The vast majority of AI based systems you see on social media today, which are the giveaways and the templates and the agents, are basically the automated equivalent of SMUT. They do not provide real value to small to midsize businesses or enterprise, at least not in the way that they are being sold to you. I mean, the claims are outlandish nowadays. You now have these AI agent swarms that completely replace your sales team or will scale your whole company to a million dollars a month. Pretty soon, we'll have AI agents that feed your dog and freaking please your wife. Like anybody with a good head on their shoulders knows that this is not happening. So my request is that we pump the brakes a little bit and we start getting back to what actually drives real business value, which tends to be things that improve revenue on the top end and increase savings or profit on the bottom end. So if you guys want to learn systems that actually do that, that's what I'm going to be talking about over the course of the next few minutes in this video. So first off, there aren't actually that many real business problems that you can solve. Okay? Most business processes are actually well doumented. I know that it seems like business is this ever evolving organism and things are new and exciting and there are shiny objects everywhere. In reality, there are actually a pretty fixed set of business processes that you can apply automation to drive outcomes. Okay, I'll give you an example. In a service business like my content writing company, which I scaled to 92K a month, I broke it down like this. You had lead generation at the top with both inbound and outbound. Then you had some sort of sales mechanism which converted those leads into clients. Once they were clients, you needed to onboard them. Once you onboarded your clients, you needed to fulfill their request. Then typically after they were done being clients, you needed some sort of reactivation or resale mechanism to keep them in the loop. That is like five or six things. And the reality is there are only three or four systems per thing that an AI and automation company can actually provide to build value into that business to improve their ability to drive revenue and then increase savings and or profit. A good example of that might be some sort of speedtole system on the front end. Maybe some AI automated response system. When a company runs ads, when somebody opts into that ad, they typically opt in because they want something now, not in a week from now. So, if you build in a system that allows you to respond to them very quickly, well, you're going to be able to convert a significantly higher portion of those. This is a very simple system. It's like two maybe three modules and make maybe two or three nodes in NAD. And here's the secret. The simpler the system, the more value it typically drives. When you guys see these giveaways for super complex systems in NA, it's like a million nodes that you guys have to zoom out 5 miles in order to see the number of nodes in that system does not correspond with the amount of value that system is providing. And I'd actually go as far as to say that it's the inverse. There are variety of reasons why maintainability of a system like that. The technical complexity required to maintain a system like that. Then also the fragility of a system like that. If any one of the dependencies in that chain breaks, then for better or worse, that whole system is done. These sorts of systems are usually built by novice automators that don't fully understand the value transformation that they're trying to achieve with their system. And so the only metric or yard stick they have to determine how good a system is how many nodes are in it, how complicated it is. But the second you run a successful business, you quickly realize that the stuff that people want is not the super complicated solution. They want something simple that drives value where you need to. That pressure analogy. So when I was scaling left click to 72k a month, the first couple of months I had this infatuation with complexity too. And I found that most of the projects that I was forced to take on because of my infatuation with complexity and not actual business outcomes were quite complex. So I felt like I needed systems with a million billion nodes in order to deliver value. The older and more mature and more skilled I got in the art of uncovering actual business needs and solving them intelligently, the more I realized that businesses favored simple maintainable solutions that apply pressure at specific points. So nowadays, believe it or not, the systems that I tend to sell tend to be between two to maybe six nodes in general. Are they the most operationally efficient? No, they most certainly aren't. Why? Because companies don't care about spending a few extra dollars here or there. They don't actually care about the most technically complete solution. What they want is the solution that delivers value today. And the shorter and simpler the system, the faster it is to develop, the easier it is to slot into a pre-existing business process, and the better it is at actually providing value where companies care about. Okay, so looping all this back into business processes that are well defined. What actually makes a difference? What can you actually build as an AI and automation business? So lead genen, I think I mentioned inbound, so speed to lead. But if you flip that around, you can also go outbound. So you can do cold email, you could automate uh the sending of cold DMs, you could automate the scraping of leads and so on. Then if we move into sales, you can automate the generation of assets like proposals or sales materials. You could automate the generation of uh of payments and invoicing platforms like Stripe. You could automate triggering CRM stage changes, things like calendar invites automatically. These all have value. I've sold all these systems for several thousand dollars. You could do onboarding. So you could have automated emails that go out the second a payment is triggered. You could have automated stage changes in a CRM. Automated kickoff call notifications. You could do some automated checklist. You could send guides on how to get up and running with our software platform. You could send them portals automatically. On the fulfillment side, you know, it depends on the business obviously what is your deliverable? But at what copy when we were scaling to 90K a month, uh we generated the content with AI. That was a big chunk of our value prop and it was a big reason why we ended up being able to operate with such high margins. But in a design business, perhaps it is automating the selection of templates for websites or maybe having AI generate you some assets. Uh, and on the reactivation side, maybe it's follow-ups. Maybe it's automated, you know, quarterly check-ins talking about new developments in the market. These are things that actually drive value for small to mid-size service businesses and enterprises alike. And these are the systems that you should learn how to sell, keeping in mind that once you learn how to sell them, that's about it. You just do more and better until you eventually reach the financial goal that you want. You don't need to innovate here, most of the systems that we're working with are actually solved problems. And as nice as innovation is, a lot of the time, believe it or not, innovation is not the thing that actually makes you money. It is applying a known business solution or finding a way to apply a known business solution in a new way to an old problem, one that's plagued businesses since the beginning of business itself. Okay. Another big thing I want to talk about is incentives. So when you guys see these big over complicated systems, you need to keep in mind that creators like myself are incentivized to try and make the stuff that we do seem as complicated as possible. Why do we need to make it seem as complicated as possible? Because the more complex that we can make you think that the solutions that we provide are, the larger perceived differential in knowledge between you and us. And I'm not making this up. This is well doumented stuff in any sort of content creation or education. You want to be seen as an authority in that space. But let me dispel all that for you here. It's not that complicated. If you sit with yourself for a couple of weeks and you just put your head down and you look at tutorials, go through their documentation or watch one of my videos on how to do it. Obviously, the degree of complexity is going to depend on your background and where you're coming from. But if you've ever dragged and dropped stuff before, if you've ever downloaded an application or moved stuff from one folder to another, you probably have the technical literacy necessary in order to become really good at AI and really good at using these no code tools. But is that what makes me money? Well, I think in my case it does cuz this is a case that I make all the time, but in a lot of other people's it doesn't because again they make money on their ability to position themselves as an authority relative to you. And you need to keep in mind incentives not just in our space but more generally anytime you're learning something or doing any sort of transaction, right? When you're watching my videos, you're transacting your attention and in return I'm giving you some value. But anytime you have something like that going on, you need to keep incentives in mind. What am I incentivized to do? What are the creators whose content you're consuming incentivized to do? Well, they're incentivized to make their stuff look a certain way to improve the probability that you do the thing that they want you uh ultimately to do. Achieve whatever thing that they want you to achieve. Pay them the money pay them. This isn't always necessarily a bad thing. Obviously, in life, we look for situations in which our incentives align. If I could teach you something valuable and you could go out and make a bunch of money with it and then I can get a bunch of money in return for teaching you that skill, that's a win-win scenario, right? But life isn't always like that. Most of the time situations are not mutually beneficial and so you always just need to keep that in mind. You're being sold on the idea of a system, not necessarily the system itself. My third main point is technology gets better every day. And so every day technically there is some reason to be interesting. Every time you see a new model intelligence upgrade and it's supposedly the smartest model ever on planet Earth, that is technically correct for like 3 days until the next model drop comes in. That's 1% better on benchmarks. Every time you see a new software platform drop that has more human fidelity with the facial features or I don't know produces better audio that is interesting and valuable for maybe like 3 days until the next thing occurs. So the rate of technology is picking up and if you constantly spend your entire life just glued to a screen watching development after development. What you are doing is not upskilling or learning. What you're doing is you are just watching the news. So don't watch the news here. Okay? focus on fundamental things that have driven value to businesses not just for the last couple of years but for the last uh I don't know 60 years the last hundred years the core fundamental values of business creation assuming that is what you are watching my content for are what generates more revenue on the top end and then what generates more savings or profit on the bottom end if you are capable of constantly reorienting every new development or system that you see in that language you'll be much better off than somebody who's just constantly looking for the next model update and so on and so forth I'll be real a very Common question that I usually get when I'm consulting is, "Hey, Nick, have you heard about this new cool technology? " The answer to that question is almost always, "No. No, I haven't. No, I'm still using make. com. No, I've just been dragging and dropping nodes in nad. What is that? Why do I care? I'm capable of delivering extraordinarily powerful outcomes with tools that already exist. And every time a new tool comes out, it's not like my ability to deliver those outcomes goes up anymore. As I've mentioned to you guys, these business processes are, for the most part, pretty well solved. I'm sure at some point over the course of the next 10 or 15 years, some new business needs will emerge as a result of the technology balance shifting, but I'm not really focused on that right now. What I'm focused on is growing my business to several hundred,000 a month. And that is a known problem that has known solutions. So, that's where I'm putting my time and energy on. I'm not trying to become the Uber today, and I don't think anybody here realistically is either. I think most of you guys just want to run a business that generates a disproportionate return per unit time spent on it. Maybe a business that allows you to connect more with your loved ones or spend time doing the things you want to do and feel less compelled to do a bunch of things that you have to do. Okay, so keep all of this in mind as you navigate the next few months of AI automation content out there. Just to recap, there were three main points. The first is that most business processes are solved. We're not inventing anything new here. What we're doing is we're applying systems that have been demonstrated to prove and deliver outcomes to known problems and then do that faster and better over and over again. The second is incentives. Creators incentivize to make themselves seem significantly more intelligent and capable of grasping more complex things than you. That knowledge differential is usually how they justify their value and how they make their money. So be wary anytime somebody tries that or tries to make the problem seem really difficult it seem like you need a ton of experience in order to learn something. Favor simplicity whenever possible. And the third was don't focus on watching the news. Focus on actual upskilling. What is actual upskilling? It's improving your ability to generate revenue on the top end than generate profit or savings on the bottom end. Focus less on flashy models and then more on sustainable things that have been around for a while. Cuz if they've while, odds are there's a reason why they're probably going to continue to be around for a while longer. Okay, so hopefully I don't get too much flak. I don't know how well this video is going to perform algorithmically, but I felt like I had a uh necessity to do this. You guys have any questions on this, just leave them down below. I want to thank everybody here for watching my content. I know I've taken uh quite the hiatus here, just focusing on my health and a couple of other things, but I'll definitely be back to it soon. Have a lovely rest of the day and I'll catch y'all in the next video.
