The NEW Way to Price Your AI Automation Services

What's going on everybody? I'm doing something a little bit different today and it comes straight from your requests over on my daily updates channel. I have pretty in-depth conversations in the comments about all sorts of things from how to deliver an automation project in real time, how to spend the first $100 that you earn in an automation business, how to bootstrap, how to do technical things. Basically, a whole mish mash of topics that don't always make it into my more polished YouTube videos. Now, I consider these conversations a pretty big gold mine of practical advice, and I think that they are too valuable to keep hidden on that smaller channel. So today I'm bringing some of the most important and commonly asked questions to this channel here. These are the exact roadblocks and solutions that are helping people break through right now in 2025. If that sounds good to you, then stay tuned and let me answer all of

your questions. Albert says, "Hannah, can you please guide me on how to set up the pricing for the monthly retainer for automation services? My thought works like this. I create the automation, register the client, set up the automation in their account, then they have access to it. But if I want to introduce a retainer model, do I need to add myself as an admin to have access to their account and manage the automation? What exactly will the client be paying the retainer for? What will I be doing as part of the retainer? And how do I determine the cost? These are some solid questions. For those of you guys that are unaware of this, retainers are just a recurring services model where instead of somebody paying you for a one-time project like I think most people probably think of services in the context of they pay you every month usually. Um and in addition to delivering them projects, you also add a bunch of other things. So let me show you just a very quick example of um pre and post retainer. Okay. So there's kind of two types because there's two types of um billing models. There's the hourly billing model. So, previously, let's say you did 20 hours of work for somebody and you did it at uh 50 bucks an hour. How much money are they paying you that month? They're paying you $1,000, right? That said, this isn't guaranteed. Some months will be 25 hours. Other months will be 15 hours. Some months they might not pay you at all. What a retainer allows you to do is the retainer allows you in exchange for some of this money, you get the customer to lock in. So, they actually buy 20 hours at some discount. Let's say $45 an hour now. So, you make $900, but the difference is they prepay. So, they pay you ahead of time. They lock in the hours. You now can schedule clients because you know exactly how much in volume you're going to be doing for client one, two. It allows your life to be a lot easier as opposed to having like random fluctuations in hours and stuff like that like a lot of people see when they do like basic hourly pricing models. Okay. So, the way that you do the retainer, at least this is for hourly. You can do the same thing for fixed price, by the way. Like, you know, previously it was like one project per month at $1,000. I'm keeping the prices really low here. You know, afterwards you do one project a month at like 900 bucks a month or something, right? But then you add in a bunch of extras. The reason why retainers are so good is because recurring revenue is the way to go. Normally, customer acquisition cost can be 5% to 15%. total margin on onetime deals. What that means is, let's say a deal makes you $2,000. Uh, let's do 1,000 just cuz I'm using that as my thing. In order to acquire a $1,000 deal, you might actually have spent anywhere between $50 to $150. Let's say $150. That means that on a onetime deal, right off the top, before you even pay for software, before you pay for your own business, before you pay yourself, before you pay taxes, the maximum you're making is $850. Okay? Now, imagine you get a $1,000 retainer instead. And imagine that they stay with you for 6 months. Well, now the lifetime value is $6,000, right? If you subtract out the acquisition cost, you're now making $5,850. So, do you know what $850 is as a proportion of a,000? That's 85% margin. But do you know what 5,850 is as a proportion of 6,000? I don't at all. That's why I'm going to pump it into my calculator in a second. 97. 5% margin. Obviously, you want 97. 5% margin, not 85% margin, right? And that's not even taking into account all the rest of the benefits of a retainer. Like, yeah, as I mentioned, stable work, better client relationships, more opportunity for partnerships and whatnot. All right, so now that everybody is up to speed on what a retainer is, why retainers are cool, the way I would structure retainers is you don't just add in the services. You add in the service or the project that you were doing before, plus a bunch of other stuff to make the retainer a no-brainer for them. What do I mean? I mean, maybe you offer in a one-time, this is what I do, a onetime weekly strategy call, which is 45 minutes. Maybe you give them unlimited maintenance. Instead of you having to pay me one off for like random fixes here or there at like my normal rate of 100 bucks an hour, I'm just going to include all that in the retainer. So, like, you know, if there's any issue with the system and, you know, we define issue as like there's some problem with the API or there's some issue with like the no code platform or there's some server outage or whatever, I will fix that for you completely for free as part of my retainer. this is part of my peace of mind guarantee or something like that, right? You can pitch it however you want. Maybe you give them availability and you say, "Hey, if you reach out to me between 12:00 p. m. until 2 p. m. Monday to Friday, I'll respond within 15 minutes through Slack. " What does this mean? Emergency Q& A. So that if they need some training or they have like access to some resource, they just want to like know, hey, how do I update this or whatever? You just respond to them through Slack. These are all things that you do in addition to the core service, the core project. And this makes a retainer a lot more preferable from the client perspective, but it doesn't scale one to one with your time, right? And then it allows you to get into the situation where you have like, you know, multiples on your time with the $6,000 lifetime value instead of the $1,000. So that's one thing. And the other reason why retainers is so great is because you're usually not fully utilized. Believe it or not, very few retainers will ever fully utilize you. Nobody really talks about this, but this is kind of like the hacky part. If somebody purchases 20 hours a month off of you and you charge them a discount, let's say $45 an hour instead of your normal hour, you know, of $50, right? You may think, well, I'm only making $900. Now, but realistically, do you know how many hours they're actually going to use you? They're probably going to use like 18. So, you're actually working the exact same hourly rate, which is 50 bucks an hour, but now you just locked somebody in for a six-month plan. So, yeah, hopefully you guys see the logic behind retainers and why they're so valuable. But that is the main thing. And then obviously from the customer perspective and from your perspective, it's way better to work with people that you've already worked with before because you get to know their business. So your solutions are more nuanced. You can deliver more value in addition to the non like full utilization and stuff. You usually get like more referrals. You work less for the same time. The benefit of the a automation model is you get to build systems that deliver value for you. So that even if you're not necessarily delivering value with your time, the customer still feels like you're delivering some value. Oh, you know, Nick's cold email system generated me 23 leads last month. Like that is extraordinarily valuable whether or not I'm physically there working on their systems. My system does itself, right?

Hey Nick, what did your daily schedule look like when you're focused on the agency side of things and or when you're just starting out? Did you have an hour plan with time block for every strategy follow-ups etc. I'm trying to build a strong system to help move the needle on a daily basis. Thanks for all the valuable content. No, I did not have an hourby hour system, but I will run you through what my schedule looked like. Basically my schedule mirrored the pipeline of a typical agency. So you know at the top of an agency you have lead genen. So, you know, you'll have like a cold email, you'll have Upwork, obviously, everybody has slightly different lead genen methods, but maybe LinkedIn, you might have like communities, you might have trade shows, whatever the hell, I don't know, we just had somebody land $54,500 from a trade show or something like that in make moneywithmake. com, which is freaking awesome. So, whatever your lead genen methods are, you know, then what do you do? You pump them up to some sort of sales call. After the sales calls, what do you do? You do some sort of kickoff call. After the kickoff call, what do you do? You do some sort of fulfillment. And after the fulfillment, what do you do? you do some sort of like retention, you do some sort of follow-up. So, this is like the way that um clients flow through an agency, right? You can conceptualize this as sort of like a pipeline kind of like this. Now, the exact same way that the customer flows through most of these points is the exact same way that I recommend laying out your day. I recommend starting every day by focusing on the top of this funnel. Focus on lead genen. Knock out lead genen for, you know, one or two hours or something like that. Then do all your sales calls afterwards. Schedule them. I mean, obviously, if you are at the start line of your business, you do have to make yourself available for client calls. Sometimes they're going to want them early in the morning. later. But generally speaking, do your sales calls. Do onboarding calls after that, maybe like an hour a day. Then do fulfillment. Maybe this is like one to two hours. And then if you have follow-ups or retention or whatever, then do these after. Now, obviously, like retention follow-ups are kind of better off here, but just wanted to give you guys a simple framework you could use to follow. So, guess what? I didn't just do this when I was uh in the middle of scaling my agency. I'm doing this right now. I do this every single day. It's almost the exact same thing. If you guys head over to my Nyx Drive work log, it's just a Twitter account where I basically post all of my work and I just talk about what it is that I'm doing. And sorry, I'm on cellular data still. So, let me just move this close to the window so it doesn't take an hour. This is actually my new daily schedule I just built out. And um it's very similar, I would say, to this. Now the difference is I'm frontloading with make money with make management maker school management but yeah this is basically my whole daily schedule. So my lead genen in a way is like my reputation and so how do I maximize my reputation? I do the um community management right now. Then I do some inbox zero. This is almost like you can kind of think of this as like more like these three they're not exactly lead genen but they are lead genen adjacent. So I start with lead genen. Then what do I do after that? I do content which is lead genen for me as well. I do the fulfillment and then at the very end I have some miscellaneous admin. It's not one to one, but just notice how I start by focusing on what I consider to be the highest ROI part of my day. I always just frontload that. You want to focus on the most important thing that makes you the most money immediately every day while your mind is fresh and you're as full of energy as you'll ever be. And for most people at the start line, that's the lead genen. Then you want to kind of just work your way down the stack. You know what I mean? Alex

Son of Thunder says, "Yo, Nick, thanks for the great content adding so much value. Great way to do it. " As opposed to Lee Miley's weekly Google meet. Does he have a weekly Google meet? I don't even know. Oh, what does he do? like answer Q& A. What's the fastest way to build trust and confidence when a random lead is interested but does not know me yet? Also, how do you in their eyes eliminate risk and almost guarantee results and value so they feel like their well-invested money will actually bring results, not just another risky and costly endeavor with a random dude who just cold email me with an offer? How do you just make them say shut up and take my money? My best guess so far showcasing a demo and projecting results based on their current processes and doing some calculations, but I'm definitely curious where your take is on all this. Yeah, for sure. That's basically it. Honestly, you said almost guarantee results. I say, you know, you will get X, Y, and Z or risk mitigation. There's a difference between an emotional sales decision, which is what a lot of people will push for. You know, you need to buy this now. You know that you want this. This is aligned with everything that you've told me so far. You have all the information you need to make this decision. So, let's make it now. And then there's an like intellectual sales decision, which is, you know, is the return on investment of this positive? Am I going to make money by investing in this or am I going to lose money? So, the guarantee solves the intellectual and then I find that it also solves the emotional. It just makes it like a no-brainer. If you are willing to guarantee your service, and if you don't, you just give them all their money back. Like, intellectually speaking, there's no reason why they should not accept or move forward with you, unless there's some other major issue that you haven't handled on a sales call, unless you're like really untrustworthy or unless you haven't built up value enough or whatever. Yeah, that's how you do it. You just offer a guarantee. It sounds like you got most of the right pieces here. I just wouldn't pitch it as a demo because when you pitch things as a demo, in my experience, you tend to become like a dancing monkey on performance for the person that's like rating you. And then if you don't do a good enough job, they don't give you your snack or your treat, which is your deal closed. So, I always like to frame things as like from one business owner to another, hey, let me show you something really cool. You're going to love this. You know, like, hey, you know, I've actually built a system that did just that for a sevenf figureure business. I built a system that extracted leads from this source and then enrich them with this source. And then, um, I know you weren't asking for this, but on top of that, we also did this. Do you want to see it? It's super cool. And then they're like, oh yeah, that sounds pretty sweet. And then I show it to them. So, now I'm kind of like on the same level as them. And it's more of a, "Hey, this is pretty cool. " Not necessarily, "Hey, dance for me

monkey. " Study motivation 6838 says, "Thanks for answering all the previous comments. Would you promise meetings booked for your AI lead generator outreach system because I feel like I can offer leads, but the calls booked comes down to the offer of the business, but at the same time, they all want to hear meetings booked. How do you position it considering you have a case study for leads? Also, you mentioned cold email works for consultants or coaches. How would you go about writing copy or what would your messaging look like if you're selling, for example, business coaching to medium-sized business owners? So, would you promise meetings booked for your AI lead generator outreach system? " Absolutely. You should always be guaranteeing this sort of stuff. The reason why is because guarantees just align your incentives with the customers and then there's basically no downside. If you screw up, you're out nothing except for time, but you gain a ton of experience. You paid down a bunch of the skill debt that you probably have acrewed that you don't fully know about yet. And then the client has probably gotten results between zero to what your guarantee minimum was. So, they tend to always win as well. Let me give you a quick example of this. So, if you had a guarantee and let's just say your guarantee is 20 sales appointments in 60 days, what are the outcomes? You think about it, there are a couple. The first outcome is that you hit it. Now, what happens if you hit it? If you hit it, that means you've delivered over 20 appointments in 60 days, meaning that the client is happy. Okay? Not only are they happy, but you got paid. and odds are you've set a great impression on that client and the likelihood of wanting to work with you more in the future is pretty high. The second possibility here is that you get between 0 to 20 appointments. Now, this technically doesn't fulfill your guarantee. But what does this realistically mean? Okay, the client has still gotten some results. Odds are you didn't gotten zero appointments. Maybe you landed seven appointments or something like that. They might have actually made a fraction of that money. You don't get paid, but the client still has a positive impression. Why? Because you just delivered them a bunch of stuff for free. Man, that's about as clear as day as you can get towards value. The third and very unlikely scenario is you don't do anything. You book zero appointments. I mean, like statistically, think about it. You know, even between 0 to 20, this is uniformly distributed. This is just a statistical hack that I'm going to show you guys really quickly. There's a 5% chance of you getting one appointment, 5% chance you getting two, 5% chance of you getting three, 5% chance you getting four, all the way up to 20. Right? Basically, if there are 20 options here, there's a 5% chance of you getting each of them in this case. So, the chance of you getting actually zero appointments is very, very low. And it's probably way lower than 5%. I'm just trying to make it as simple as possible to understand here, but this is super unlikely. So, what's actually pretty unlikely in reality? If you're doing an offer like this and you're putting yourself out there consistently and you're pretty good with it, there's an overwhelmingly high chance that you hit it, probably greater than a 50%. Meaning, there's a 50% chance of you making whatever money you're going to make. So, I don't know, let's say you were planning on charging $2,500. There's a 50% chance of making $2,500. You know what that means? That means that basically every time you take on one of these clients, you make $1,250 just mathematically. The other thing is you get between 0 to 20 appointments. Well, if there's like, I don't know, let's say around 40% chance of you doing this. If you're a total beginner here, you've never done this before, then you know, you don't make $1,250, you make $0. But I'll tell you what, clients love getting things for free. The likelihood that you don't get anything from this client, it's actually pretty low. You've also helped them and you've learned a bunch. So, I guess what I'm trying to say is there's basically no downside to offering a guarantee so long as you put the full force of your intention behind it and you do try. Because if there are two worlds and in the first world you offer a guarantee, the second world you don't, in which world do you think you yourself are more likely to learn and then grow? Obviously, the one where you offer a guarantee, right? Why? Because guarantees are scary. They're hard and they align your incentives. If you screw up, you don't get paid. Wouldn't you rather live in the future where you grow and learn more anyway? Obviously, this involves doing harder things. Obviously, you're going to push yourself harder than you would have otherwise if you didn't have the guarantee. But not only does this help the client, it also helps you, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. How to position it. Considering you have a case study for leads. Also, you mentioned cold email works consultants. You know what? I would do this to write the copy. Watch me start installing AI service in 10 hours. this video here that I just brutally ripped off of instantly. Uh, and then I just like repackage it and then turn it into like how to do it for AI. So, check this video out. This has everything that you need in terms of copyrightiting. Just go to the 57th minute of that. Then I run you through my actual copyrightiting process. It's the same across coaches, consultants, and everything else. Some

says, "Hey, Nick, I'm in high school. Don't have any social proofs that I can show to my prospects. Uh, what would you do if you were in my situation? How can I prove myself to the clients? " You know, you're in like pretty much the classic situation that all beginners are in. They have nothing to start with. They have no social proof to show people. It's like the not just entrepreneurial problem nowadays. It's like the job problem as well. When you apply to a job for JavaScript development and it's a junior job and they're like must have 10 years of experience in JavaScript and you're like this is a junior job. They ask for TypeScript 10 years of experience in Typescript. It's like dude has Typescript even been out for 10 years. Anyway, the point that I'm making here is everybody suffers from a very similar problem to you at the start line. This is just like one of those normal things that you have to go through in order to get to where you want to get. The good news is there are ways to not pretend, but fake it until you make it. The simplest one is actually take some of the systems that I've built on my channel and then rebuild them on your end. I have some of these for free. A lot of the really good ones are obviously in maker school, but take the ones for free and just try and rebuild them as much as possible and then ask yourself, what sort of business would work with this? does this system help? You know, a lot of the time it helps like digital agencies because that's my niche. I help like B2B agencies with growth. So once you have a few systems that you have now built yourself, you're not just like copying and pasting mine, you're actually building them. Now you can actually say stuff like, "Hey, I built an automated cold email system that enriches contacts and then adds a,000 leads a day to a cold email platform. I created an automatic proposal generator that takes as input a customized form fill and then it customizes a template based off this and then it does all this really cool stuff. " Now you actually have some social proof. Is the social proof like, you know, have you done this for other clients? No. But you can get away with saying, "Hey, you know, I built this stuff for an AI agency. " Like, you don't specify the AI agency is yours, but you did build it for an AI agency your own. You kind of see what I mean? This is almost like pulling yourself up by the bootstraps, which is super cool. And that's what I recommend. You kind of start there. And then, you know, if I could visualize this, you know, you start here. I built X for I don't know, like a like an automation company. And guess what? Once you're done with that, you actually use that to land one gig and let's say you work with some personal trainer company. Well, now you could say I built Y for a personal trainer company or personal trainer. Let's say you take Braxton's niche, just completely destroy him. Sweep it out from under his thumb and maybe now you have two portfolio pieces or case studies. That makes the third one so much easier. Now it's like I built Z for an AI agency. And maybe once you have these three simple systems that you've done, well, now you can actually go in and like sell something that delivers value and actually makes people money because now you know enough about this stuff. So you could say, you know, with your new lead genen system, I don't know, let's say you actually add $1,535 in revenue in the first three weeks for a, you know, whatever business. Let's just say B2B SAS. with systems. And now, do you notice how like you're starting with like the trashiest case study? This though gets you to here. And now you get both of these. These two get you here. Now you have all three of these and then these three get you here. And now you actually have some sort of actual thing, you know, tangible case study with value. And the second you have some dollar signs in your case study, from experience, it just gets so much easier. So yeah, I guess what I'm trying to say is there's like there's a million and one ways to play this, but that's

what I'd recommend from end things IRL. Hey Nick, thanks for your amazing guidance. Really appreciate it. What do you mean by an asset? Can you help me a bit more? I can't do Loom videos as I currently don't have any sort of webcam or anything like that. So, what could be my other options? Now, about the cold emails, I certainly don't have any money, but I do have a subscription to a cold emailing software called Many Reach. I know it's not the best, but it does work. And I don't have custom domains. I'm using Gmails for now. After getting my first couple of clients, I'll invest in things like a good webcam or a good laptop. Loom videos are improving my outreach methods. Right now, I don't have a laptop. All I have is an old PC to do the outreach and build automation. As for the Zoom call, I'll manage. Maybe I'll ask one of my mates for their laptop, but can't do that for Loom videos as that may take too long. Cool. So, there's a lot going on over here. Obviously, you're very financially and kind of resource constrained. You don't have some of the things that I probably consider basic these days, like a laptop with some sort of webcam, some sort of microphone or whatever built in. But what I like about you is that you are actively thinking about how you could solve these problems. I think it'd be easy for somebody in your shoes to just say, I don't really have any of that stuff, so I can't even try. But you're thinking, hey, so I don't have these things, so how can I still get stuff done? So, you know, that mindset is going to take it very far right off the bat. When I say asset, uh, you're referring to the assetbased outreach strategy that I've talked about before, which in a nutshell, if you guys are new to it, is where you design some sort of asset that's high quality and customized to a prospect that solves some problem for them, and then you just give it to them without asking really for much in return, and you use that to sort of icebreak instead of just like a cold email or whatever. These things are obviously very high value and they're very effective if you can design something that effectively handles the pain points that the person on the other end of the line is suffering from. But the trade-off is it just takes you a ton of time and energy to put together, right? Like you're designing an asset. So what are some examples of assets? One thing I did on video was I generated a bunch of newsletters using AI and the customer's website and then I pumped them into a high-quality newsletter format that I've used for myself and then I generated like a nice sounding newsletter that was I don't know like it's not perfect but it's like 80 90% of the way there. So that's considered valuable. What's another example of an asset? Maybe you're targeting coaches or consultants. So what you do is you run some automation that finds like the top 10 trending videos in their niche. You pass the titles of those into AI and then you have AI generate a bunch of like highquality title candidates and then give it to them. variety of other things you could do too. You could One thing the video editors do a lot of is they actually go and then this is more manual, but they will do an edit of the person's video and then they'll give it to them and say, "Hey, I know we haven't talked before, but I love your channel. I've been following you for a while. I've actually edited a bunch of stuff for you. So, I just want to put it in front of you cuz I know that giving value is how you get ahead in any industry. " And uh whether or not you want me to edit for you, just wanted you to have it. Hopefully, this helps. Do whatever you want with it. You could pump long form videos into short form content generators like opus. clipip clip or something, you know, that allows you to make a bunch of short clips and then you send it to an influencer or creator and say, "Hey, I just clipped a bunch of your content for free. Take it. I just want to let you know that I did this step professionally and I'd be happy to do it for you cuz I really like your brand. " I mean, I'm just throwing like tons of ideas at the wall here. You can use any of these or any combination of any of these in your individual outreach and you'll do just fine. Okay, so that's what I mean by assets. And the thing is in your case, because you don't have a Loom video, so you can't record anything super custom, you don't have any sort of like cold email platform. This is probably your best bet, right? Because what you're doing is you're leveraging your skill in building an asset as opposed to, let's say, your skill as a saleserson or something like that, which may not necessarily be there. It also sounds like you don't really have the ability to do things like record videos, which are obviously high value, and so on and so forth. Okay, so these are all just some ideas that you could use. And then, yeah, I like the Zoom call. Ask one of your mates for the laptop, get on the call that way. Yeah, that's very good. You got a lot of gumption, I would say, which is necessary. And that's a wrap on

today's Q& A. I hope these answers help you push through whatever barriers you are currently facing in your AI or automation business. The opportunities in the space are massive right now, and I think we all know that, but they're only big if you actually take action on what you learn. Cuz these strategies work, but they only work if you go step into the arena, if you actually implement them. So, if you guys have your own questions that didn't get covered today, don't let them hold you back. Just head over to my daily updates channel, it's the link in the description, and drop them in the comments. I do read and respond to every single one personally. And if you guys are serious about turning your AN automation knowledge into real income, Maker School is where it's happening. We have over 2,500 members, a 90-day accountability program, and there are tons of people landing their first clients consistently within a month or two. So, just subscribe to my channel, check out daily updates for more detailed answers, and I'll catch youall on the next video. Thanks so much.