Why Technical Skills Won't Get You AI Automation Clients

A lot of people that watch these sorts of videos are extraordinarily technical and they're really talented at what they do, but they can't for the life of them build a business around it. So, in this video, what I want to do is I want to explain to you why technical skills will not build your AI agency. And if you guys actually want to take the skill set that you've developed in AI and automation and turn that into a business, you need a fundamental shift in the way that you approach things. So, first of all, I have three little secrets for you. The first is that clients actually can't distinguish between good implementations and exceptional technical implementations, which means all you realistically need to do is get to good. Don't worry about getting to great. Speaking of technical, many of you guys will probably recognize this sort of graph. This is called a sigmoid. And essentially what it means is they're diminishing returns after a certain amount of improvement. So if this over here is your skill and the amount of time that you're dedicating towards it. Notice how after you achieve a sufficient amount of skill, more time doesn't actually meaningfully make you better. This is where the vast majority of you guys should stop. Okay? Unfortunately, a lot of very technical people keep on going and spending more and more time in La Land getting better at stuff that doesn't actually meaningfully impact your ability to generate money. What does that mean? It means that technical skills are necessary, but they're insufficient for agency success. So once you have some technical skills, you don't need to focus on the technical skills anymore. When you obsess over your technical skills, you create a perfectionist paralysis effect and that prevents your business growth. I'm not speaking into a void here. I'm sure many of you guys totally understand what I'm trying to say. Some additional points, advanced technical knowledge doesn't actually create any revenue until it's paired with business systems. This is related to that idea of technical skills being necessary but insufficient. And then also to be honest, the real challenge here isn't distribution or marketing. The real challenge is not in creating the AI product itself. As technology and AI in particular grows better and better, the ability for a completely random person with zero technical skills to recreate the thing that you've spent your entire life doing increases. And so, as unfortunate and as hard as it is for us to accept, our ability to do really complex technical things is no longer the number one prize thing that we should be focusing on. Instead, on distribution, marketing, and business skills to be pragmatic. So, here are

some signs that you guys are stuck in the technical trap. And as you can tell, there are quite a few. The first is you're watching too many courses, but you haven't yet reached out to a single potential client. And yes, I mean courses like mine. I mean online YouTube content where people show you things, but you're not actually taking that stuff and doing something with it. Knowledge only matters as much as it converts to action. Next is you regularly postpone client outreach because you feel like you're not ready yet or you just need to learn one more thing. In reality, you will never be ready. There are many situations in which I do not feel ready. If you really want to crush it, you have to become comfortable not knowing the thing right now. And then you have to become confident that future you will figure that thing out. That's how current marketing works. Another big gotcha is when you invest more time improving systems that already work versus finding new clients. Because diminishing returns, as I mentioned above with that sigmoid, right? You improving the system by 1% will take 10 times the amount of your energy every single percent that you do. Another big issue is when you feel uncomfortable talking about business outcomes rather than technical implementations. I feel like a lot of you guys are probably in that camp. And the last thing is when you judge your progress by your technical capability rather than your revenue growth. If we're being pragmatic here, there is like knowledge and curiosity and solving that problem. And then there's also money and revenue and income and solving that problem. And if you guys want to turn something into a business, that's the thing that you ultimately care about. You don't actually care about the knowledge and the curiosity and the technical expertise. Okay? We should be judging people by the thing that we care the most about. Okay? And if you care the most about technical capability, that's cool, but don't expect to make a ton of money with that. Okay? So, here's a little SOP that you guys could follow. Learn technical skills. Once you've learned it sufficiently to deliver value, then you can move on. If not, then just learn some more technical skills. This number here is way less than you think. You don't need to be 100% certain of how to build a system. You only need to be 70% certain. So, until that you are at that 70%, sure, keep learning. But the second that you find yourself thinking, I mean, man, I don't really know exactly how I do it, but I feel like I got a reasonable handle on things. Move on. Start building business skills. Start developing client acquisition. Start doing outreach. Acquire your first one to three clients, and then start scaling your agency revenue. You know, the really cool thing, as you scale your agency revenue, you will inevitably have more resources available to you, and you will actually be able to do things like take time off if you so desire, then spend that added time learning more technical skills if curiosity is the thing that you're trying to scratch. Okay? But everything starts with the money to be honest with you. And if you don't have any money clients, then uh what you're doing is you're not running a business. You're basically just doing a hobby technical project. All right. So another

thing to focus on is outcomes over technology. I know I talk about this a lot, but I just want to stress it again. The technology isn't very important. When you communicate in a technical language rather than in business outcomes that creates an immediate disconnect with potential clients who care about results on implementation details. The way that a client sees your system, as crappy as it is to say, is basically as this. It is a black box with a bunch of money labels on the side. The client puts in $5 and then the client expects to see $50. All they care about is the relationship between the $5 and the $50. They don't actually give a crap about what goes on in between. Have you guys ever seen that meme where it's like step one do this, step two question mark, question mark, step three profit. That's exactly how you guys should conceptualize the system that you're building. The only thing that matters to the client is that step one and then that step three, not really step two. And even if they do express interest in that, they're expressing cursory interest and don't actually care too much about the technical implementation details. So what does that mean? What are outcomes actually? Well, it's in a nutshell three things. It's revenue, that's top line, it's profit, that's bottom line, and then it's some intangibles like risk reduction, and then chaos as well. Chaos is subjective, but it's just how the person feels on a day-to-day basis. So if you run an agency, your whole job is to significantly improve revenue, significantly improve profit, significantly reduce risk, and then significantly reduce chaos. If you can accomplish these four things, you're going to make a lot of money by proxy. So your goal is to translate technical capabilities into financial impacts with real numbers. The client doesn't care that you built architecture on GPT4. 1 and are passing it through a multi-step cyclical content generator. These are fancy words that matter to other technical people, but you're not selling, for the most part, to technical people. You are specifically selling to people that don't understand the technical stuff. That's why they're hiring you, right? When you frame outcomes properly, as in when you say, "Hey, what problems are you suffering with? " Okay, great. This system, I believe, can help solve that problem for you and generate some outsized return on your investment, a lot of the injections that you guys are currently getting when you attempt to solve something that might be putting you off, those disappear naturally. The second that you can justify that ROI where somebody gives you $5 and then you turn that into $50, the second you can make them believe that, that's really the whole sale in and of itself, right? So if you guys can get to that point where you frame outcomes in terms of return on investment and not the technical stuff, the cost doesn't really matter so long as you can get somebody to trust that you are capable of delivering the system that does that. So if you really want to succeed in sales, just quantify their pain points first, then present solutions afterwards. Here's how you translate technical features to business

outcomes. So instead of GPT4. 5 integration, say something like, "Hey, I'll get you 24/7 customer support, and you're not going to have to hire any additional staff. " Meaning, we're going to scale your ability to do customer support without scaling the costs. Instead of automated data processing, say, "Hey, I'm going to eliminate you $4,500 in monthly data entry costs because you're not going to have to hire somebody to do this manually for you, and we're going to do it so much faster that your current clients will be more satisfied and thus more likely to pay you more money. " Instead of saying multi-step workflows, say, "We're going to capture 25% more leads," which right now is 100 per month. So, we're going to get you at 125 per month, by eliminating manual follow-up gaps. Here's a brief little SOP. You're going to start by identifying your client pain points. Ask them, "Hey, so what exactly are you suffering from? " You'll notice that their responses will usually not be extraordinarily technical. Their responses will be stuff like, "Well, we're really disorganized right now, and it's impacting our ability to get more clients. " Why? Cuz business owners just instinctively care about the business details, not the technical details. So, if you ask them to explain something to you, most of the time they'll do so in that manner. Then you quantify the financial impact. You figure out how much money is this probably costing them or how much money are they leaving on the table by not acting on it. It's like, "Hey, so how many clients do you normally get a month? " Hm. Since this problem started, how many clients you've been getting a month? Wow. So, this problem's been costing you three or four clients, and you were telling me that every client's worth about $5,000 a month. Gez, that's adding up. Okay, great. So, here's what my system's going to do. That's when you frame your solution as a business outcome. Then, you support it with case studies and proof. You present some sort of ROI calculation. Position your price against the value created, and there has to be some multiple there. Again, if your price is $5, then the value created has to be some multiple of that. And then you close the deal based on outcomes, not tech, which is ultimately the thing that matters. Another really big thing

that's difficult for technical people to wrap their minds around is that consistency always beats innovation over the long run. So consistent execution of very basic, unsexy business activities almost always ends up outperforming sporadic technical brilliance. I mean, I use pretty flowery language here, but in reality, like, don't spend a lot of time trying to come up with the perfect, most insane, most incredible system if you could just do it yourself in like 5 seconds. 5 seconds and just do that consistently every day for a year, and you're going to end up way better than if you had spent and poured years of your life into building this sort of system to begin with. The boring money routine always prioritizes some sort of revenue generating activities in the first 2 to three hours a day. This is what I've done. This is what thousands of people across my communities have done, and this is what actually makes money. You have very simple daily actionables that usually involve some sort of thing that doesn't scale. Some sort of outreach, some sort of phone call, some sort of video meeting, some sort of Loom video recording, and then you just send it to people and you do that over and over and over again for a very long period of time. Technical people don't like this cuz technical people tend to get bored with the same thing over and over again. That's why they feel driven to invent and innovate and create new things. Unfortunately, inventing and innovating and creating new things can make you money. It's just not as probable a way of making money as executing consistently in the boring stuff. Like, does innovating technically get you the next Uber? Yeah, absolutely. But it's only going to get one out of 10 million companies the next Uber. What's a much more sustainable and consistent way to make money? It's boring money routine. It's taking something that works and making it 1% better. So, here's some high ROI activities so you can do some direct outreach. Follow up with prospects. Do some relationship building networking. My actual personal recommendation for technical people is to legitimately set aside 2 hours every morning. Set a timer for 2 hours and know that you cannot do anything technical in that 2-hour time period. Instead, all of the time that you spend on your business has to include something of this form during that two-hour period. If you're not doing outreach, if you're not following up with prospects, if you're not relationship building or doing what you could qualify as networking, you're not spending that time, right? Okay? As long as you exhaust a full 2hour period of you doing this every day, then you can worry about the technical stuff later. You'll have accomplished the minimum viable thing necessary for growth. I also recommend focusing on some sort of consistent activity metric. Try and send, let's say, 25 messages a day. try and send some sort of number of Upwork applications or Loom videos or whatnot. And then what you'll find, what technical people do eventually appreciate is compound growth kicks in. After 30 to 60 days of consistent execution, the inputs that you provide ultimately start lining up with the outputs. And that's when you finally start seeing some traction. get to do the cool stuff that you've probably read about in books all the time, but capitalizing on network effects and whatnot. But you can't do that without putting in the work. It doesn't happen before, it happens after. All right, so here is a quick little

almost like an SOP. first two to three hours daily to revenue generating activities. Eliminate all distractions during this time. Just turn off notifications, turn off emails, turn off social media that you don't need. Set specific daily activity targets that are completely under your control. Here are some basic ones you could do. You could send five Upwork apps every single day. You could send 20 cold emails five Loom videos every single day. The Upwork apps might take you 5 minutes each. That's 25 minutes. The cold emails, depending on if you're doing this manually or automated, might take like 5 seconds or it might take like 30 minutes. And then the five Loom videos, assuming they're five minutes each, it might take you 25 minutes. How much time is this? Hey, that's 50. That's 30. So at the end of it, you spent 80 minutes or 1 hour and 20 doing the most important part of your business. And if you subtract that from the usual 8 hour workday, you're still left with 6. 7 hours left to go. You can do whatever the heck you want with that 6. 7 hours. As long as you do the business stuff, the technical stuff doesn't matter anywhere near as much. Track your consistency using like a simple Google sheet or something. I know you want to invent this amazing CRM project tracker Chrome extension app to do it, but this stuff does not work, guys. Just use something that works. Use something, hell, use a pen and a paper if you have to. And then just do it for 30 to 60 days. Okay, here is the SOP written in a slightly different way. I just like to provide different ways where you guys could see the information presented visually. You guys could hear the information said to you. So, you know, identify three to five higher activities, create some daily activity targets, block the first two to three hours, execute consistently, track activities, not outcomes, maintain for 60 days, then just analyze results and optimize, and then just loop it over and

over again. This doesn't have to be any more complex than that. What you'll find is there are a lot of people much dumber than you that run businesses that make way more money than you could probably ever hope to achieve. And this is something very humbling that I had to learn pretty early on. So, if you guys want to scale an AI agency, focus less on the technical skills and way more on the business skills. It's the business ones which will ultimately pay your pockets. If you guys want to grow your own AI agency from scratch with no experience, whether on the technical side or the business side, definitely check out Maker School. Christian just did over $11,000 this month through Upwork, cold email, communities, and a couple of lead generation tactics that I talk about here. What we do is we give you a 0 to90day accountability roadmap with a list of step-by-step tasks. If you just follow those tasks, you eventually get a client. It's not rocket science. There's not a whole lot of innovating or disrupting going on. You're just following a given road map. And if you don't get your first client in 90 days, I give you a full refund. That's the guarantee and that's kind of my offer to you. Thank you very much again for watching this video. Definitely brush up on those business skills and don't worry too much about the technical stuff. Like, subscribe, do all of those fun things that make my YouTube jump to the top of the AGO. And I'll catch you on the next video. Backs.