’t profitably serve.

His rule of thumb: collect enough cash upfront to cover the cost of acquiring that customer, cover the cost of acquiring the next one, pay your overhead, and still have profit. That’s why Piqued generally won’t work with a coach whose offer is below $4,000 to $5,000. And at that price point, Richard prefers payment upfront — or half now, half in 30 days — rather than long invoicing terms.

“Charge enough to where you’re not having to make those types of concessions. Stick to your guns and be like — I’m sorry, that’s not the way this works.”
— Richard Hickman

One place he tells every coach to stay far away from: pay-on-results. Coaching is something you generally pay for before you get it, and results-based billing invites exactly the trap where a client’s business takes off, they decide they don’t need you anymore, and your upside walks out the door.

From Coach to Advisor: The Retention Shift

That leads to one of the sharper ideas in the conversation: the shift from coach to advisor. The classic consulting problem is that once a client succeeds, they no longer need you. Richard’s answer is to position yourself so they still do.

He described a client who has been a leadership coach for 20 years — with clients he’s coached that entire time. The cadence changed from weekly early on to maybe monthly or quarterly now, and the role shifted from coach to advisor. Get a client to $10k a month and the relationship isn’t over; that was step one, and now you help them get to $50k. It’s a mindset and relationship shift: you build a genuine long-term relationship rather than performing a set service and disappearing when it’s done.

The Villain Origin Story: From Russian Hackers to Coaching the Coaches

Every good guest gets asked for their villain origin story, and Richard’s is a good one. He went to school for digital forensics and spent years in cybersecurity — working civil cases, then figuring out how hackers got in, including Russian hacker and other high-profile cases. He built and sold a cybersecurity firm.

Then he met his wife and became a stepdad to her five kids overnight (they’ve since had one more — six total). Being an on-call cyber consultant 24/7 doesn’t fit dad life, so even though the money was great and he loved the work, he stepped out. His wife was and is a public-speaking coach, so he offered to build her coaching business the way he’d built the back end of his cyber company. A couple of her clients — also coaches — asked for the same help, and coaching the coaches was born almost by accident.

Build Your Site for the AI That’s Reading It

LLMs are reshaping the arena for coaches on both sides. On one hand, people are using ChatGPT as a free therapist, which makes mindset coaching harder to sell right now — the ROI is hard to track facing forward, even when it’s real. Business coaches with a clear ROI story have a much easier time. On the other hand, AI is a new discovery channel, and that’s where Richard gets tactical.

He calls it AEO — answer engine optimization (also GEO, generative engine optimization; I offered “search everywhere optimization”). The core idea:

“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

The goal is to get cited when a prospect asks ChatGPT “how do I grow my business?” and it answers with your name and your formula. Most people trust their AI almost too much, so a recommendation there tends to convert. It also means you have to be able to monitor whether AI actually cites you — and for agencies running this across a whole client roster, that visibility tracking becomes its own deliverable. And blogging, of all things, comes back — but for a new reader:

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

His practical move: title a blog post as the exact question your prospect is typing into ChatGPT, so when the model goes looking, it finds a whole article answering that question. You still do all the traditional SEO work, then build for the AI reader on top of it. My friend Matt Brooks framed it well — an AI is already acting as a customer support rep for your business whether you trained it or not; if you don’t give it good material, it’ll either ignore you or make something up.

It’s the same shift we track constantly on the SEO side — practitioners like my friend Michael McDougald of Right Thing SEO live in this problem daily, and there’s more on structuring content so AI cites you over at SEO Arcade.

Don’t Rely on One Channel — and Stop Ignoring Email

The through-line of the back half of the conversation is: don’t rely on any single channel. Richard told the story of someone with several million combined followers who had never collected a single email or phone number. When the government-mandated TikTok outage hit, that person was freaking out because their entire livelihood had just been switched off.

“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

That’s why the foundation comes first — so an email isn’t a “whoop-dee-doo, I got an email” moment but a genuine asset. Richard is a firm believer in gating a real guide behind a form to capture at least an email, ideally a phone number too. And the most underutilized channel, in his view, is email marketing. Coaches worry about being the spammer, but the fix is to make yours better than the rest and send value at least once a week — it’s Gary Vaynerchuk’s jab-jab-jab-hook: give, give, give, then ask.

The Authenticity Paradox

I raised the authenticity paradox: marketing means rehearsing and repeating messages with the intent to make money, which can feel inauthentic. Richard’s answer is character-based. If someone is genuinely just using people to make money, that’s a bad person — steer clear. The coaches he wants to work with have a livelihood to earn, sure, but their actual goal is to help people. The safeguard is being able to say no — the same muscle that lets you refuse bad payment terms. Desperation, we agreed, puts off an odor; people can smell when you’re only in it for the money.

Up at 4 a.m.: Family, Balance, and a New Podcast

Richard’s real passion is his family, and his balance strategy is sacrifice on the clock: he’s up between four and five most mornings to get focused work done before anyone else wakes, so the rest of the day belongs to his kids. The goal, he says, is to raise kids who want to come home after they’re adults. I connected it to a past Unscripted conversation with George Rivera and his small table of CEOs built around not abandoning your family for your success.

Richard’s own podcast, The Business of High Ticket Coaching, grew out of the same instinct. There’s plenty of David Goggins-style “put your shoes on and get to work” content already; his aim is the tactical, operational layer underneath it — who was your first hire and why, what marketing actually worked, what was the biggest waste of money.

Try Richard’s Free AI-Visibility Audit

Richard’s parting resource is a free AI-visibility audit for coaches. You enter your coaching niche and the number-one question your potential clients might ask, and it checks ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude to see whether you’re referenced in the answers — then gives you pointers on what to fix on your site to start showing up. You can run it at coachingaiaudit.com, and learn more about his agency at Piqued Consulting or on Instagram @piquedconsulting.

🎧 Listen: Castos  |  📺 Watch: YouTube