This AI Business Is Boring…But It Makes $500,000/yr (just copy it)

What does a $500,000 a year AI agency actually look like under the hood? What do they sell? What systems are they using to streamline delivery? And overall, what are the tips and tricks that they've picked up along the way that allowed them to scale to that point? Today, I'm bringing on Chris from Early Bird AI, and he's going to be walking through the exact offers, the exact systems, and all the learnings he's had along the way in order to scale to this point. despite coming from a marketing agency background and not being technical at all. There are some incredibly valuable nuggets in here for anyone looking to scale next year, particularly around how to optimize your sales process as an agency, how to niche down correctly, the exact tech stack to use, how broad or narrow you need to go in order to really be able to tap into a whole market and whether to niche down by industry or by solution type in 2026. I hope you guys enjoy. Chris, mate, thank you for coming on the channel. Um it's great to have you on here to break this down uh some of the incredible results you've been getting and how people can map that over to their own success in 2026. — This year has been an absolutely huge year. We've had a massive you know as you can see there 500k year plus actually this year which is phenomenal and I'm looking forward to sharing some

of these lessons. So essentially what we want to just cover off on here is how to start the agency or run an agency end to end in 2026. The actual hard part isn't AI. So I don't know what um everyone else is thinking but essentially from my side here like it's really easy to create these AI workflows or these AR processes and these things. The hard part is actually making these battle tested and ready for the clients and actually surviving real interactions with people as well. And the other thing too that we're finding and um I'm sure it's going to continue a lot more into the new year is that AI is becoming less impressive for business owners when we talk to them. Um we've started this uh back in February 2024 and early on people like wow AI um let's talk now u business owners are a lot more educated they're discerning they've probably tried a few AI tools and even some other AI agencies and probably haven't been impressed though AI is not necessarily the leading factor uh that it used to be and the other thing too that we got to acknowledge is a lot of these tools and softwares are actually adding in software or AI uh natively so for example one of the things we started off doing was these uh draft replies to, you know, Gmail and everything. And now Gemini does that for a lot of clients as well. And so what people actually want is they want certainty and leverage. They want, you know, their revenue to be stable. They want to have um I guess consistent results for the lead responses in our um circumstance. They want time savings and they also want risk reduction. So essentially, we're selling outcomes here in AI is what we use to actually deliver this. And so if you lead with AI instead of an outcome, I believe in 2026 you're going to get absolutely crushed. What we do is we focus on a particular outcome. So not a particular niche. So especially earlier on, uh it's really hard to go, look, I'm going to pick this one particular vertical and solve all their problems. So um what we did at the beginning is we just found problems that business owners had. We actually started off with what we call the ACDC model. So it's attract, convert, deliver, and collect. And so we'd start off by talking to businesses about all those four areas and just solving problems. We ended up focusing in on conversions, which is the speed to lead and the database reactivations in particular, which we'll cover. Um, and that's the outcome that we're owning. And what we can actually do with this is we can go across verticals. And right now we're identifying a few of them actually that we've worked with that are going to be great to niche down with afterwards. But the main thing to do though is focus on the outcome rather than saying, "Hey, I'm going to pick a niche. " Uh and so example outcomes here is an incoming lead to a booked appointment. That's an outcome you can own. Um going from idea to AI content created, that's also another outcome you can own. And same even with like email outreach or AI email outreach to qualified leads, that's another outcome. And so what I'd suggest is start with that and then go across different niches and audiences and you'll find the ones that you want to work with and then once you got that established and then you can niche down after that. What was some of the stuff that you went through that I mean a lot of people are probably in the same position of now. — Yeah. So it was actually interesting. The start of this year was very much u delivery mode. So last year we started off with a bang. So you could essentially say AI and people would want to buy your services. And so we had a lot of operational um back backlog essentially to sort of get through. And so we had to go through and spend our time building out these systems and these processes. So we can actually not have to build from custom uh each and every time because the start of this year, the first 3 to four months was actually really painful. We did virtually no sales. It's all just delivery and clearing out the backlog there as well. From there though um we only found I guess these uh areas that we're owning the outcomes by working with a lot of different businesses across a wide variety of different offers. So we did start off by doing we had a podcast companion we used to sell. We had the content creation obviously the lead generation here as well. And so at that time we were just figuring out what products and services do we want to really offer that we can add big impact that also we enjoyed working with as well. Okay guys very quickly if you're an aspiring entrepreneur and want to start your own AI business and you haven't already joined my free school community it's down there in one of the links in the description below. has my full free course on how to start your own AI agency as a complete beginner. And you're surrounded by over a quarter million people who are also striving towards the same thing. There's no better place on the planet right now to be surrounded by like-minded people. And you get free weekly Q& A with me where you can ask questions directly to me about how to start and scale your business. I'll see you in there. Yeah.

Do you find something that um I mean upon like really laying it out it seems quite obvious but uh earlier in the AI automation agency sort of uh wave um there was a lot of talk and I mean myself included was thinking like okay go deep and find like an operational uh a problem that businesses face and try to copy and paste it across uh a certain industry. But the more I've got into it, the more I realize like in your case, uh the more replicable systems are going to be in the sort of higher up parts of the like the AC/DC, the further up you are in that, the more standardized it will be across businesses cuz you can at the end of the day, they all need to generate leads. book in some kind of call. They need to well set them and they need to have the call. They might need to go into a contracting invoice process. So that top half of the business, the entire like marketing and sales process and uh getting right up to fulfillment is a lot more standardized across businesses and therefore more easy to make a scalable offer like you have here than if you go say within a within an accountancy firm once you get deep into say how they or insurance how they do X process it varies a lot more between businesses. So I think this is an important thing for people to keep in mind as they look to niche down. That's why you're seeing a lot of these like more higher up the business and earlier in the kind of uh how do you describe it just like on the acquisition side of the business is a lot more standardized across people in the given niche and therefore that's why you're seeing a lot of these scalable offers popping up in that area. But it's not to say that there aren't still opportunities further down but you need to sort of replace fully rip out something and give them something suitable to replace it if you're going to go deeper. — Exactly. And there's more risk as you go deeper as well. And if you think about it too, that's probably why digital marketing agencies did so well is because you were working across at higher level. Sort of the process stays the same no matter what industry or business you're working in. But as you go deeper down that pathway, things get more uh specific. So businesses have their own processes that want to follow. Um also I think too we got to think through like the adoption curve. So if you look at any particular niche, you're going to have certain business owners who are really open to AI and keen to go now and they're going to have those going to be really resistant. And so if you do try to go focus on two on one particular niche, you're going to tap out that sort of early adopter um group of people early. And so if you can just go across niches by solving a particular problem or process or outcome, then it makes life a lot easier essentially. — Did you find it was better to go like start with a very small like uh lead to booked appointment uh rather than trying to do a bit of a more longer pipeline for the project. Initially — that would be the best way to go. It's not actually what we did. We started trying to own the whole process from start to finish and it was very tough. But yes, going back if I could start again, I'll just pick that one piece and own that space and then expand. So the way I think about it now is like an axe head. So we're trying to hit with the blunt force of the axe head trying to do everything at once versus leading with the leading edge because um doing a review our best clients started off with one particular thing and expanded versus buying everything up front. So yeah, if I could do it again, I would do it that way for sure. — Totally. I think this, as you've touched on and alluded to previously, just like in the marketing agency world and like the state that SMA got to with people doing mass outreach and people getting very used to being done dirty by certain agencies and the skepticism towards where we're naturally going to get a bit more of that as the space starts to grow and the trust factor and being able to get a small like getting a beach head in the company, whether it's with an audit or some like small PC, just some way to say, look, hey, we know what we're doing. and we're going to deliver some kind of uh value very quickly and being able to grow the relationship from there is just uh is the best way to do it in my opinion. — Yeah, a thousand%. And it really comes down to like what business owners really want as well because we've spoken to probably um I think it's about 190 or 200 or so businesses this year I believe. And a lot of them they just want the same things, right? So obviously they want to make money. They want to save time. They want those key things. But the really the key things that really separate those that buy versus those that don't is they want things that are simple and easy to use. They want to like remove complication. So like as a business owner as we know like you got to deal with staff, you got products, you got pricing, you got competition, the market moves, all these things, bookkeeping, tax and so business owners just really want ease. They want simplicity. They want you to remove complication. And the thing that um probably others will relate to as well when you're in this space like everything really seems easy. So this whole thing here about like essentially like an AI automation or doing a prompt, people out there struggle just using chat GBT even now. And so just because it's easy for us where like early adopters, a lot of the business owners we're talking to and dealing with and their team members, it really isn't easy for them. So um they want something that's simple, they also want things that work within their existing tech stack. So um one thing I found very early is they don't want to be switching things around. You know, again, there's so much operational drag. The team is used to this one particular CRM or one particular tool they use. They know the login information. They know how to navigate. And then if you need them to switch their text stack, it just it adds a lot of resistance essentially. And they also do want to have fewer subscriptions too. So again, a big concern that a lot of people have spoken to and also our clients have is they don't want to be adding to their tech stack because it seems like one subscription to us. Okay, it's like $50 a month, whatever that is, it seems really affordable. What that actually creates for that business owner is the bookkeeper has to know how to categorize those things. They then have to log all those transactions. go through and teach their team how to use all these new tools. And so wherever possible, if you can shrink that tech stack, which we'll get to towards the end of this as well, the better results you'll have. They also want it to be stable. So they don't want to have to constantly change. So the reality of the space um we had a very painful lesson. Um I won't mention which companies, but with the voice um AI, we were using one particular voice provider which was one of the leading ones and then they essentially um just it bugged out and became so unreliable. So, we had to go ahead and switch all of our clients across to our current um voice AI, which is we're using Vaffy right now. Vaffy and retail are great, but we're using Vaffy, but the one we had to switch away from, it was extremely painful. And it was actually around this time last year that it happened. So, they want to have solutions that they know they don't have to constantly switch. They also uncertainty. Yeah. — In there is a bit of a caution around the size of the the startup and the tool that you're choosing to build on. I'm always very skeptical of becoming like an early adopter in a tool because I know that like naturally they're going to have a smaller feature set. Um they're going to be sort of further away from where they want the product to be. They're also going to have like this thing might not exist in 12 months. Um so definitely building on the big ones at this point is definitely a smart strategy. — Yeah, absolutely agree. And they also want certainty as well. So again, AI already introduces a lot of uncertainty for people in this space. they just want to know that hey the person they're dealing with knows what they're doing and can solve the problems that they're going to have. So one of the biggest things that we also learned um and I think all of us coming into the space at the beginning we're like super hyped up we go wow AI can do everything but then we realize that when you actually start going to production level like work it it's not the case and so that the difference between a demo versus something that's production ready is chalk and cheese — they want to know that who they have working with them can actually solve their problems and — so I guess there's a part in there about the scope of your agency how niched you are like you want to be in your case solving one problem and you know everything about that problem, right? And it might not be their particular niche, but you understand all the complexities of how to implement that certain system. So being niched on the solution level rather than on the industry level um and solving a certain problem and becoming an expert in there um is definitely providing that certainty that they want. — Exactly. And just an example of that too. So we obviously part of our solution is voice and so um we have everything from Twilio you got your voice providers like 11 Labs and Vappy and we actually use Vo providers like you know obviously uh 3CX you know dial pad and air call those sort the ones that routes phone calls and so 3CX recently changed their rules where they no longer forward the phone number of the incoming call and so things like that can change and so when you really focus in on a particular outcome and you own it you have the ability of solving those problems but if you go too broad there's no way you're going to be able to solve those problems and these things happen and they change very frequently. So essentially um also up here too if we just speak about like owning outcomes you want to focus in on AI systems and so we started off again at the beginning of our journey going look we'll build whatever you'd like but the skills leverage and um especially in this space when really everyone's still learning like you can't just go and say look I want to hire a new plumber right and you get someone who's a qualified plumber everyone's learning in this space and so if you scale or as you scale and you're building custom solutions you have to retain that team member uh and then bringing people in to train on that particular system. It takes a long time. So the winning solution obviously is to work with AI systems and to have a defined end-to-end solution and so this also creates a lot of trust as well. Um my natural inclination is to always offer more. It's like hey we can do this, we can do this but on the other side of it the business owner is looking at this going hey that sounds great but I'm looking at a lot of risk a lot of you know um things that can go wrong. So if you do have your fixed and defined scope with what is included and what is not included, you're going to get better results. Um clients will be happier. Their expectations is going to be set correctly and you also won't pull your hair out. So you're just going man said we can deliver this and we actually have to go ahead and deliver it now. — And if you pick yeah like exactly like you said when business when you go to business owner you're like I mean I'm putting my business owner hat on or someone comes to me and says that we're going to solve this problem this this this. I do get a bit skeptical that one you could actually do it and I'm like look m I'd just rather you just like okay the appointment booking rate I want that to go up like 30%. If it can increase a certain amount then I don't care about the rest as long as you do that then we're good like that's all that I care about and if you focus on one of those key metrics like that um of increasing a key metric like the show rate or something um which we can probably get into. That's what I really care about and the rest of it is just a bunch of [ __ ] that's going to slow you down. — Exactly. And then when you come in with that business owner mindset of saying this is exactly what we do and don't do, it gives them a lot more trust cuz they know you're not just another person who's like just learning and coming into this space. And so we

obviously go through like value systems. So ours is obviously based on sales and conversion, but it doesn't have to be. But you just want to have a system that delivers value for this particular client, not just a dev product. And so our core system, we'll just go quickly over what this looks like, is essentially a lead will come in, whether it's a phone call or a text message. AI is going to respond. Um, it'll reply and follow up. If they don't reply, it moves into discovery and qualification. So, we again we're focusing on sales. So, if this is not a sales inquiry, so people, you know, ask about invoicing, they want to sell the businesses, everything. If there's anything outside of that scope, we just gather the information and send it through. That's our sort of job done. Um, we discover, we qualify. If the pro — So, is this being done over SMS in most cases? — Yes, this is done over any of these um platforms here. So we have a live chat widget, SMS, meta DMs, Instagram, Facebook, contact forms, emails, WhatsApp, and meta ads. So obviously with meta ads, it turns into like SMS or email. And so what we do is if they qualify, we then move ahead to the booking. Um if they book the appointment, we move ahead. If they don't, you want to have things that follow up. And so again, you know, the business owner says to your point there, you want more appointments, right? That's the outcome you want. The part of it is the AI is not going to book every appointment first up. You want to have those follow follow-up systems in place. So we own the whole outcome. So uh essentially if they book the AI will then do the appointment confirmations. So the show rate is also huge. So what we want to do is we want to have the AI reach out and confirm the appointments and if they need to reschedle the AI will handle that for them. If they confirmed that obviously that's a good thing. If it's cancellation or no response, AI handles all that for the prospect as well. It was actually great to see. We had this happen um for us I think um on Thursday. Um I saw a message coming say hey I need to reschedle my appointment. I open up the window just to go back and reply and by the time I open up the window the AI had already reached out and was in the process of rescheduling which is absolutely amazing. And so what you want to do is you want to own that whole process. Now if you go to a business owner and say look every time you get a lead come in we're going to handle the initial response. follow-up and what you're going to see in your calendar is more qualified appointments booked and confirmed. That's a very compelling use case of what business owners want there. So it's going to take all those hassles out. And then what we also do too is again just ending owning the whole process is we build over the top of a platform called high level. Obviously everyone will be familiar with that one. Um and so what we also do is update the opportunity pipelines. We manage the calendar. We send out the confirmations and then we also make sure we enrich the contact record as well. So one of the things that we found is we would send an email after every conversation and say hey this you know AI had a conversation here's the outcome. Um which is great. That's fantastic. is what the business owner wants. But often it's not the business owner talking to the leads or the prospect, it's their sales team. And so the sales team would have to go digging through all these email notifications. So what we do now is we just add a summary to the contact record itself. So the sales team when they log in, they open up the record and they have the summary of what's been going on with that contact record in there as well. And then we obviously they're just an example of the actual conversation summary that gets sent out. So this gets sent out after every call or conversation summary. And so in here we're just getting the prospect details. what was the outcome of the conversation? What are the recommended next steps? And just a bit of a summary there as well. So for the prospect, sorry, the the lead uh the team member or the customer, what they can do is they can click on this, they can read it, they can open up and listen to the recording if it's a call and they're prepared for those calls when they show up. And just some examples of the lead follow-up as well. So you obviously this is just this is through SMS. Um this is just an example of the AR reaching out to someone who you know obviously submitted the form and the application but didn't actually book the call. And you can see we did this via SMS and also email. And it just shows the appointment being booked. And then what we do is we follow up roughly half an hour later. So you'll see this is just an example of just follow-up. So 232 was the first message and then 303 was the second one. And then we also move into we call it like monthly follow-up essentially every 3 to 4 weeks essentially. And this is just an example of someone who we had a conversation with them back in June and then the AR reached out again in the 15th of July. — And just having this looked after. Yeah. as a business owner, it's so much peace of mind. — Exactly. Yep. Exactly. And coming back even to like these notes, um if we come back up here as well, uh one of the biggest complaints that business owners have is their sales team don't add notes consistently or they're terrible. And so even again that one little use case there of consistent notes um is huge. And also just simple little things like progressing people in the opportunity pipeline. Um, one of our clients um fired I think two of their salespeople because they wouldn't move their um this card across from here to there. Little things. It's wild. — Yeah, this is awesome, man. Um I mean just the peace of mind stuff like you've just mentioned. The question that I have is around tech stack here. Is this running as an isolated system for you where they previously had a different CRM and now you're setting up a high level separately or are you moving them all over to high level and sort of enforcing that? This is always sort of the tricky part of like at what point do you have your own isolated system versus when do you force them to move over to it? Do you have your own system and sort of uh sync into theirs occasionally? So what's the most common thing that you're running into in terms of text there and how do you deal with it? If you're a business owner who's interested in what generative AI can do for your business, you can get in touch with me and my team at Morning. AI AI in one of the links in the description below and we can start your entire AI transformation process going all the way from the education and training of your staff to the identification of the best AI use cases for your company all the way through to development and beyond. We have worked with some of the world's biggest sports teams and also publicly traded companies. So rest assured you are in good hands. — Great question. So we do have our own and we prefer to keep it that way but if they have their own like HubSpot, Salesforce, you know, service mate will integrate with those as well. So we work off this like I guess um three pillar platforms. Once we have a base where all the data lives and stored, we have orchestration and knowledge. So what we do is we build everything in our GHL, right? So this is going to be there regardless of whether we're plugging into their system or not cuz this is where our workflows live. team is trained. This is what they know. And so if they want to use our platform, we give it to them and they can use it. And we actually have a lot of clients who move across from other platforms like HubSpot or Salesforce just simply because um cost, right? So, um, we have one client who's paying $140,000 a year just for a HubSpot subscription, and it's just insane. So, they're looking at making the switch. Now, obviously, that switch is pretty it's a big move, and so it doesn't happen lightly. Um, but that that's also an option. But what we do is we build everything within our system in here and then we use make as our orchestration layer right now to plug into other platforms like HubSpot or their existing CRM. So the one caveat that we have with our clients and this is one of the sticking points that we have as well as integrations. So as long as their tool that they're currently using has open API documentation, we can connect and we usually connect with just make. Um sometimes if they don't have that, we can't work with them and it's unfortunate, but it's just one of those blockers. Um we've had a few uh instances earlier in the the journey where we try to work with them and it just gets painful and messy. So we build in our system. We try to enforce our system wherever possible. But if they have their own, we just connect and integrate using make to go to HubSpot or any of their other platforms. — And in terms of ease of setup, would you say have you had any nightmares around like, oh, well, yeah, we can integrate with that and you find out that it's actually a lot more work or is it kind of like, okay, we've already done a HubSpot integration once before. We can kind of reuse a lot of what we've done previously for a client. — Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So we we'll find the CRM and the platforms we work with. So, HubSpot, um, Servicemate, Simro, uh, Salesforce, they're all proven stacks for us. We actually had a couple in the restaurant industry. It was really unfortunate. Um, there's, uh, there's two main softwares that the restaurant industry uses. And we started off, we said, "Yes, we can integrate with it cuz their documentation, yes, said yes, we can. " We worked with the local Australian team and we got all the way through the process of the integration. They sent it off to the international team and they got knocked on the head and uh, unfortunately, it resulted in a lot of wasted time and um, rejected the integration. — Correct. And then I found out recently about uh maybe 2 or 3 weeks ago I found out they got their own thing. Yes, — that's exactly right. So we had someone saying Yeah. — So the interesting uh thing that I've had to warn some of the younger guys I'm mentoring about is uh if you might build relationships with some of these platforms and be like, "Oh yeah, we're building all this cool AI stuff for the platform. " And they'll go, "Oh yeah, sweet. Yeah, you go and do that and yeah, just keep me in the loop on And it's like they're just waiting for you to do the hard work of finding the useful AI additions to the platform and then they're just going to like scoop it up and plug it in. Exactly. — Um they're not your friend at the end of the day. Yeah. — They're in business. — Yeah. They're in business. They're looking to make profits. And that's the concern I've got with a lot of people pursuing the AI apps or rappers is you're basically building these use cases that will get um built in. So, just a quick little example of that is we use Vappy for our voice and we used to pay a company um $1,000 a month just to run um tests um in evaluations essentially and they recently released in Vappy itself the ability to run the same tests that these other companies were doing as well. So, they're watching they're seeing what people are building and what people are using — and then they start adapting and adopting. It's it's business. It's the way it is. What I'd recommend just in terms of your tech stack um what I'd recommend is have a base. So this is where the data is going to live or be stored. So examples of this is like HubSpot um obviously GHL which is what we're choosing here as well. Notion's a great platform, Air Table, your Monday, ClickUp, even Google Sheets is fine. Also pick one and stick with it. So when it comes to orchestration, this is where the AI does the work for us anyway. Um so you mentioned like ease of setup and ease of use. We have um make and we have GHL. Within GHL we have snapshots and a template. So we just copy and we create a new sub account with a snapshot and then we modify within make. We have our scenarios that are blueprinted. So we just again we create the new scenarios, import the blueprint and modify. So it makes jobs um a lot easier. It used to take us weeks to do builds. Now we get version one back within maybe four to 9 hours essentially which is a huge. — Wow. I thought you were going to say days. — No. I guess the takeaway is I think it's important for people to know about the realities of niching and it's very easy to be like kind of thinking very binary. It's like I'm either fully niched and I just do one thing or I I'm a general fully generalist and I do everything. But in this case you can see and I think this is a really good middle ground is being able to say okay look we work with the three or four major things here and outside of that we do have to say no. So it's like we and over time you're going to build up the internal like the templates for each of them, the understanding that the internal knowledge within the company and the team of being able to deal with that and you can build like SOPs around it. Um but having enough flexibility that you're still open to enough business um but you're not sacrificing you still get the benefits of being niched in uh in a certain way so that you have those quick delivery times and overall less headaches as an agency owner. So I think that's a great insight for people to take away before we go on the on the offer there. So you are you charging setup fees? Are you charging retainers, I assume, on top of this? Is it usage based? Is it just flat plus usage? Uh what's the sweet spot that you found? — Yeah, so we currently we're running a setup fee plus um ongoing retainer for maintenance and updates and support. Uh and we're actually we have a bit of a hybrid model now as well. So some of our clients have the capacity and the desire to look after it themselves. So we actually do have a handover model we have as well. So our main thing is — Do you charge extra? — Uh yeah, we charge extra to transfer things across. Yes, absolutely. — As you should. Absolutely. Yes. It's IP, it's work, it's effort, and they get a system fully in their infrastructure. So, set up fee and ongoing. And even with the um handover model, by the way, too, we still have an ongoing subscription for that as well because what we're positioning is this core system is what we've got, but we're always adding more on top of it. So, one of the projects I've got lined up for the Christmas break is the no-show follow-up. So in here, if someone doesn't show for an appointment, just click on no show, then have AI fall off and recover it. So what we'll be doing for everyone, even if we've handed over the system to you guys or to the clients, we're going to record a video showing exactly how to set that up so they can continue doing that themselves as well. So they've got that sort of incentive to stick around because we're always rolling out new features and updates. — Okay. So that's what, like a 500 bucks a month and it's like you're going to get any new updates that we drop. — Yep. Exactly. So we we'll show you how, but you do the work cuz that's also the hardest part. Without getting into numbers, we have a reasonable amount of active clients that we've got. And so every time we release a new feature, we got to go back and update all the other platforms. And so it's a lot of drag. And probably about half of our clients have their own internal team. And look, the reality is they're all learning these things as well, right? They want to learn these things, too. So they know automation, they know they're learning process engineering. And so if they knew how to do what we what we've set up, they could do it themselves. And so it makes a lot easier for us for scalability. So we can just drop videos and do Q& A calls if we need to and then allow them to benefit rather than waiting days or weeks for us to roll it out. — That's great. So you get paid to train them up and then they pay to get the updates that they're going to plug in themselves. — Exactly. That's great. That's true. — Exactly. So yeah, so you get to do the cool kind of product work coming up with new systems like okay let's optimize the show rate or the like capture and you can get put like deploy that for one or two clients get the result and say hey we've got this new addition to the system that's going to actually recapture 5% of your or like 20% of your no shows are going to actually get re rebooked as um as appointments and you can roll that out and give them the source to do. I think that's a really innovative model. So that's another little insight for you guys there. So what we also want to do, we want to make sure we sell outcomes, not capability. And this is something that I'm very guilty of is I get very I nerd out, right? I get talk about features, functionality, all those things. But business owners, they don't care to your point earlier. They just want to know, hey, appointment bookings goes up, right? So basically, just make sure you show the business owners that you can win by reducing their risk and talk about these things about operational drag. Like you're not going to make them switch their systems if they don't have to as well. And this especially with AI, it favors clarity, right? So basically even with our system so with our system over here we've made this to be as clear as we can possibly but even within this people have so many questions about how the AI works because again AI is so new for a lot of these business owners even now that they have a lot of questions so if you can just focus on helping them get clear on exactly what you do right and then um again heavy pre pre-education works if you can help them get clear you'll get the sale more often than not the reason why people don't buy typically is integrations pricing cuz it's too much or more than what they thought or they're just not clear on what you do and they're confused. — For context, how are you generating your leads at the moment? You running ads, doing content, you doing referrals? What's the strategy for you at the moment? — So, we started off just doing um organic content through podcasts and appearing on other people's podcasts. Um we did some ads earlier this year which were phenomenal. Um and we've stopped them for right now just because we found quality wasn't so high with leads coming through. Uh but right now it's uh content, organic content, and referrals. We're very fortunate where we have again we get great results for a lot of our clients and I'll just be real as well by the way too like I just want to make sure like if you're in it right now and you've got clients you're getting bad results and things we've all been there and so you just have to push through and learn those lessons and so we get a lot of clients getting great results right now they just they send a lot of referrals through which is phenomenal. — I think that's a really important thing to say like everyone has shockers. It's part of the thing you know all you can do is keep going and get better until you're really pleased with your customers. Um, and I I'd really hate for someone who has a hard time in their first few projects and thinks this stuff is a lot — is difficult, which it really can be at the beginning. Um, you feel like you're really overwhelmed. You have the pressure of client on your back as well. You just got to stuff. — Yeah, you do 100%. Everyone that I know that is doing well right now had to go through that phase with their some of their first clients. So guys, just keep going cuz uh you get better. — Exactly. And so like I I'll hammer

in on this a little bit more as well because this what business owners are really thinking is really important, but this pre-education is so valuable. So I look at people like yourselves and there's other people out there on YouTube and you guys are able to generate a lot of appointments and sales a lot easily because you've got that pre-education up front. Though we don't have that particularly um so far, but we do have a pre-all video that we do and so we we'll cover a bit on that as well as we go. But when it comes to what business owners are really thinking, this is what's really going through in their head when I implement this AI system. Will this disrupt my team? So there's things like, okay, do they have to learn a new system, which we've touched on, but team members will push back because they're concerned about their job. And so we've had it with a few of our clients where team members will actively try to not sabotage, but they sort of push back on things because they're like, "Oh man, this is taking away more of my work. " And so we also have to realize as well often as agency owners, we're working with the clients leadership team, the owner, the founder, managers. We don't deal so much with the team members who are actually dealing with the AI on the front lines. So you want to make sure you communicate with them. How do you communicate this through to your team and pass it on as well? We have to do training with them as well. But this is really massive. So the business owners are thinking, okay, how is this going to disrupt my team? They're also thinking, will this work with what we already use? So as we touched on, they don't want to switch, right? It's once they're locked in, they don't want to do that. And as we sort of touched on, there's a lot of retraining of staff and then is the data and IP actually safe. And so this even just dealing with the team was a huge lesson for us. Um we actually had one of our clients where um they had a customer service team and a sales team that was you know I guess benefiting um from the AI and so um customer service was loving the AI in particular but because the way things were being routed through the sales team didn't like it at all and so we had to work with them and go okay well sales team what feedback can you give us to update and adjust how we're actually pushing leads through that can help solve your problems and that was an absolute game changer. So again, um, with the sales calls, when businesses don't buy, a lot of the times it's because they just don't know what they're signing up for. So early on in our journey, we had a lot of people showing up for calls. They just weren't a right fit, right? So they thought we sold this, right? Something over here, but we actually sold that over there. They had no idea about pricing. integrations. And so one of the things that we introduced because we didn't have that heavy pre-education piece in terms of content at the time, we have a pre-call video. So the process is someone applies to work with us, they book in an appointment and then they get sent a pre-call video to watch before the call. Now during that pre-call video, it covers a lot of things, but some of the things in particular is what the system is. So obviously you guys all recognize that diagram. We walk them through this is what we do, don't do. Um, we also give them pricing indications as well, right? So we let them know up front we're not cheap. And we actually give them a guide of pricing because one of the biggest misconceptions out there with business owners as well is I think oh AI it's going to be super cheap — be cheap. — Yeah. Exactly. And they don't understand and it's just education or they just don't understand what goes into setting these things up properly. And then what we also do is we have a disqualification. Right. So we let them know if after you've seen this video you don't want to actually attend or you can't make it, let us know. We've probably had maybe uh seven or eight people this year that I can think of just off the top of my head email us after the call after watching the video and say, "Hey, sorry. I don't think it's the right fit. I'm going to cancel. " And we love that. That that's fantastic because then what we can do that frees up space in our calendar. We don't have to show up for a call and waste, you know, half an hour or 45 minutes on the call. — So, the purpose of these pre-call videos is really just to help the people get clear on what it is that you're going to help them do, right? Even if you don't have a system like this, you can help them by saying, "Look, we can help you with this, this, or this. " just so they get an idea, give them an indication of pricing of what it's going to cost them. Um, we also give them some results and stuff in the video, too. Um, just to build that trust and then just disqualify them. — Yeah, 100%. This is um something that really can drag an agency down. Um, when you're taking a [ __ ] ton of sales calls and particularly if you're a solo founder and your calendar is booked out half the day with sales calls and 70% of those are not actually qualified people who don't really know what the hell they're buying. um this is going to be a savior for people's time and not being bogged down on the sales side because it really can just sap all the energy out of you. So I think my approach to financial qualification has always been like do the discovery and then at the end of the call say hey look now you have to pay like I don't know a grand 2 grand depending on how big the agency is and how big the client is um and say look the next phase is an audit or expiration milestone and like these ways I think this is a really good one as well to even like prevent the call if you can um and say we don't do cheap useless AI we're going to cost this much um I think that's great cuz financial qualification you get so many tie kickers there's an AI who just think you're going to come in and do it cheap. Um so I think this is something that everyone could um could put together. — And so the other thing too is again for us in the space like AI is like we get super excited about AI but it's only really 30% of what we're doing. 70% of what you do is the process as you mentioned earlier at the start of the call like I think 80 90% is not AI it's like the business though the value of the agency is the processes and the systems that you build. It's not the latest tools or tech. And in fact, I to your point as well, I agree. I try not to lean towards new tech because a lot of them just they're just not trustworthy. Elite delivery looks boring and that's the whole point, right? So you want repeatable processes, you want playbooks, you want standardized data intake, you want controlled knowledge, you want all these things in place. And the other thing too, by the way, big lesson, um, don't automate first, automate last. So what you should be doing is just documenting first. Turn that into a process, prove that it's stable, and then automate. So, um, I fell into the trap earlier on is we go, man, I'm an AI automation agency. I know what I'm doing here. And you automate things and then you have to constantly change it and then you realize you change this thing over here, it breaks out over there. Just don't do it. Not until it's stable. Just some examples here of just some processes. So, this allows us on the onboarding call when we're having a conversation, we just, you know, visually can see, okay, cool. If you've got a textbased AI, what platforms do you want? What are we gathering? Uh, are we gathering lead information? Okay, what do we need to get? Who are we notifying over here? Uh are we qualifying people? What qualification criteria do we need? So we just sort of have these processes in place. And again, as you know with Figma, you can change it, right? So this isn't bedded down yet. And so once this bedded down, we can automate this whole process. The goal here for us will be have AI call or AI go back and forth and gather all this information, but we haven't beded this down yet. And until we do, we won't automate it. Um just also some examples. So we have processes for everything in here as well. And so obviously I won't reveal the full details but we have the high level steps. So the first thing is the welcome on boarding. We set up the accounts. We do the onboarding call, create the brief, build and training, internal testing and approvals, client testing, approvals and obviously launch. And underneath each of these is a set action item and obviously we have team members that we assign it to. Um just to expand on that as well just to give you guys an example of just the welcome. So we have a kickoff email that gets sent. We create client folders in drive, slack channels. And this is an example of a process, right? You can automate a lot of this stuff. And again, this is something we haven't automated it yet because we we're changing the folders we do in drive, right? We're changing some of the Slack channels, etc. So, — um, and then here as well, just you want the work or the template to live where you're doing the work. So, just an example of just what we have there for that too. — Okay. So, and is that ClickUp or is that something else? — Yeah, this is ClickUp. So for us just our tech stack just out of interest is GHL for everything sales and marketing and then ClickUp for everything um project management and delivery because they're kind of like the everything apps of each of those areas, right? So ClickUp is like the everything app for project management and yeah same with JHL. — Yeah. And I think a lot of agency owners will be looking at that uh that ClickUp and be like [ __ ] I don't have anything like that. Um, that's probably why you haven't got any time either, you know, like or it may be a case of, hey, you're not niche down anywhere near enough. Um, and you need to start working towards this. But I think the tricky thing a lot of people have is not really being able to like sort of it's like a a roll of tape, you know, sometimes you got to like feel around the roll of tape until you find the edge. And people can't really seem to find the edge of where they can like, okay, a conversational AI systems, okay, but now how do I market? But how do I get my first client? and you just got to keep going until you can find that edge. Um, and like you like you've done is just getting those reps, be willing to stay flexible and be like, hey, understanding that at the start when you're delivering these, it's going to feel like you're way over your head. You don't know what the [ __ ] you're doing. And by a client four, five, six, you're actually starting to deliver something really good for them. You're starting to see the patterns and it's really just the tough work that many people aren't willing to go through is feeling like you're over your head. Um, so that you can find these insights and start to actually build systems around it. So it really is a case of if you can delay kind of gratification, just push through until uh you have the overview of the systems and how things actually roll out in reality to be able to build some actual good processes around it. — Correct. And start documenting now as well. Like even if you don't have a team member, you might think, oh, what am I doing this for? It just allows you to your point earlier clear thinking, right? So then you would document it, start putting this together. So next time you set up an AI, you can just go check this and go check check rather than reinventing the wheel each and every time as well. Uh and I don't know if you want to go over any of these other examples down here, but we do just try to like process everything, right? So again, we have rounds of testing and uh now we actually outsource this as well, but again, you just want to have repeatable processes wherever possible. And again, we didn't start with this by any stretch of the imagination, right? This is built up over time, but it just comes from documenting. So just record um we use, you know, Fathom, you know, record even on a voice notes. Uh just record these things and then you can come back and create processes about them later on.

Now, and we sort of covered this a little bit earlier as well, like with what our model is. Um, and really I see there's three different models. There's like you retain, you operate, you manage, you do a handover, and then I do see people out there doing pay per lead or pay per results as well, which is good, but it does come with some risk. Now, um, we have tried that with a couple of clients. Maybe we didn't do it well or correctly, but it didn't work out for us. So, really the options here is we find that I found that there's two types of clients out there. So there's clients who want to have just nothing to do with it. They just go, I want this result. I don't want to know anything else. How much should I pay you? And then there's the other kind of client that says, hey, I want to know everything. I want to retain the control and have that clarity. And so these two models here allow you to service both because I guess up until recently, we were only doing this whole management system in here. And I can't tell you how many people we turned away because we refused to do a handover. It's like, hey, is our IP our control? And my view was a bit of a mistake. So if I could change it, I would do that a little bit differently. So if you have both of these models ready to go, so you have an option to retain and operate and again charge more and hand over, that I think will cover most of the bases there as well. And this one here, this sounds it's usually the easiest one to start with, right? So business owners love it cuz it's like I don't have to pay any money till we get the results. Um but where you run into challenges is like proving the lead came from you as an example or that your inputs chasing money as well. Well, that was the issue we had was like you got to invoice in a rears for these things. And look, to be honest with you, it's just you don't want to be dealing with that especially early stage. Just want to Yeah. Stay focused. Cool. In terms of team, this was um a big thing for us. So, we started with a bang. We grew very quickly and we've sort of expanded and shrunk our team a few times. And so, these are some lessons I've learned um the hard way, right? So, um early on I believe you've really got to own the sales and the tech. So, I know we'll lean more towards one or the other. So we might be more tech focused or more sales focused especially in the beginning you got to know both because um we had situations where we've had sales people come through and work with us and no fault of their own but they don't know what they are can and can't do. So then there'd be times where they said yeah we can do that when actually we either didn't want to or we couldn't and then it just causes a lot of conflict down the track as well and also at the same time if you're too focused on the tech and you don't understand what the business owners really want you're going to run into issues. So basically at the very beginning know both and if you don't know one learn the other piece there as well right credibility will come from that and then over time when you do hire more people again painful lessons learned offload your time not your judgment because especially in this space people don't know AI so much right they don't know clients so they either know AI really well but they don't know business or they know business and they don't know AI and finding someone who knows both is really challenging so again we've had a times in the past where we've tried to offload judgment and it causes I guess issues. So a business focused person will come in and set up great business infrastructure, right? But just it doesn't work with AI as an example or vice versa. They'll create great AI processes and systems, but it doesn't actually work in reality there too. So just look for things like a virtual assistant, someone who can follow up maybe creating content or posting content, things that don't need judgment. Um start hiring that first. — And just quickly, I'd be interested to know what your uh most valuable or key hires were. If you lean more towards tech, probably the first thing you should hire is sales who can understand and vice versa. For me, it was a dev, right? Getting a good dev. And we we've hired many. Uh we've been through a lot of them. Um and once you get a good one, it's a complete game changer. A and the other thing too, it ties in with this uh system down here. Uh it's really when you have a system like this, it's a lot easier to find devs who can build within those sort of constraints. if you're doing all sorts of random solutions and situations, you'll have a dev that's really good over here, but it's really poor, you know, building something else. And uh we ran into that issue there as well. So getting a good dev is great. And with dev, all they need to know is make, right? Make or n um are those two platforms and the basics of promise engineering. So now um cla on top of that, right? Like — exactly. Yeah. — And there should be more than enough of them uh floating around now. Where's your if you can drop the alpha on this? Where's uh where are you hiring from at the moment? — So all of our hires have come from Upwork. So we have a really good process for hiring on Upwork. Um we so just few little pro tips on Upwork. Don't have an open job. You'll get flooded with um flooded with applications. Create a really good clear job description and do it invite only. And then what we also do is part of the process is have like a code word you want to put somewhere deep in the job description that you want them — actually. — Exactly. Yeah. And so there you're like eliminating most of your um duds. uh straight away. I should actually say one per one of our lead developers there has brought on a few others that they know as well. So um it's a great place to go when it comes to tech stack as well. So we sort of already covered off a little bit of this but look you want to go the boring tech stacks. Don't go for the flashy new tool the new system because uh you know as mentioned beforehand like they're often unstable they're poorly supported and they're still figuring things out as well like they're early in their stage. So going back to that voice provider, like they were rolling out new features and things, but they didn't realize how it would break certain um other situations. And so then my side of things would have a solution that's working really well with clients and then they release a feature we didn't ask for, but then all of a sudden calls weren't working. And so clients don't want to hear, hey, look, we got this new feature. They just want to know reliability and stability. So go for the boring established tech stacks. And then also design and build on systems that are going to benefit from AR progress. So again, I I get a little bit concerned about a lot of the rappers that are being done out there because if you build a product that gets redundant when OpenAI releases a new feature or Gemini releases a new feature, as you can see here, you haven't really built a business. You've just built a temporary workaround. And so our preferred model again is to build off established platforms that allow a bit of modularity. So we call it like an a modular operating system. Um because I think in AI we got three options, right? We got rappers, right? So build your own rapper tools and by all means go ahead and do it. Got the operating system here which is what we do the module operating system where you have full custom development enterprise development as well. Now that's great. It allows maximum flexibility and cost but it's just not what we want to play in because um again it's challenging. You have longer life cycles and especially because things are getting easier and quicker. Um what we've decided to do is we're picking a few platforms we believe will be around for the long term and we're building over the top of those. So again, we we've chosen um you know, higher level as our main one, but we also do work closely with HubSpot because a lot of clients still do. And for us, we we've chosen make. Um now N8 is fantastic, don't get me wrong, but there's a few considerations that go into make. Um it's a lot easier to pick up and learn. It's very visual. So if you're doing a handover model with a client, it's a lot easier to show them and teach them make than it is NAN. If you're looking to hire people and train them and on board them, it's a lot easier to make than NAN. And again, you maybe we're doing it wrong, but when we tried NASA as well, we were limited by 25 operations at a time or runs at a time with make unlimited. So, you know, especially when you're doing the volume of calls and conversations we're doing, we can't have any limitations. So, just pick one or two platforms and just build off them. Very interesting point there on like the make versus NADN debate around like sure it's a great developer tool NAD and it's been like going from strength to strength recently but a lot of this is going to have to be uh self-managed um and which one's prettier and easier to understand well it's going to be make and while they are lagging behind in a bunch of features I'll very much admit that um it's certainly my preferred one when you're actually in their building it's a it's more of a pleasurable experience in my experience than uh than something like an air Um, correct. I guess we'll see it how it comes out in the wash. — Yeah, 100%. Well, even like you look at like making N like Gemini, Google Workspace, you know, GHL, they're all building their own versions of it. So, um, yeah, it's going to be an interesting future. — I want to close off with a question for you on the direction of custom software. We did touch on how businesses want to spend less on their software stack, right? there's uh so many different things that they're paying for. But we are seeing a trend towards consolidation with the drastic decrease in costs of general software dev um allowing these kind of custom softwares for businesses to be fully suited to their uh their operations. So I've made a bit of a prediction. I think Google's going to be able to come in and gobble that up and us as agencies will become a lot more of kind of a integration partner on top of that where our job is to understand the workflows, understand the problems and then be able to feed that into like the Google business in a box. Um how do you see uh that trend going in light of this? Because obviously you've got go high level and you've kind of got your own system there. Where does all this go in your mind and what are you looking at for 2026? — Yeah, it's a great question and I agree. um all these bigger players will come in and dominate and crush. Um essentially all this AI stuff will become more native. So it it'll become second nature. People don't even think about using AI and Gemini and those sorts of platforms now too. So um we just have to know that these big platforms will eventually replace a lot of the technical pieces in here. Um so my view is yes definitely become more of an integration partner with the established platforms because they are just going to keep on eating things up and um kind of like even like social media if you think about that. Back in the early days there was a lot of a big premium on knowing how to use social media. Now people use it without even thinking AI will go through that same process and AI will just become second nature and people will take it for granted. So um another you know prime example is just um one of the voice solutions um the VoIP services they now do their own version of inbound voice as well like 11 Labs even bringing their own in too. So it's going to get easier and easier for businesses to implement this themselves. They'll do it you know without even thinking it'll become second nature. So if you can become the integration partner um I would agree with that 100%. — This has been uh been fantastic mate and massive congrats. Sounds like you absolutely deserve every bit of the success you've had. you've just been chipping away at this and just building a great business. So, always makes me happy to see people taking action on this stuff and really running with it. So, if people want to get in touch with Chris, um I'm sure you've got some links, we'll put them down in the description below. Uh the board to access this and really dive deeper on it is going to be uh in one of the description links below be on the school community and the resources section there on the podcast resources. But Chris, mate, it's been an absolute pleasure and I'm sure we'll have you on uh sometime next year to talk about how things are going um for you in the new year. — Thanks, Liam. Pleasure to be here and uh yeah mate look uh kudos to you too cuz you're right there in the forefront and um yeah it can be challenging but um m you're adding so much value so thank you. So that is all for this episode of the podcast guys. If you want to see something similar that I really think you'd like you can click up here to watch another one. And remember if you think you have a story worth telling and some valuable insight you can share with the community. You can fill out my podcast application form in the description below. I'd love to have a chat with you and get some exposure for your business. Aside from that guys that's all for the video. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next