For Jethro · 2026-05-25
A one-day hands-on AI summit at Mad Swans in the Mendips.
Thursday 10 September 2026.
Here's the shape of what I'm proposing, the 50:50 partnership, the money and the time.
Let's make AI great again.
Scroll for the detail
The promise
Most AI events put people in rows in hotel meeting rooms. This one is built differently. 30 owner-managers, operations builders and people whose work is starting to bend toward AI. One day at a boutique countryside venue in the Mendips, 40 minutes from Bristol, 30 minutes from Bath.
A pre-prep pack lands the week before so people arrive ready to build. The day opens theatre-style in The Carousel: a Claude Code walkthrough, scene-setting, goals from each attendee, feedback from the room.
Then break, the room flips to 8 tables of 4. Office-hours model from there: we float, we don't lecture. Show-and-tell at the end of the day, drinks in The Hangout, and an optional eco-cabin overnight for those who want to make a night of it.
Every paid ticket comes with three "built for you" agents tailored to the attendee's business (worth £1,500+ each in equivalent consulting work), a companion ebook on building agents for your business (£99 standalone), and two follow-up 45-minute 1:1 build sessions with one of us after the event.
Roughly £4,800 of deliverables baked into a £495 ticket. The agents and ebook are what attendees walk away with on the day. The build hours are the gateway into our paid consulting when they want more time at £150/hr, and the retention hook that pulls them back to the next quarterly session.
It's the difference between "I went to an AI workshop" and "I shipped working agents into my business." That difference is the whole product.
An AI's read on the idea
Unprompted critical pre-mortem from Claude, generated 2026-05-25. I told it to find the weak points, not just the strong ones. This is what it actually came back with. (Fitting that the AI summit gets an AI assessment.)
Why it likely works
Real UK market gap.
Hands-on AI workshops between £100 community events and £600+ enterprise training days don't really exist. The £245-£495 band is unoccupied territory.
Take-home value is real, not implied.
Three "built for you" agents (£1,500+ each of equivalent consulting work) plus a £99 companion ebook means attendees leave with ~£4,500+ of deliverables. The promise isn't "you'll learn something," it's "you'll leave with working agents you didn't have when you arrived."
Build hours are the second structural differentiator.
Two 45-min follow-ups per ticket convert workshop attendees into both a consulting funnel and a retention loop. Most competitors include zero follow-up.
Operator-led pricing premium is defensible.
UK comparables (Mind The Product Forum £699, UX London £695, Lenny's Summit ~£790) all charge £600-£800 when the speakers actually ship at production scale.
Mad Swans is genuinely differentiated.
New venue, cabins, padel, golf, no hotel-meeting-room vibe. Photographs well. The kind of place attendees willingly post about, which lowers Cohort 02 marketing cost.
Cohort model compounds.
Same 30 across three sessions builds a network, case studies for Cohort 02 marketing, and the natural Annual Pass upsell. By Year 2, parallel cohorts become possible without proportional founder time.
Geography works.
40 min from Bristol, 30 from Bath, train-accessible from London. Mid-funnel for a regional operator cluster that's underserved by current AI events, which all cluster in central London.
Where it could break
Filling 30 seats from a near-zero brand.
Nathan + Jethro LinkedIn reach + Mad Swans hospitality audience isn't a natural SME-operator pool. Paid amplification isn't sized in the budget yet, and organic alone may not bridge it.
Annual Pass conversion is make-or-break.
Year economics assume 18 of 30 retain at £895. If conversion lands at 5-10, the year gets thin fast and Cohort 02 has to backfill harder than planned.
Mad Swans cost variance.
The £60 DDR / £350 room rate may not survive contract negotiation for an anchor-tenant booking without track record. A 30% venue overrun would absorb £4-5k of the partnership pool.
Jethro's holiday allowance is the real ceiling on scale.
Multiple parallel cohorts requires multiple Thursdays out of Neighbourly. The scale path is real, but bottlenecked by something he doesn't fully control.
Audience is harder to reach than the framing implies.
Owner-managers and operations builders sit across many channels by industry, function and region. Mid-funnel positioning means harder targeting than pure technical or pure executive workshops.
No social proof yet.
First cohort means no testimonials, no case studies, no event footage to repurpose. The launch has to land cold, before any of the assets that make future launches easier exist.
Net read
Probably worth doing. The structural elements (build hours, cohort model, operator-led delivery, premium venue) all defend higher pricing and recurring revenue. The risks are mostly executional rather than strategic: filling seats, delivering quality, and negotiating Mad Swans cleanly. Financial downside is bounded to a few weekends of partner time and ~£20k of Consortia at-risk capital across costs and refunds.
The upside if it works (Cohorts 04+, parallel cohorts, the consulting flywheel) substantially exceeds the Year 1 cash. That's the real reason to do it.
The venue
A boutique countryside hotel that opened in 2025, by the Beaverbrook and Bel & Dragon founders. 16 rooms, eco-cabins, two restaurants, padel and pickleball courts, a 12-hole golf course and a driving range. The Carousel is our workshop room: theatre-style for 32 in the morning, reset to 8 tables of 4 over the morning break.
The Carousel
Our workshop room. Theatre 32 in the morning, reset to 8 tables of 4 for build sessions and your data deep dive.
The Potting Shed
Lunch and optional retreat-tier dinner. Restaurant cooking from the estate kitchen.
The Hangout
Show & tell finishing block, drinks, energy at the end of the day. Mid-morning coffee break room while The Carousel resets.
The series
Cohort 01 is a trimester programme. The same 30 people progress across three Thursdays. By Session 3, the cohort is a network. And if Cohort 01 works the way we're scoping it, we run multiple parallel cohorts from Year 2. The model is built to compound, not to be a one-off.
Thursday 10 September 2026
Foundations. First agent. Show & tell.
Thursday 14 January 2027
Connect agents to real data. Build for the gaps people found in their own businesses.
Thursday 13 May 2027
Cohort teaches cohort. Production-grade outputs. Case studies for Cohort 02 marketing.
Plus 2 × 45-min 1:1 build hours per ticket per session, scheduled 3-4 and 10-12 weeks after each event. Booked through Cal.com. Round-robin across both of us.
The partnership
Cohort 01 is delivered as a 50:50 partnership between us, run through Consortia. You're engaged as an outside-IR35 contractor on Consortia's existing recruitment-company paperwork, so there's no bespoke agreement to draft and nothing to set up your end.
We calculate your profit split each quarter and pay it as a standard contractor invoice. No business set-up to worry about, no extra accountancy or finance costs at your end. Paid within 14 days. Auto-renews unless either of us gives 30 days' notice.
Cohort sets for other audiences (e.g. a technical-practitioner programme down the line) sit outside this. Those will use paid hourly co-hosts, not profit share. The Jethro arrangement is bespoke to Cohort 01-03 SME owners and operators because you're the right person for that audience.
The build-hour mechanic gives us each a stake in the long tail of consulting that comes out the back of every cohort.
Event profit pool
Split 50:50
Ticket revenue minus direct costs (Mad Swans venue and F&B, Stripe and Klarna fees, AV, design and landing page, ads, tech helper, refund buffer). Less notional 19% corporation tax. Net pool splits equally.
Paid add-on build hours
75% / 25%
Deliverer / Pooled
Per £150 ex-VAT add-on hour: ~£88 to whoever delivers it, ~£15 to each of us as partnership pool share. Cal.com booking record is the source of truth. Total per hour to the deliverer: ~£103.
The numbers
Base case. Cohort 01 sells out, Mad Swans anchor-tenant deal at the rates we've already been quoted, 20% of attendees buy 4 add-on build hours, 50:50 delivery split between us.
Event pool share
£7,450
After notional 19% corp tax
Build-hour delivery
£1,055
12 hrs delivered × £87.94
Add-on pool share
£350
25% pooled, 50% to you
Total, base case
~£8,850
Per year, across the three sessions. Range £8,500 to £12,000+ depending on add-on conversion and your delivery share. If the consulting flywheel exceeds the base case, this number grows materially.
You pay your own income tax + Class 4 NI on this via Self Assessment. At higher-rate the net to your pocket is roughly £5,100-£7,000 in the base case, more if uptake exceeds expectations. Per hour committed across the year, that's £90 to £125 equivalent.
Attendance and substitution
50%
You attend the session.
50% of that session's event-pool profit. Standard partnership share.
10%
You can't make it but you did the prep.
10% of that session's profit. Requires you to have attended at least 50% of formal planning calls for that event.
0%
You miss the session and didn't plan it.
No share for that session. 2 weeks' minimum notice required for non-attendance.
If you can't make a day, I bring my own backup. No Jethro-sourced substitutes, cleaner that way.
The time
3 event Thursdays across the year
~25 hours of pre-event prep (planning calls, deck reviews, designing your data deep dive, agreeing build challenges)
~50 hours of build-hour delivery across the year (Cal.com round-robin, ~1 hr/week on average)
~5 hours marketing (LinkedIn launch post on 5 June, bio + headshot for the landing page)
Total commitment
~95-100 hrs
Across the year. Most of it is the three event days and the build hours. Flexible week-to-week on the build delivery, fixed on the three event dates.
The honest stuff
1. The admin sits with the Consortia team.
Obviously with your input. If admin grows materially in Year 2 we revisit.
2. The cash is decent for 1 cohort in Year 1.
£8.5-12k+. Real long-term value lives in three places: any chargeable extra build hours that follow from the included two, the option (and this is the big one) to run multiple parallel cohorts from Year 1.3 / Year 2 if the model works, and the brand asset (a small audience of owner-managers building with AI is a great long-term asset to own together).
3. We can scale this if it works.
If we make it work, we can easily run multiple cohorts per year. The constraint isn't demand or my time, it's how many Thursdays you can spare from your Neighbourly holiday allowance. Worth working that out before we commit to scaling.
What I need from you
01
Read this. Sit with the numbers.
Don't agree out of politeness. I'd rather you push hard now than resent it later.
02
Bring pushback.
On the split, the attendance rules, the time commitment, the build-hour mechanic. Anything that doesn't sit right.
03
Confirm your bandwidth.
For the 10 September date. For ~1 hr/week build delivery, flexible week to week. For the prep cadence.
04
Public co-host status.
Comfortable with being named publicly on the landing page and on LinkedIn launch posts from 5 June onwards?