How to Go From $0 to $100K with AI (Ultimate Beginner’s Guide)

Ask any multi-millionaire and they would tell you the first million is easy, but it's the first 100,000 that is the hardest part. And so in this video, I'm going to be breaking down the complete process for any beginner coming into AI to be able to go from zero to $100,000 and the five key challenges that you're going to face along the way and the solution to each of these different roadblocks. Sweet, man. Great to see you. I'm so excited to jump into this cuz that 0 to 100K is what everyone's after right now and you've just recently gone through that process. So, we're going to be breaking down um the five key steps that you've got in between here and there. And uh you've got a ton of source in there, guys. If you got don't know Kelly, he's been absolutely crushing it. I've been watching his story for a while now. Came up through my accelerator and he's just been going from strength to strength. The way he's doing his content on LinkedIn, uh the way he's sourcing this like the strategy he approached learning the skills with is actually really smart as well. So, Michael, mate, it's great to have you on here and I can't wait to share what you've got to share with these guys. or if you just want to give us a bit of a framing on your journey and how you sort of come to the realization on a lot of these before we jump in. — So what you see here on the screen is the road to 100k and all the problems that I had to go through along the way and I broke them down into the five key steps five key milestones that I had to go to get to the 100k because it is one of the most important steps at least for me um to then be able to go down in different directions but I feel like these cover mainly what most people really go through when they go to uh to build an AI automation agency and so on. — Yeah, for sure. I mean, there's uh these are the exact things I have to answer again and again and again on calls. Um, and it's going to be so great for people to see this contextualized of basically taking the playbook that I've been screaming at everyone to do for so long and you giving us the actual screenshots of those messages that you're sending out and the examples of the post you're doing. So, I'm super

excited to jump into this, man. — All right. So, the first up here is really just learning AI. So, this is the first milestone when you get into the whole space. I feel like this is where you get the most overwhelmed because you get introduced to all the different tools that are out there. In this case for me, I was introduced to Voppy uh voice flow make. com lovable and again you were one of the YouTubers that I was watching over time uh because you were introducing all the different tools and you're talking about the AI automation agency model uh and I was so excited and when I jumped into the AAA which is where I really got started with the whole sort of journey I was introduced to all the different tools and I was overwhelmed because there's so many different things to focus on and I didn't really know what to do at that point. Um and that was — that all the time. — Exactly. And that was I mean focus is one of the hardest things to have especially in the space because there's so many things you can do, focus on. So for me that was a key step that I had to go through. So what I did for me I actually spent a few weeks diving deep into each software to understand more so the space but also what each software did and the function that it played around how to build a business with it and then through Casey which is one of the success managers at AAA he told me if you just lock in and focus on one thing and that was make. com in that case work for automations and that's the thing that I decided to is jump in. remember I did a video I think it was in like end of um like middle of 2024 or something and it was like the five different ways to start an AI agency and it was basically the same thing. There's these different areas that you can specialize in. There's a voice agents. There was like I mean you could even go do Zap Zappia ecosystem and get really good at that. You could just do the workflow part of things. Um or you could do the textbased agents and chat bots. And I think what was really helpful for a lot of people in the same way that it is for you here to just like cut out the noise and just pick one area because they're all like if you just focus on voice agents you can become very good at them and there's so much money to be created in that space right now. Likewise with workflow automations or if you want to be doing I think the custom software and vibe coding one is a great path to get into as well now. So taking that down from thinking you need to be like a general agency and be able to do everything to just being like this is my area of expertise and I can learn that stuff which is so important for beginners to know — 100%. And it's so easy to just like focus on all of them because you just like you're missing the opportunity if you don't focus on all of them rather than just d each one which is exactly what I felt because I was learning everything one day. — The interesting thing about workflow automations is I call it's kind of like the meta skill cuz all you use it across everything. So even if you're building textbased agents you may still be like orchestrating that with a with a workflow platform like make. Um, or if you're doing voice agents, you might be doing your tools on something like uh like make or you might be doing it on NA10 and the same kind of transferable skills. So, I still think that workflow automation base is really solid. — 100%. Especially as someone who came in with no technical knowledge. I think the fundamental skill here is like APIs, understanding how apps talk to each other. And the skill you're learning is not make. com, it's workflow automations. And that's something you use across the whole board. Uh so that's — and understanding how like software talks to each other like APIs is the core of everything we do these days um across all even if you're putting custom software on lovable it's like okay well I've got this cool looking front end how am I going to get it to do anything okay well I understand that my automations would have to send API requests around so maybe I can get some workflow automation or like some uh some tool that I create and then hook it into our API and it's just like everything is built on top of that ability — 100% I think that's something you learn over time like what fundamental skills you actually need to learn. Uh but that was really key for me. So what I did essentially was just niche down as much as possible. AI automation was is already a niche within AI to niche down to one subset of AI automation which is work for automations. And to be able to learn these tools um people over complicate this. They think they need a course. to find some fancy software to go out there and learn these tools. But what I learned is just YouTube is the best place that you can probably learn all these sort of softwares and stuff. — Nowadays as well there's so much of this content around on YouTube now. like the amount of AI automation training content. I put out full courses here on the channel um on basically everything the AI agents, AI automations and vibe coding and all these things. I have full courses and then every there's channels that are just specialized in each of these different areas as well. So if it's like oh I haven't got the money to start this, it's just not even an excuse anymore. — 100% 100%. Especially for me cuz I literally had zero dollars. And by the way, just so you know, like when I joined the accelerator, I didn't have any money. I asked my sister to give me 80% of what she had and my dad as well and I put it onto the accelerator and I went full in — all in um and that was that was the key for me and the thing that actually got me started as well was your chap videos like you were posting chap videos on voice flow. So that was the thing I found on YouTube as well that you can just simply just learn and just get going right away. So the second step

here after learning AI and getting started once you know your sort of niche within the AI automation space you know that you're doing work for automations then it's about how can we get our first client clients right and for me at the start initially it was just about working for free for the first three clients before actually pricing any client before asking for money uh and for me it's just because of experience that I wanted to get but also just to get going getting the momentum going I feel like early on you want some quick wins you want something to keep you going uh because that keeps you motivated and so on. Yeah, 100%. I mean, the free strategy, I get into a bit of a difficult situation with some people like obviously you're young, you've got time on your hands, you've got energy, and you wanted to do the fundamentals and learn from the ground up. When there's other side of the auto AI automation space or people wanting to get into AI businesses are people with jobs and they want to do it as a side hustle and they want to come in and not necessarily do all that ground work and have like a really solid skills base. So, it's always a bit tricky whether for younger people like us or maybe people who are time rich. uh definitely doing all the learning, the fundamentals, and then working your way up through free clients to paid clients. It's just a very logical progression. Uh but then some people do come in and say, "Oh, I don't really want to do all of that work. I'd rather just kind of be the connector or be the marketer. " And that is possible, but this is definitely like 100% the guaranteed way. I call it like the slow way to get rich with AI is to do this path to learn the fundamentals and like you will absolutely get there. Um but it might not be as rapid as you expect because you do have to go through free clients gradually increase your prices. Um which is exactly what you've done. — I mean it's just doing the unscalable before you scale right and for me it was like 19 team with so much time like you mentioned no responsibilities. I've talked to 45 year olds who are trying to get in the space and I understand their point of view when they say they don't want to work for free because they have something to lose. They have responsibilities. So it just makes sense um on that end. But I feel like this is still the first step just to get experience to get the momentum going. I actually dropped the email that I actually sent to my first uh to my first prospect, which was a guy that I knew from an agency that I work with. Um I just told him, "Hey, — I just wanted to help you out. Um can you help on a call? " That was basically it. And this was 5 days after 6 days after I saw your videos, the first video on automation. And I was like, "Okay, this is — this is so sick. Let me just do it. Let me just jump in. Keep — moving. " — Um didn't know anything. Did literally zero idea what anything was. Just send a message because why not? And these are other messages as well. And the warp network is legit like the thing that I really emphasize on this is just reaching out or maximizing your contact list. So go through your contacts and just message each person that you know. And I was 19 by the way. I had when someone told me this to reach out to my word network. I was like the first objection I had was I know no one like no friends are mine. I'm business owners. I have no friends who are business owners. Literally nothing. Um once you dig deep into it like you find that your sister's boss is a restaurant owner and your sister's friend's dad is another business owner. Uh and go from there. This is so important to point out and I have to I keep answering these same questions as well. It's like oh but I don't know anyone. I say you need to get your first clients for more marriage. If you just ask people around you and you make enough noise and let people know there are people in your network um who not either they themselves need it. So you have your first degree connections and then in this case it's like someone you know who knows someone. So here you've got like your uh your sister's connection, right? Um so that's a second degree connection. So instead of saying, "Oh, I only know young people or students um and none of my family have a business. " It's like, "No, who do they know? " Ask them, "Hey, hey, mom, dad, hey, or like my auntie or your uncle or whatever it is. " Is there anyone that you know would be interested? I do this stuff now. And so I think it's so helpful for people to see these screenshots right here. Um if you've ever wondered how to do it or how to actually reach out to people like that, — something I wanted to start, I was like, what do people even say when they reach out to the world network? — This is exactly the text message. I mean, it's nothing crazy. Like none of this is crazy. It's just reaching out to people that you know. Usually the way I would frame it um if you're 19 with no network and you have nobody to know, you just frame it as like do you have do you know do you happen to know anybody who'd be interested to just help or like help with — and if they are interested themselves they'll say yeah I'd like that but if not then you get access to their second degree connections as well. So it's this is the whole Aussie war outreach strategy. It's not like I've invented it. Uh it works so just do it. — And that's at the start that's what you have to do at the start. I mean, I think that's a non-negotiable unless you just get so much traction that you need to get free clients. But I think like this is a really — Yeah, any other route the school community one you're about to break down is a really good one as well. But if the fastest way to get your first one, two, three clients is going to be through that warm network you've got. — It's just faster. Like you can do it tomorrow. You know what I mean? If you know someone, you can just do it tomorrow. Max out your contact list, go through each one and just — you will get something like I can guarantee you just each one. — Yeah. I've actually got a full guide on the warm outreach, guys. I I'll link that down below. Um you guys can just grab that breaks down the whole strategy that uh that Mel's using there. — The next strategy for me was school community. Uh so I actually joined your free school community. I mean now it's insane actually the amount of people that are there. Um but this for me it was like where do I go where people are asking for work and because you were like the guy that was just doing all these things and had a free community and a lot of people just joined. So, in your job board hiring, there were a lot of people who were asking for jobs, asking for work, like, "Hey, do you know someone who's able to do XYZ? " And this is the job post that I saw from a guy who's actually my friend now. Uh he was my first um my second client in this case, and he was looking for a chatbot guy, boys. Uh and I just DM'd him and said, "Hey, I'm from the UK. I build chat bots. Uh can we help on a call? " And that was pretty much that second client. And — just like that, again, another thing I've been yelling at people to do is like if you there's we have like 500 to sometimes a thousand people per day coming into that community. They're either posting in the introductions and saying, "Hey, like I'm XYZ. Um I do this and you could just reach out and make a connection or the hiring channel where there's people looking for either looking for developers or they're they have a specific project in mind. " So, if you actually go in there and at the same time, if you grind a bit of sort of clout within the community and you start to post and like create a bit of share a bit of value, um being the go-to people or notable in that community is there's so much business you can get off the back of that. So, it's great to see this being like actioned on and seeing results from it because I know that hiring board has got so much source in it. — I think it's so underrated. I mean, especially because there's 200 plus K people in the community and some posts don't even get any comments or one to two comments. like there's so much opportunity out there um that you can just take action on. So these two were the different strategies that I used to get my first clients in this case the first two uh for free war reach and then school community — and do you want to just give us a an insight to you maybe be a bit vulnerable what was it really like doing those first few clients bro like did you feel out of depth or did you feel that you'd prepared well enough with the material you've been through on learning automations like what was going through your head at that point — it was horrible I didn't know anything I just hopped on a call uh I just told them that I do chat bots and I was like I can make your chatbot better And then we went on the call, we went off the call and I was meant to use make. com as well for like the chatbot. And I had zero idea how to do it. And I had basically had to spend three four days going on authorizations with the client and he got pissed off and he ghosted me. Um, so like that was the first. — So that's setting up the accounts on make. Yeah. — On Hopspot, on voice flow, on web hooks. I didn't know what a web hook was at that time. Uh, just zero. He just goes to me time. So yeah. I mean, for the beginners, what's the best way that you've uh there's a bunch of different ways of approaching it, but for those initial setups, like do you have Loom videos now? Do you have a like SOP that you pass over to the client for setting them up on certain platforms or giving you access? Like what's the way that you've refined that? — I think for me, uh the way that you I like to hop on calls like I've tried different things. I've tried sending Loom videos on because I already had tutorials and hey, here's how you can make your Make. com account. Here's how to connect your Google Sheets to make. com. But I found that even with showing a step-by-step video, the client still has questions. So you might as well just go on a call with them and just walk them through. Hey, share your screen. Click here, click there, connect this, connect that, and then it's just better. Even if you invest that one hour, it would be there anyways. All

right, cool. Now we can get to getting more clients. So now we got free clients. We got the first the second client. How can get more people to know about our stuff? Um, in my opinion, when I first got started, the thing for me was content. That's the thing that I saw you do and that really inspired me to just post content as soon as possible because content is actually one to many which means that you can make one content or one piece of content it can go to a million of people. So you can get a lot of stuff uh from there. Now when you get when I got introduced to content medium, YouTube, LinkedIn X and Instagram and one thing that I find a lot of times that people try to stretch themselves out and just do everything and that's something that I did at the start as well. Uh because I did YouTube, I did LinkedIn, I did I think Medium. I had no I literally I was doing everything. Um and thankfully I had people like Casey who told me, "Hey man, stop messing about just focus on one platform and just do it really well. " — Yeah, this is like a chronic beginner issue and I always try to hammer at home, but just like one is enough. Uh even for me like I'm I barely post on LinkedIn. We're starting to post a bit more um to talk about what we're doing at Morningside. Uh X we've just started posting on consistently. Instagram I basically never post and medium I've never done. Like if you just do one platform and do it really well. Um particularly the big ones like if you're just doing YouTube really well or just doing uh LinkedIn. I've seen guys doing short form content on Instagram and getting tons of leads for their agency and their school communities through short form on Instagram. Um and I'm sure you could do the same on Twitter. Like I don't really think there's anyone really running the X uh the X space when it comes to a automation agencies and things like that. So if you just pick one and do it well. uh with even guys in the accelerator doing the medium strategy and just posting on medium and getting tons of leads for your agency like that. So, but you just got to pick one and do it well because there's that skill curve of like actually getting deep in the platform and realizing, okay, what are the trending formats? Okay, I've done enough of these posts now that oh, this one popped off and you just start following these little grains of truth from the data that you get back on your post. Um, which I'm sure is what you're going to break down now. — So, for me, okay, so I got introduced all these platforms. My decision on why I chose LinkedIn was based on where do the people that I want to target where do they hang out and what was I most comfortable using at the time and so the LinkedIn content that I had the strategy behind it is something is the reason why I booked over 300 400 calls uh just off of organic content and it was uh separated into three different types of posts. The first one is the automation videos which is to show your expertise. The second one is lead magnets to provide good stuff for free. And then the third one is personal uh show that you're just human that you have a story that you're not that you just have feelings and stuff. So that that's the main uh thing about content and that part of side. Now the automation videos itself what they are and what I did then is just — got as many nodes on the screen as you could that's the hook. The crazier it looks. It's like the NA10 ones now is like the crazier the the scenario or the workflow looks. But yeah, I mean it stops the scroll, doesn't it? — Exactly. It just hooks them. Um, so YouTube was where I learned. So I learned YouTube and then I actually posted on LinkedIn. This is this was crazy to me. I was watching YouTube videos building automation. I was making them with them. So I was actually learning through the process and I was posting it on LinkedIn and then I got clients. That for me was like just a crazy process that I had to go through because it just people over complicate this so much. You just learn, post what you learn and then just do it over and over again. — That's what I call like the potential framework. I think you would have seen in the accelerator as well, but there's this very powerful upward spiral that I got stuck in and you've anyone else who's really succeeding in the space get stuck in, which is you realize there's when you start doing content off the back of your skills acquisition. Like when you learn a certain thing, you are like you're not just learning in isolation. You are learning for the sake of content and then that can help you to get leads and then those leads convert into clients and then those clients give you learnings and then you can talk about that in your content again. So, it's this like powerful upward spiral where like some people will just learn in isolation and learn learn and then they'll try to like go and market whatever they've learned. But if you're learning and creating content at the same time, — um, and just really exploring your own curiosities and like how far can I push this tech, that was like the biggest secret for me was just finding something that I was totally nerding out about and I just wanted like it felt like play to me cuz I was just cooking up this awesome stuff and then I made a video about it and like that I'm sure you can agree is when you get into that like real playful zone is when you make your best content and it's when you're making content that's really pushing the the boundaries of the space and that's what's actually unique. The lesson with content that I if you just do this like you'll just succeed is post content as you get good not when you get good. That's like the main thing that you just mentioned here is like no one like just document what you're doing because there's no real experts in the industry. I actually feel like there's no real experts. This only came out like two years ago. Um so that's why uh I think that's important. So automation videos is just to show your expertise. This is you building an automation and showing hey guys this is the automation I built. This is what it does. And fundamentally like when I started I was working with zero clients. So I wasn't showing any automations that I built for clients. I was just showing automations that I just built for fun, you know. And that's what I think one of the roadblocks that I got started with. I was like, "Okay, but I post videos. How like I have no clients. How can I post videos about automations I never built clients? " — Personal projects. I keep shouting from the roof about that as well. Like if you're looking to get started, find some personal projects. Like talk to the GBT and get it to like help you pull some ideas out. But there's some personal projects either if you're doing voice agents, if you're doing workflow automation, if you're doing like textbased agents, there are some personal projects that you can do. — Yeah. And because of the fact that we're targeting business owners, the thing to understand is like business owners don't have the time to set it up, but they be on their phones, look at what's possible in the space to then reach out to you uh for help. And that's like the thing. Now, the second part is lead magnets. Now, if I were to uh point the success that I had on LinkedIn, it probably was on the lead magnets that I made. So lead magnets fundamentally comes from the fact that you're playing within LinkedIn's algorithm. So the way it works is that you make a post, let's say Ulium, you comment on my post, your whole network, everyone who follows you sees that you in my post. It's like a compounding effect that just follows. And as you can see, I mean, it did pretty well. Um, — damn. That's so important to point out how the algorithm actually works on LinkedIn. It's just like with YouTube, you understand that they they're incentivized to recommend videos that are going to lead to long watch times and long sessions. just and on LinkedIn anytime someone comments if you can try to bait someone into commenting like if you maybe made a post about me and then I happened to comment on it then boom it goes to my whole network right and so the lead magnets like this and asking them for them to comment is going to get all of that spread out into other people's networks right — like the thing about LinkedIn that I found over time is that it doesn't so much matter about the algorithm itself it's more so that you just share value like the way that you share value is different right here is through a video showing hey guys I just built this here's what it does I've never worked with the business but here's what it does and here's just me giving away some stuff. Um, and that's playing the LinkedIn algorithm. And I'll break down the exact post and how they work, all that sort of stuff. So, we can go that into more detail. — The third one is personal show that you're human. Again, this right here, I think, is so underrated. You saw Mer, he did some personal post that did really well. H is the fact that LinkedIn necessarily like two years ago, two three years ago, it was just seen as a hiring platform. I still I think I still think it is seen as a hiring platform. And with the fact that LinkedIn is seen as a very serious platform and everyone's so serious and so like I'm proud to announce um then people necessarily care about their personal stories and that's like the proud — to announce — and that's like the main thing is like if everyone's so professional don't be professional be yourself just share about your story of course like to the limit but um personal always builds up this is what builds a brand like this right here I think what helps build a brand of like you're not just working with zooming on to that bottom Lux over performance start learning. Sick. That's like showing behind the scenes the grind. That's like so powerful, man. And what I really love about that this whole strategy if you zoom out a bit is like these are different content formats uh to zoom out to all three of them. And this is something that you guys really need to regardless of what kind of content you're doing is finding these different formats. And if you look at this, it's freaking genius because you have the lead magnets which are helping you to get pushed out into the algorithm. That's the discovery. It's like on YouTube here, I'll make some videos that are intended to go broad and get me discovered by new people. Those lead magnets are going to get you shown to a lot of new people. Then when they come in, they might like or follow or connect with you in some way. And then they'll see on your page, you've got all of these show your expertise videos. And while those might not go as crazy, they will see that, oh, this guy's actually had a consistent track record of posting things that he knows. So, not only did he put this out, but one, he's a real person and he's got these like this is someone I might want to work with because he's obviously um into some interesting things or he's working really hard and he's got the expertise. This is like I'd say why this has worked for you so well is because you've got that discovery mechanism and then the credibility and authority and then also that human element to it. So, if you guys are doing content across any platform, the same thing applies. is need to find out how you're going to get pushed into the algorithm, discovered and then how you're going to show your expertise and then some element of being a real person that people can actually relate to. So, I think you've freaking cracked it, mate. That's a it's textbook. But I mean the like we mentioned focusing on W platform. This is exactly why before I could put this together to show you guys it took me a year like a solid year which isn't a long time but like hours and hours and hours just in my room just understanding what it is, how to do it, how to just get better and better. Invested money into like LinkedIn coaching and all that. Like all this stuff that I did to get really good at one platform and I'm still not good enough. To tell you enough like just being one platform is just so key because like this is hard. Um — imagine trying to do that across three at once. It's just there's just no way. — Yeah. And that's why most people just stick to one platform and then they expand to different platforms when they understand one platform good enough. Um okay. So the automation videos lead magnets personal. The let's go on a deeper level. Let's look at the actual breakdown of the post itself. Each post on LinkedIn is similar. It has a hook. It has a body and CTA. Now CTA optional depending on the type of post that you make, but something that I always like to have because it drives them to take action. So the hook right here, one of the most important things about the post because fundamentally when you go on LinkedIn, most people don't know this, but 70% of the audience or people who are using LinkedIn are at work on their phones, right? So you want to make sure that the hook itself has 40 characters online, which is mobile optimized, summarizes the whole post. So when I look at this, I basically already want to understand exactly what the post is about without having to read it. And best to add numbers. So when you add numbers, it just shows results, more credibility, something that we're more willing to do. uh especially for business owners because they have no time. They want to see exactly how it impacts them and how like the outcome that they can have for their own business by looking at this post. Then we have the body of the email. So this right here is just in this case a list uh works great. So step one is this, step two is this, three and four. And again, this is for automation videos. So hey, I build this automation. Here's what it does, right? In this case is what it does part. Um avoid paragraphs, make it easy for the reader. Again, I mean, you've probably seen posts on LinkedIn that are just like three paragraphs long. Nobody reads that. So, don't even like don't even try it for that. Um, and the — and like you've got those little arrows put in there as well to like literally guide the eyes onto the next line. It's not just a bullet point. It's like actually an arrow pointing them to it. Um, so like guiding their eyes through each line. — Now, the CTA, which is essentially what do we want the person to do? A lot of people don't add this, which you're missing out on because a lot of people because of the LinkedIn algorithm, because like commenting is like a big part of LinkedIn and you want someone to drive action, to take action, do something. In this case, one just tell them, here's the next step you want to take. In this case, because I'm repurposing a YouTube content, you can say, hey, check out the link in the comments for the walkthrough. So, fundamentally, that's a strategy that I had for LinkedIn. Um, and I mean, right here, I broke down exactly how we can write each post, the different types of post and so on. We'll leave the link down below just in case you want to take a look at it. — Yeah, there's tons of good stuff here, guys. So, if you are wanting to do LinkedIn and really break down the strategy, Kell has really fully broken down how he's writing these posts. So, uh, for the sake of the people who aren't maybe going to go all in on LinkedIn, uh, I'll link that down below with those other links there, you guys can check this out. Super valuable. I mean, if there's anything you want to copy or take inspiration from, then it's just so I really appreciate you sharing this with the guys. — Yeah, no worries. And honestly, like the formats of the post are very templated in a sense. So, it's if you follow once, if you see it once, you won't see it. Uh, you will not forget it and you just copy it. So, uh, that's pretty much it for the content strategy. And then down below, I mean, that is the reason why I was booking two to six calls a day from LinkedIn organic with no nothing paid, which is pretty unheard of um to say from one LinkedIn account from one guy just in his bedroom just trying to make it. Um I think that two to six calls a day was pretty good. — And that was all What was your like conversion mechanism off that? Cuz obviously a lot of engagement. I hear a lot of people saying, "Oh, I might have got a bit of traction or impressions, but I wasn't able to convert those into book calls or qualified calls. " So were you like you're shooting them the link to the resource in the DMs and then you're starting a conversation from there or how much are you automating this as well? — So the funny thing is I didn't send a single DM for months like a single DM. Um what I was doing is just putting the lead magnet and then updating the post later with the link um and then letting them know. Now, fundamentally, like yes, I was sending them the resource, but I wasn't pushing for a call because previously what I know what I did before was like I put the lead magnet, for example, like the 3,000 comments. I was just on my phone replying to each one. I'll send it to you. I'll send it I'll send in the lead magnet. I never follow up because I didn't need to because I was getting already two to six calls a day just from like just — Yeah. Yeah. So, it's a supply issue, not a demand issue. It was a the same thing. I think anyone who gets their acquisition and particularly content working well under this like for us at Morningside, it's not never been a demand issue. It's always been a supply like how many new clients can we actually take on cuz there's just so much especially when you're doing general dev. — I mean I guess it's like a good problem to have but it's still like it was still pretty bad. Um cuz the conversion off of like the book calls is horrible. I mean we can get into it still process that I had was consultation 45 minutes then proposal call another 45 minutes and then I had a 5% close rate. Now that's not even noticeable. I mean that's horrible. Um but the the close rate was honestly it's just a numbers game. I'm like out of a hundred people that I speak to, I think one of them is gonna say yes, you know, and — and in between the consultation and the proposal is like four hours of like prepping and proposal writing and prep like putting together the slide deck and getting ready to prop like present it to them, right? So, I remember we would spend like four to six hours like prepping. As the projects get bigger and bigger as well, there's like way more you need to cover and more like working with the devs to figure out how long it's going to take. But yeah, give us the how do you get over this one, bro? I love this part. On that note, man, I was using Canva like every day for like three, four hours just putting like you said proposals together. This looks pretty. This looks nice. Um but over time you realize like you can cut it down. Um — and you get on the call and they just not you realize you haven't financially qualified them at all and then they like they see the price and they go oh like they get a shock and then you just never hear from them again. So — Exactly. — Yeah. — So the problem here wasn't the amount of book calls that I got. It's just conversion. Like I had no friction which means that I had I think two three questions on the actual form. they could book in at any time they wanted for how long they wanted. Uh, and they just came right in, right? And I just had to book calls every single day. I was so stressed. I was it was just horrible. The process that I went through to actually solve this was through actually changing my sales process. So, fundamentally, it's just adding more friction, which means that you now tell the client, we only have a 20-minute consultation, which is free, so they can book in. Um, and this is more than enough time, more than enough time to like figure out exactly like sort of like where they're at and so on. And then if they're qualified, not qualified, but if they're Yeah. qualified, I'll say, then you pitch an audit. Now, this is something that I got off of your video where you mentioned an exploratory um — expiration milestone. Yeah. — Yeah. Exactly. So, that's the thing that I implemented. So, I told them, hey, if you want to work with me, you have to pay $200 for one hour for the audit. So, that actually made it worth my time to even hop on a call with a business owner. And that did three things. That increased my ability to close because I spend more time with the business owner. that can actually like teach them some stuff and in a sense and actually take them through different things see more opportunities for upsells later on because when you break down everything and audit you start to see more problems so you can start making like a road map as to like we can do this first and then that — um and then the third thing is just you get more qualified people because if they're willing to pay for it they're going to be whatever it is that you have — now this is key guys I've I'll put the video that uh that is referencing here on how we do exploration milestones at Morning Side. We'll link that down below as well. But it's really important. We had the same issues at Morningside. Terrible close rate despite tons and tons of leads. And as soon as you put a financial qualification in, either like it's a quick audit call or it's like we would hop off the end of our consults at Morningside and we'd say, "Okay, yeah, we're ready to go on this. " Basically, like there's a few there's always a few unknowns here. So, we're going to start at like 800 or 1500 or now it's like $5 $10,000 for us what we charge for these initial engagements. But, we're going to explore these different solutions and we're going to see if it's actually technically feasible for you. And then at the end of that, you get the full proposal and then we can move into the next part of the contract. — What was it for you though? Um how did you know when to price the audit the milestone that you did with them? — When to or how to price it? — How did you know how much to price them? Cuz you mentioned it's like three 10K. Like how did you — Yeah, it's based off the size of the client and also project. So if it's like a huge one and we're talking about it's going to be like a 100 $200,000 project. We've just done a uh expiration phase. We're in the middle of one just wrapping up at the moment. That's I think it was $10,000 or at least five figures um for the exploration part alone. And that started as like a $500 like it, let's see if they say yes and then it went up to $800 then,000 and like we just gradually increased it um as the size of our clients grew as well. So you can just start super low like you do with this audit just anything to financially qualify them to get the tire kickers out. — Now they improve I say improved because I my closure went to 40%. Which is much better like an 8x from the 5% that I had. I was so much less stressed. I was making more because the quality of clients was increasing and I was working with less clients, less calls and more time uh to do whatever I want. Um, all right. So, that right there fundamentally is how the LinkedIn strategy was and that's what I used to get more people to know about my stuff.

The next milestone or phrase that I had to go through was productizing my offer. Now, the reason why I wanted to productize my offer, it was by choice because with make. com for automations, because of the reason why it's custom, you get a lot of problems that I had to go through. The first one is scope creep. So, every single client that you get into doing a project, what it looks like at the start and what it actually end, it's completely different. So, uh it was it wasn't that nice when you had to figure when you figured out that something couldn't be done the way that you thought it was or when the client told you, hey, we actually have this step and you're like, oh, that changes everything. — And then you got to like be a bit of an ass. You feel like you've been an about it. You're like, no, but like that's not what we agreed on, man. Like, we're going to I'm going to need to charge you more for that. Um, and that's some uncomfortable discussions that I think early agency owners maybe aren't super great at dealing with, but just like knowing your value and saying, "No, this is what we agreed on. " Um, so yeah, — I mean it's just about understanding that you're helping them like they're not help like they're not helping you at the sense, you know? So like position yourself is like I mean I'm making you a favor. So like let's just work together to make sure that we can get this going uh and whatever extra work we need. The only thing for me at the start was like I told them let's say we're doing an onboarding system. The outcome is we'll do a fully onboarding a fully automated onboarding system but that that's the outcome you sign on the contract but the onboarding system changed over time but the outcome was still I had to do the onboarding system so I still have to do the project yes or yes and that wasn't that was a non-negotiable for us uh and you can talk to the client and so on but um at the start it was it wasn't something that I had the balls to just go to the client and just say — all right so when it came to productizing my offer um apart from scope creep we also had the knowledge gap so knowledge gap just means that whenever a new client came through they're from a different niche I had to relearn the whole market to un to contextualize the automation to like their business. And so that came from just not knowing any niche and just figuring out as I go. But productizing my offer, the first part of it was just niching down. And so what I did is I analyzed the past 10 months of clients and I asked myself who did I like to work with, what brought the most money and what recurring problem that I get asked to solve the most. And that's like the that's the fundamental thing of like, okay, I need to niche down. And I analyzed all my calls, all the clients that I worked with, all that sort of stuff to then niche down to uh to the offer that I'm running now, which is again working with agencies um in specific for the client delivery, which is very niche. — That's so far, man. I think if you've like nailed it with that, that's such like a for the people that you're trying to help, that's like exactly what they want to hear. Double client capacity without hiring more people in 30 days. It's so specific. Uh that's just such a fire positioning statement. — So niche. this is like this super niche that um I mean there's not a lot of people who do this but fundamentally it's like when you niche down you're just scared that you're just missing out on opportunities but for me it's like I couldn't do the custom work anymore so I had to do more so something that was repeatable so you can do every single time but also I knew the niche really well um and I could solve the actual problem that they had and by the way if you guys want to take a look at the LinkedIn profile that I had when I actually had the offer this is what it looked like outcome picture statement and then the about section as well — awesome yeah I mean that's typical way I laid it out. — And so for me, the important thing was prioritizing my offer to make things repeatable. Um, so the delivery itself had to be repeatable because it was solving one painoint for one niche. And so the delivery process that we had was using a framework that I made over time which is called the AIAT framework. It all started with the audit. So fundamentally what this is a call with me and the founder just breaking down the process that they went through from the moment a client signs to to deliver the service and the whole process they had to go through that. Now this process was crucial again because without this we can't go to the next step. Um so fundamentally we just break down their whole thing is it's about one to two hour calls that we do with the clients and uh yeah this is an example that we had. Then we have the implementation phase and this is where we centralize their project management system on notion and these are the dashboards that um where they basically manage their whole client delivery. So team tasks um projects all that sort of stuff there. — Okay. And so this is you migrating them over to something that you've built right. So this is a template that you've created and you're like this is my system. this is how you're going to be able to scale your uh like increased number of clients you can handle without hiring more people. So you're sort of pushing them onto this — because I know the niche really well and I know that agencies to manage their client delivery they use one software and other software and three other softwares and everything's so scattered. So notion is a software we use because it allows us to put everything in one place. So yeah that's references everything here. So implement project management and then we go to the automation part which is where we automated at least 30% of the whole client delivery using make. com. So see how I'm not discarding make. com. I'm just putting it into like a higher ticket more um just more transformation for the agency. That's increasing and integrating with like a bigger system in this case. — Mhm. And so you you're just changing these around maybe like 20% of the work done that you would have had to do initially is just like tweaking it around, changing the prompts, making sure it's all working as expected. — 100%. I mean cuz I knew the niche really well and they all had similar problems. They all had a similar process. Um, so it wasn't like a crazy amount of difference from each sort of agency. And the next part is train. So we obviously had a delivery call with the team. We made SOPs uh that we can put them in notion. So we they know exactly how the whole system works. And then we have the optimized period which is 60 days. So we improve the system over time. We jump up bi-weekly calls with the whole team and make sure that any changes are made after using the system. Now, this is great for us because we get to cultivate the relationship with the client, which is, I believe, is one of the most important things as you're getting into higher ticket because this right here, this offer was going for 9. 5K. Um — Mhm. — And so, — 9. 5K. — Yeah. — Damn, bro. That's bro, that's way more than I would have expected. That's freaking awesome. — Just positioning, bro. Uh — positioning, bro. And it's also like if you got enough leads, you can afford to be, you know, like the more demand you have uh on these calls, like if you have only 10 people coming to you, you might have to sell it for five because like the chance of you having people who are willing to pay that much is is a lot less. But you have 100 people, there's going to be a handful of those who do have the budgets and are willing to spend more on this AI stuff than the others. You can kind of volume your way into high ticket. Um which is basically what we've done at Morningside as well. I mean just to let you know like the I ran an offer campaign on LinkedIn to get these clients. I sent about 580 loons personalized loons to people and to get my to get one client which is 10k but like the in the upside is like so much better because it's 10k instead of just 2k which is like a normal project. Um so you ideally you want to work with less clients who pay more and increase ever made. So that's that. All right, let me go to the

last milestone or the last process that I had to go through, which is how to outsource. So, how to make sure that now you have all these clients, you have these projects. How can you give it to someone else so you can focus on actually growing the business, making content because it is a full-time job like James said. So, the strategy for me was using three different places. The first one was the uh AAA um school community. So, I just put a post here, which is a full circle moment cuz I used to look for jobs here and now I'm putting a job there for someone to talk out to me. That's the ecosystem, man. Like, it works. And I'm on my YouTube videos telling business owners like go into my school community and post for you like make posts saying you're looking for certain things. Like you can come in here to make posts about hiring as well. And then other people can come in here looking for work. Like it's a perfect meeting of the two sides of this space right now. — 100%. And uh the second thing for me was making a post on LinkedIn asking if anyone's interested now because right because I was doing notion as well like it was more it wasn't something that I could ideally find here. I mean, I posted here. I didn't get anything great off of Notion, but workflow automations because it's the AI automation space, I got like tons of people. So, that was good for me. So, LinkedIn as well. And then the accelerator, I mean, you guys have a whole literally a whole like place to find people and they're vetted. Like, you won't put them there if they're not good. So, I used as well. All right. And when outsourcing to other people, the problems that you're going to find when you're giving work to someone else, at least that I find um is you don't have enough cash flow to hire someone full-time. So, you hire a freelancer. The problem is that freelancers are cheap but and they're lower quality, right? So that means you have to spend more time on training and resources. And what I found at least the freelancers that I worked for, they weren't not delivering on the timelines that I set. But it's like the balance is like you will only pay more for someone who's more skilled but you don't have the cash flow um compared to someone who is cheaper, — but you have to put more time into like making sure that you do the right job. — Yeah, I've been ringing this bell for a long time. We had those that was our first when I was getting Morning Side AI off the ground. It was Upwork freelancers initially and they just you're one of 10 clients and I mean they're probably not even like they might just be good at reaching out to people within the community and they've got a lot of projects but they're not super skilled. Um and so you want to be able to get to that point where you can pay someone to get all of their time and that's such a big unlock for any agency or anything you're doing here in the AI space is that first full-time developer because they can drive so much uh in results and deliveries for you. So um it is a tricky period initially with these with the freelancers. — I mean the good thing about my offer was that it wasn't so custom so like I could train someone to do it. Um and the thing that really ended up happening was that I just got a notion guy who just did not stuff cuz that was like the main thing structuring the system and I offloaded the make. com to someone else as well. So I had these two people in the same time. — Now the solutions that I can that you can implement that I implemented was set expectations on day one make them want to work with you. I think that's one of the main things is like I mean people if you have someone who's good who's I mean who you can see potential that they're actually good make them want to work with you like invest time into making sure that they're all set uh to make sure that you stay and you basically form a long-term relationship because working with someone I mean you your business is your baby like you want to make sure that it actually grows and the people who are taking care of the business are just they're solid and they have a they see your vision. — Yeah. Super in invested in what you're doing. Yeah. And that's uh that's part of that when the leadership skills come into play is like painting the vision. I mean like look we're going places like this is do you want to be on the ship like look I want to get you into these roles like you can really step up into this position. Um and the right people will respond really well to that. And uh that's how I've always approached leading these people. — And right here I mean we walk through the whole five-step process that uh that I went through to get to 100K with the agency. And fundamentally along the way you just get to learn new skills for here is just automations. Then here is how to reach out to people for the first time. Then here is content, which is a massive one. Here's offers, um, leads, all that sort of stuff you want to know. And then here's how to outsource, which is fundamentally all the skills you need to learn, um, you're going to have to learn to get point. — Yeah. I mean, it's the the business 101 skill set, right? Like how to get clients, how to, uh, run the operations of the business, how to hire people and manage them, um, how to learn skills that you're going to eventually be able to monetize as well. So, mate, that's been uh some mega source. If you guys can't uh haven't got anything out of that, then there's something wrong with you. As someone who's on calls regularly with people, I'm talking to hundreds and hundreds of people across the community. I see it firsthand in my communities as well. What people are struggling with and what's making them ultimately succeed. It's all of these roadblocks that Mckelly's broken down here. And he's basically given a textbook way of getting over each of these. So, it's awesome to see you just flawlessly execute on the exact strategy that we've uh we've laid out for you, man. And uh I'm so excited for what what's to come for you, mate, cuz you're absolutely crushing it. I — appreciate you, man. And I mean this is a repeatable process that anyone can go through. I'm not doing any magic here. This is what works. Just do it, focus, and just be consistent. — So, really, really appreciate you and all the best. I hope you guys can agree that was absolutely packed with source for you beginners looking to get into building an AI business. Like I said, if you guys want to get in touch with Mikuel and his agency, the links will be down there. And if you guys want to be featured on this podcast as guest, you have a story to tell, or you have some secret source that you really think could benefit the community, then you can apply to be on here on my channel using one of the links in the description below. If you want to hear another incredible success story about two 19year-olds from Turkey making $320,000 with the AI agency by selling AI audits, that's broken down here in this full interview that I did with them. But that's all for the video, guys. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next