The 5 Phases of Scaling an AI Agency: $0-100K/Month Roadmap

hey everyone leam mle here and today I wanted to make a quick video breaking down the different phases of scaling your AI automation agency from0 to $100,000 per month this can be broken down into five different stages I've made a nice little presentation here for you to walk you through and it's more so talking about okay what are the problems you're facing and where should your focus be on at each of these different phases and what kind of team and hiring requirements are needed at each phase so I'm basically going to break down what your team should look like at each stage say 0 to 5K or 10 to 20K and also the TCH stack you're going to be using I'm going to be covering everything at each of these different phases because I know I get a lot of questions about okay I'm how do I get to the next phase what am I missing like what's the main Blocker in my business and I've been through this process of scaling from 0 to 100,000 and more month and I'm going to break down what's been super helpful for me this is going to be more so focused on a general agency um so this is assuming that you're just doing purely custom AI development um as an AI automation Agency for your clients um there are changes that occur if you move to a more niched model but I'm just going to keep a pretty clear cut with this and just say if you're doing all General development this is what it's going to look like so there's five different stages we can jump into it here the

first phase is called startup um and that's from0 to $5,000 per month um so your team in this case is going to be if you're a non-technical Founder we're going to split this into twos especially in these early phases um a non-technical Founder starting an AI automation agency is a bit of a different route to a technical founder so you can see here if you are a non-technical Founder as and you're someone who's coming into the AI field wanting to build a business but you don't have the your technical background you're not a developer and we get a lot of developers coming into the field trying to start these as well so I want to make sure I'm addressing both sides of this if you're non-technical then your first team or the first person that you're going to hire in this case you're going to be using a contractor will be a freelance AI developer and this will be at a revenue share basis or you can either do it at Cost depending on what setup it is so basically because you don't have the technical expertise yourself you can't go out there and deliver these first few projects to get yourself off the ground in the case of the technical founder it's basically just going to be you and you are the lead developer of your agency you're basically just a freelancer at this point but that should be pretty straightforward for you technical guys but for those of you who are non-technical going into a place like my free school Community which we've just hit 100,000 members on which is incredible so thank you guys for all the support on that um but there's 100,000 people in there a significant portion of those guys are AI developers who are looking for work so go in there to the hiring tab you can look for hey I'm starting an agency I have XYZ leads through my warm connections which we going to touch on in a second and I'm looking for someone to uh pass off on these projects to and we're going to do a revenue share basis now for all the cost of these different uh hires and in this case the split I'm going to be breaking it down at the end of the video a full table of all of the costs at least starting cost for each of the roles I'm going to mention so I don't want to clog up this slide so I'm going to break that down at the end and you guys can screenshot it and use it for your hiring moving forward so starting off as a non-technical Founder you've got that freelance AI developer where you're going to work with now when it comes to the focus at this phase of your journey it's going to be on warm Outreach and finding your first free clients through your existing Network and then eventually graduating towards paid clients through your existing Network so that's using the warm Outreach method that I've talked about time and time again I'll put it in the description it's homi's one it's really good um but that warm Outreach strategy is going to allow you to find your first few clients and really just get some experience and get off the ground and the big focus of this startup phase is really just building your confidence and experience gradually just slowly like baby steps to build your confidence and experience because like he like this quote here says at this stage you're likely feeling like I'm inexperienced I'm unskilled and I'm struggling to really just wrap my head around this business and how it works I'm taking things one step at a time in order to ease me into things and this is the most important thing in this phase is just gradually and slowly easing into things and not trying to take this1 $15,000 project or thinking you going to have this fully productized offering or I'm going to boot a sass or something it's just start small and gradually build up your confidence and experience um now when it comes to your text de to get started you can use slack you could even use WhatsApp just to work with your warm connections for these first few clients I put down slack cuz it's good practice to get familiar with it but slack is of course going to cost you a bit of money but slack Google meet Google Calendar calendly which will cost you $ 20 $30 a month initially I think and then stripe so that's your Tech stack starting off at this point and then we have the estimated cost and profit margins at this phase and this is going to be based off the revenue share model if you're doing a 20% Revenue share and you're making 5K per month then your cost would be around $1,000 per month which is going to your freelance AI developer and exchange for uh their services and helping you fulfill those projects so that startup phase just purely focusing on getting things off the ground and building a little bit of momentum and experience

the next phase is phase two called early growth this is from $5 to $10,000 per month the team that you have in this early growth phase of your journey is going to be one two or even three freelance AI developers like you had in the startup phase but this time you're going to have more of them to choose from as you start to get more leads coming through your warm connections as you share some of the things you're doing from that startup phase with them and say hey this is what we've built you're going to see a lot more things sort of shaken out of the trees and as you get more of these leads incoming you need to expand your ability to deliver on those and that's going to be with more than one developer and so by going into the free community and getting one or two more freelance AI developers that you have a relationship with will allow you to take these incoming warm leads and sort of get a statement of work together and say hey look this is what we're going to build are you interested like can you make me a bit of a proposal or say like why you should get this project and then you can say okay great let's move forward we'll do a revenue share on this 20 to 30% depending on how good they are and the size of the project and things like that and at the same time you should also be hiring a virtual assistant or a VA um this is going to be really your admin support to help you to start to build your first set of systems and scale your warm Outreach on this case you can see the focus is here scaling your warm Outreach so this means instead of you doing all of the messaging and follow-ups manually you have to do quite a lot of tracking to make sure you're doing this systematically and not just doing kind of Willy LLY the virtual assistant the first role of that is going to be coming in is to help you manage that warm Outreach process making sure that you are reaching out to enough people per day and making sure that you are also sending follow-ups and tracking the conversations and saying Hey look this person's ready for a Call Etc having a bit of help so that you're not constantly in the DMS all day or emailing people constantly having a virtual assistant who can help you with that is a big step and first step towards you really building some acquisition systems as you see here the quote for this phase is I'm getting the hang of things but it still feels like chaos I'm sitting at my first acquisition system that runs while I sleep and learning how to manage projects so the virtual assistant coming in to help you with that warm Outreach and scaling of the warm Outreach is key so that you can keep the lead flow coming in and the other Focus for you in this period is to start creating content and sharing the client wins from phase one and phase two um to build your Authority and credibility in the public eye basically so starting the long journey of content creation here is key because it's going to take a decent amount of time before you actually start seeing some results from it so kicking it off here is key the Tex stack remains basically the same just adding on make or zap here for any internal automation that you need to set up and also for notion for Internal Documentation so that's the early growth phase and as for cost and profit margins you're looking at around $3,000 per month at that 10K mark because you're going to be paying roughly 30% of your uh Revenue to these developers as part of their R share so

the next phase is establishment and this is going from 10 to 20K per month this phase is really one of the most difficult ones to get right but also the thing that really unlocks you to scale much further because as you can see by the team here we moving from a set of Freelancers to having your own team of developers and from my experience you're going to be needing a senior AI developer who is full-time you're going to be needing a junior AI developer who's also full-time and then your virtual assistant and you'll be throwing in a bookkeeper here um who can do sort of part-time or contract work for you just to start to manage the finances of the business so that you aren't so stuck in and payroll and managing all of the day-to-day finances which can start to get pretty burdensome around this face the shift from using a gaggle of Freelancers to help deliver your projects to having full-time AI developers in your company is such a massive Leap Forward because if anyone's worked with Freelancers before of any sort you know that particularly if you're finding good ones off upwork we found this very early on at morning Side by using upwork divs or mer skinny starter because we didn't have any clue how else to get them but you become basically client number nine in the list particularly with guys who are well ranked or guys or girls and they're getting a lot of interest on platforms like upwork and so unless you're finding really low-key Freelancers through my free community which I'd say there's a good chance of getting them in most cases really good Freelancers are going to have multiple projects going at once which means that in some cases you're going to be bottom of their prior list um which results in all sorts of issues with client Communications um or them really just phoning it in doing the bare minimum and then that all of that heat from the client comes on to you and like hey why is this person not responding like what why is this not up to scratch so this becomes the issue with scaling with Freelancers and I cannot stress enough how important it is to get some AI developers who are working for you full-time and likey the only thing you're working on is our client projects and the quality work just goes through the roof once you make the shift as a non-technical AI automation agency founder these senior AI devs are basically the ones who are architecting the builds for you it's really a case of there being two sides to a lot of the AI development you guys will do through your agencies and the first is sort of understanding the needs of the client and okay transl in that to how we're going to approach it the research the architecture this planning how you're going to approach the build is a significant part of the work and then after that the rest is just the doing and sort of executing on what you said throw in a little bit there of also troubleshooting okay when something doesn't happen who's the brain power that's going to try to solve it and that's why you need a senior AI developer someone who does have that capability to architect the system to work with the client and understand what they're trying to get out of it and to then communicate that to in this case your Junior AI developer for them to do a lot of the ground work so that your senior AI developer can handle a lot of other work themselves and pass off the grunt work to the junior AI developer so that's that Junior and senior Dynamic and the split again I go into way more detail on these kinds of developers in my hiring guide for developers I'll put that in the description but your senior AI developer is really key hire your Junior AI developer to do all the lead work as a key hire both full-time virtual assistant to keep helping you with admin tasks and of course your bookkeeper to handle those finances your focuses the founder in this phase is going to be scaling that content production up and really trying to get some results out of it now because ATS tends 20K per month level and now that you've got your senior AI developer and your Junior developer and all of these things at a fixed cost on your payroll each month you need to be able to consistently generate leads and you can't just rely on your warm connections anymore you need to have a system for consistently bringing a new business and a content is the best way to not only attract those but also to nurture them and make sure that they're actually likely to sign with you and see you as the kind of person that they want to work with so scaling their content output whether it's YouTube whether it's LinkedIn whether it's Twitter whether you want to write on medium just picking something and doing it really well so that you can start to generate leads consistently and the other half of that content side is building an email list for consistent lead generation moving forward so I've talked about this before but part of the reason that we've never really had to worry about doing running ads or doing having to shake some extra trees for leads at morning side we've been booked out basically for two months ahead for the past year or more that comes down to us capturing thousands and thousands of emails of businesses who want to work with us through our contact form pretty basic way but we haven't really had to stress this too much because we've had so much interest but through all of those emails we've collected when there's ever a need for us to bring on more clients we've got vacancies available we'll just send out an email and say hey look we have one or two slots available if you're interested please book a call here and that's how we've consistently signed clients and allowed us to support a significant payroll of developers and other team members to help us run the business so as you can see here the estimated costs have shot up because you're taking on the senior Ai and the junior AI developer which I'm going to be breaking down they recommended monthly salaries at the end like I mentioned but this is the phase where you do have to eat a lot of cost and the profit margin is going to drop down massively like you see here 27. 5% but once you dra on softwares and some other things it could be even lower than that um so this is really the phase where you're not taking any money home it's going all back in and you were just trying to grind through this phase and get that lead generation built up so that you're not only making enough money to support and pay for these new de that you brought on but to actually get some kind of Roi and allow just scale Beyond this with that existing team so this is really the first foothold insiding an agency cuz it's like okay I actually have my own team now I need to crank the lead generation so that I can actually support them and continue to make money moving forward at greater profit margins than this in the later stages the text stack for this is all the same apart from throwing on kit which is a email marketing platform which you're going to be using to build your list you can make lead magnets and sort of send traffic to it from your content they can sign up to it put them into your email list and then also send newsletters and broadcast to them so that's your whole email capture and email marketing platform which I'd highly recommend to use and the quote for this phase is my lead flow is consistent enough to higher full-time developers but I need to keep pushing on content and email capture in order to scale further then we're getting into stage four which is scaling from 20 to

50K per month so the main higher for this phase is going to be a CTO which is like your senior AI developer on steroids this is someone who can not only plan and architect these builds but also manage a larger team underneath them not just a senior and Junior Dev in this phase but also moving forward so it's a very forward thinking uh higher and you need to make sure that they're a great foot for you and they have the capabilities to manage a team but also know how to architect build as well so the CTO also kind of helps you out on the sales side if you are have been taking all of the sales calls yourself then the CTO can start to hop on these calls for you either with you on the call as well once you I probably recommend you do that for a month or two and bring them up to speed on how to run the sales calls and then you can start letting the CTO to take the calls themselves which is going to be a huge time unlock for you so when you are hiring for that CTO role it becomes even more difficult because not only do they need to know the technical side but also need to be able to talk to clients and be client facing as well and be able to take them through that sales process so very difficult to find a good one um but well worth your while and you're going to see the compensation estimates in a bit um but it can be pretty eye watering at times so you've got the CTO and then under them is the senior Aid Dev the junior Aid Dev your virtual assistant and then your Finance as we had before and the CTO is going to be managing all of those devs the focus for this phase is going to be optimizing the onboarding and Service delivery processes as you're going to be really taking on the significant volume of projects per month so you need to make sure that onboarding process and say your prompt Engineering Process and your review process for your build all of these things are actually documented rather than just doing things by the C your pants um in this phase that's so critical all things are going to get mayed very quick and then of course in order to get to $50,000 per month your content creation and email marketing needs to be consistent as well the quot for this phase is things are getting chaotic again I'm out of my depth I need help to bring order and set up delivery system so that we can continue to scale so this is really a moment of understanding hey I need help here I'm like many of you may not be coming from technical backgrounds if you are a non-technical Founder coming in and running a basic a formal development company at $3 to $40,000 per month you're going to start to see hey look I don't really I'm a bit out of my depth here I don't know how to manage so many projects at once I don't know how to work with developers and manage tickets and stuff like this and that's why you bring in a CTO who can do that managerial side and really bring a bit of development expertise into the organization and can set up things like you can see on the check stack here there's a whole bunch of different ones you can choose from jir is the one that we use in warning side Ai and it's worked really well for us and when you have a CTO who comes in and knows how to use jir for your project management in this phase you can see that the profit margins are increasing a bit again thankfully um but you taking on a big cost of that CTO so that's eating up a lot of that growth that you take but it's much better than that establishing phase where you've taken on so many new people but your Revenue levels are still pretty low finally the last phase is expansion and this is from $50 to $100,000 per month so the team here is going to be your CTO you're going to have a senior AI developer as

before but you're going to have three Junior AI developers underneath them so in this case you could maybe throw in another senior AI developer depending on the kinds of projects you're doing or depending on how good your team is and how well your CTO is managing things but basically expanding that S Junior developers so that your senior and your CTO can be taken care of a lot of the planning and and directing them on what they need to do and the grunt work is being done by the junior AI developer so that you don't take on too much cost I've also thrown in here a consultant which I'll touch on in a second then you've got your virtual assistant a fractional CFO instead of just a bookkeeper so he's sort of upgrading your Finance capabilities uh in this phase because he's handling quite a lot of money now and then throwing in to help you on the marketing side a CMO uh Chief marketing officer and then a copywriter as well to help with things like email copy and also content creation and we also have a product/ client relations manager in here as well and this is what we found at warning side to be really necessary for the bigger projects that you take on having someone who's in charge of managing the client and being sort of the in between the client and the devs and making sure that everyone's on the same page and putting someone responsible of you are responsible for this particular project going ahead has been super helpful for us so having a product owner/ client relations manager has been a really key role for us in allowing us to scale further the focuses for this phase are going to be hiring and training processes as you're bringing in so many of these Junior AI Developers you need to make sure that they're being onboarded and trained right for working in your organization this is how you're supposed to do prompt engineering within an organization This Is How We Do reviews and all of these things need to be streamlined and clearly documented so that you can onboard new divs without this really clunky like two Monon period of just them bashing into stuff until they finally learn how it actually works so documenting it and working on those training processes as soon as those new hes come in and then also diversifying your offering away from Strictly implementation to things like AI consulting or AI education when it comes to this diversifying of your offering away from Strictly development uh the quote here breaks it down so we've built a capable development shop so we've got a really good development shop on our hands we've got a great team we are able to deliver quality projects now it's time to diversify our income and build a support team for me on the marketing side basically we have the AI expertise now we've proven that we know how to do this we've helped so many of our clients do the same now you can start to like break that knowledge and expertise into other services okay we can help you with Consulting and identifying what best use cases can be use within your business or we can make an AI education package to help your organization understand this technology as a whole and you can start to sell different services to different segments not necessarily just those businesses who are ready for AI implementation within their business so that's what the consultant represents in that team it's expanding outside of implementation to say A3 or $5,000 of a Consulting package or you might put together some kind of workshop and the consultant hops on in and educates a business for a few thousand for a 2-hour Workshop there's these kind of options that open up now that you actually have the credibility of we build AI stuff for businesses we know what we're talking about so that's why you don't start with education and Consulting immediately you do need to kind of learn the ropes and figure out what actually works so you can go back and sell those services with some kind of credibility you can get away with it just immediately but the credibility really comes from we have this this that we've done this is why we can tell you we direct your business on how to implement on your AI strategy moving forward and so finally as promised the compensation estimates are here these are just a starting monthly cost you will likely people asking for pay Rises or they're performing really well so you want to increase their pay but this is roughly the starting monthly costs or starting fees that you're going to have for these different staff members so the revenue share developer you can start off at 20% or 30% depending on how the negotiation goes um so that's for the early stages where you're taking on hey I have a $3,000 project if you want to build it for me we can do a Reven share you get 30% even again it depends on the on the person you're working with but if you can get around that 20 to 30% that's ideal and then your virtual assistant you can expect to pay about $1,000 a month for that if they're working around the clock you might not have that much work for them so it might be less but if you're talking about a full-time virtual assistant that's about how much you're going to be paying your senior AIDS will start at $ 8,000 your Junior 5,000 your bookkeeper and finance will start at $500 to $1,000 a month depending on the level of services that you need then your CTO comes in at whopping $112,000 per month which is why we wait a little bit longer to get them involved the CMO can be around $66,000 a month your copywriter can be three then you have your product and client relations manager which can cost around $5,000 a month as well so again these are starting prices you may be able to find cheaper elsewhere but these are just the costs that we've encountered at morning II in order to get good talent at these different levels of uh levels of seniority and across all of these different roles in general so hope this been helpful um I tried to bake in as much of my experience over the past nearly 2 years of building these businesses um into that I really hope that that's demystified a lot of these different things like what should I be focusing on and when I will be putting the slideshow on my free school Community there's a little post you can find in the YouTube resources this entire slide should will be on there a you guys to take if you want but yeah that's all for the video if you want to watch my video on how to hire your first developer that'll be up there I highly recommend watching that after this but that's all for this video guys thank you so much for watching and I will see you in the next one