How To Get Ahead of 99% of AI Agencies As A Complete Beginner

Here's how to get ahead at 99% of AI agencies, even if you're a complete beginner. So, I'm making this video to hopefully turn you from somebody over here on the left-hand side of this normal distribution into this lovely blue fellow over here. Somebody that is consistently outperforming the vast majority of people, and it's going to look like magic from the outside, but from the inside, it's really just going to be a collection of four simple concepts. Now, I use these concepts, and I had to learn these the hard way when I was scaling my own agency from 0 to 72K a month. I'm going to save you guys a ton of time just by laying them all out for you as simply as possible. The first big concept is this idea of the agency

owner mindset shift. And that's where basically you go from a technician to a business owner. Now, obviously, if you're starting with AI and automation, you're more concerned about the implementation right now. how to put together a system, how to use various tools and platforms, and how to connect them all together like Lego blocks that they do something cool. The reality is though, this is a very temporary period. And if you make this longer than the training wheels that a toddler puts on a bicycle, you're hamstringing yourself and you're really interfering with your ability to make revenue. The reason why is because nobody rewards technicians. Nobody rewards builders. What people reward are owners, strategists, consultants, and that's what you need to be if you want to start earning real money. So success begins with shifting from this technician mindset to an agency owner mindset. And what do agency owners do? They focus on the business transformation, not the technical implementation. They don't actually focus on the tools. way that you build these super incredibly complicated NAND or make or zap your flows. What they focus on is, hey, if I slot this system into a pre-existing business, how much more money can I make them? How much more savings can I provide for their bottom line? How much of a reduced headcount can I get that business as a result of the system that I'm building? Essentially, what we're doing is we're charging for the impact that we're providing rather than the actual time and effort that we took building. So, this is very important because if you charge through build time or effort, you're only ever going to make 20 bucks an hour. You're going to be lumped in with all the other freelancers and builders out there. Okay? If you charge based off value instead, you're just going to ask yourself, what sort of return on investment am I driving? If this person pays me $5,000, how much can I make them? Okay? And let's say you provide them with $15,000 of value. Realistically, what you can do is you can charge a fraction of that instead of some sort of hourly rate. And even if this system took you an hour to build, you could still get away with charging $5,000 for it. In fact, in many cases, you can actually charge even more. So, I'll talk all about how to do that in a later part of this video. And also, I've talked about this at length in other videos. But the way that you do this is you cultivate a systems thinking approach to business. And it's interesting that, you know, I talk about no technical implementation here and I use the word systems. What do I mean by this? Well, there's a difference between efficient and effective. And these are very different things, and this is a nuance that not a lot of builders understand. Efficient means you optimize a process really, really well. Okay? Effective means you optimize the entire pipeline of processes really, really well. Now the thing that business owners care about is not how well you can optimize a particular node in a process but how well you can optimize the entire process. How well you can essentially chain together systems to produce a return on investment. So efficient is just looking really narrowly and in depth at one node in a process. And effective is zooming out a bit seeing that in reality a system that you're building for a client is not just that individual system but it's part of a wider ecosystem. and you need to make sure to match that to the rest of the nodes. What I'm trying to say here in layman's terms is don't be the sort of builder or AI and automation developer that spends 99% of time optimizing one tiny node in the flow. Don't spend all of your time accounting for edge cases. wondering, well, what if this data format or hm I'm concerned about latency or hm I need to optimize this further. Odds are the business owner isn't going to care because that's probably unfortunately just one step in a myriad of steps that are required to get somebody from introduced to that business to a paying customer that's retained and that produces a lot of value. So don't focus on a specific node in the business. Focus on the entire business. The way you do this is by making your primary job client acquisition and management and then almost ignoring implementation details completely. I know that this sounds weird because we're talking about AI and automation. But if you guys can internalize everything that I've talked about here and go from technician to business owner, you'll see your earnings start to spike naturally as a consequence. So this is you right now, okay? You are here and you have a choice. Do you become a technician or business owner? Well, let me paint a pretty grim picture of what happens if you become the former versus latter. If you start off and you stay as a technician, you focus on tools like Zapier and Make. com and NADN and implementation like how I'm going to be doing this for you and all the complex process flows and graphs. Then you start charging for time and effort. You say, "Well, that system only took me an hour to build, so I guess I'm only going to build them for an hour or that was actually really easy. I'd feel bad charging more than $50. " You then spend the bulk of your time working in your agency, and naturally, you hit a low revenue ceiling. you're not going to be able to make it past 3K, maybe 5K. I don't know. The numbers obviously depend on a lot of circumstantials, but in reality, you're going to hit a much lower revenue that you'd like to. Now, contrast that with the people that join my automation agency programs that really internalize and get the material and that just instantly start pitching customers, clients, and focusing on ROI. Okay? They focus on business impact. They charge for outcomes and value. They work on their business, growing their business, and then they achieve scalable growth as a result. When you do this, you do really tend to spike. look at the various wins that have occurred in maker school just over the course of last week for real and practical examples. So

that's number one. Number two is the idea of a daily revenue generation system. Okay, consistent daily lead genen is the top differentiator between a struggling agency and a successful agency. Now what really sucks is a lot of people think and they have this sort of glamorized idea of what like a successful business looks like. And in 99% of cases that idea of a successful business involves zero lead generation. But you'd be surprised at how much mundane and wrote and annoying and manual work that the average high performer does. It's insane. I spent over 3 hours today just recording the exact same video over and over and over again. It was an Upwork roasts or series of Upwork roasts for my communities as well as just responding to simple Q& A. I'm going to make over $300,000 this month as a result. Now, that's my form of lead generation right now because that's the fastest and strongest lever that I can pull. But back when I was scaling my AI agency to $72,000 a month, my lead generation mechanism was cold email. It was Upwork. It was making community posts. It was cold DMs. It was reaching out to people within my network and reactivating. If you're not frontloading those activities and spending the first 1 to two hours every day exclusively on those lead generation tasks, you are really hamstringing yourself. By far, there is nothing more important in any agency model than front-loading revenue activities. And I'd go as far as to extend that to most business models out there cuz if you don't have customers, you don't have a business, okay? You have a hobby and you want to go as far away from hobby as humanly possible if we're to make money here. So, how do you actually do this in practice? Well, what you do is you enumerate all of your different lead genen channels. Okay, let me give you an example. One lead genen channel that works really well right now for our business model is cold email. Another that works really well is Upwork. communities. Another that works really well is cold DMs. Another that looks that works really well is client reactivation or follow-ups or lead reactivation, whatever you want to call it. These are all activities. Okay, so these are five different things that you could spend your day doing. And what do you do? You take all of these categories, you make a simple spreadsheet called tracker, and then you just count up the number of each of these that you do every day. And then on the left hand side here, what you do is you have a date column. And every day in the morning when you wake up, today would be April 30th, you go through and you do a certain number of cold emails, you do 10. Upwork apps, you do five. You do certain number of community posts, you do three. You do 10 cold DMs, you do five follow-ups. And what you do is every single day, you just do that exact same sequence of events for the first hour or two hours of your day. And by the end of the month, you'll have compiled a massive list of wins that are statistically improbable not to have delivered you at the very minimum some sort of conversation. And ideally, and most likely, if you're consistent about it, and if you're smart, the momentum will drive you forward. And you'll have generated in this massive list of various outreach activities, you will have generated one or a number of clients. It really doesn't get any simpler than this. If you're incapable of putting together a spreadsheet like this, unfortunately, it's going to be really tough for you to like move ahead with more or less anything. Not just an AI agency as our business model, but most business models in general. I want you to treat this stuff not like super flashy cool technology project. I want you to treat this like the gym. you tracking your sets and your reps because that's exactly what this is. If you can just sustain enough outreach for a long enough period of time and get good at that outreach, which tends to happen when you do it enough, you will succeed. Okay, so that's what that looks like. And then my other big tip is to maintain the no exceptions rule. Even during busy client delivery periods, continue performing your lead generation. The reason why is because growth solves everything. Now Sam Alman, who most people here are probably familiar with if you're in AI, he's the current CEO of OpenAI and he was also a part of their founding team and so on and so forth. He wrote a blog post, I think it was probably like at least 5 years ago on his experience working with a variety of SAS companies. You know, he was in Y Combinator. I believe he was the president for a period of time where he essentially helped a bunch of new software companies go from complete and utter beginners, people that have never really sold a single instance of a software product offering to, you know, multi-million or multi-billion dollar unicorn. So, he's seen a lot of that stuff. And the number one thing that he always repeats is that growth solves everything. Well, I'm of the exact same mind. When you grow everything, all of the problems that are otherwise major issues in most businesses tend to disappear. Let me give you an example, okay? If you are really busy, you know what solves being really busy? Growth. If you grow more, you'll make more money and you can start handing off those things to other people. Let's say you don't have time. I mean, I guess that's the same as being busy, right? But let's say you have so many clients and leads that you're like, "Well, there's no need for me to do more growth because I'm already drowning in opportunities. " Believe it or not, you know what solves time? Growth. If you grow more, you have more access to better lead generation opportunities. That means that you can pick and choose the clients that are going to pay you the most. So, if right now you're capped out at 5K a month, okay, when you have 10x the leads, you'll be able to pick and choose the leads that pay you 50k a month instead for the exact same amount of work. Because in reality, there's variance between how much money a lead will pay you for a given amount of deliverable. So, I guess the point that I'm making is growth really does solve everything. Do you want a simple step-by-step process that you can follow? Well, here it is in a flowchart format because we're systems people. You wake up, you block your first 1 to two hours for lead genen, you complete daily minimum activities. Now, you have to define these activities yourself. In my Maker School program, we talk about three main ones. Cold email outreach, upper proposals, and then community engagement. Then you just track it in a spreadsheet. And then once you're done with that, check it off and you're done for the day. At least for the lead genen activities, you can do everything else you need like client delivery work, like walking your dog, like watering your plants, whatever. Okay. After you're done with the day, review, adjust tomorrow's targets, and then you just begin the feedback loop again. This is actually like modern business. I hate to be so reductive, but if you want to crush it and it's 2025 and beyond, this is what like a good sustainable bootstrap business looks like. You have to frontload a lot of lead genen activities and you have to do the vast majority of them yourself. Okay, the

next is the idea of strategic market focus, not being distracted. Again, I had to learn this the hard way. I've been distracted by a great many things throughout my time. But the whole idea here is you test, validate, and then commit to something for at least 90 days. Now, the reality is if you're a specialized agency as opposed to a generalized agency, couple things happen. One, you understand a problem way better if you niche down. Okay? So, you're much better at defining a problem. Two, you have a lot of experience building solutions that solve that specific problem. You've probably built systems that make solutions cheaper. Okay? And then three, you know how to stand out compared to all of the other people in your industry. All of these coales into you being able to charge more money, close deals faster, and then do less work as a result. So, if you want to just instantly make more money, niche down. The issue with niching down is people typically don't give themselves enough time to really explore a niche and to really trust that the approach that they're doing is working before they look at some, you know, usually pretty sparse numbers and think, "Oh, okay. I should probably move on. " Iterating based off of data is great and I highly recommend it. And we're in a very datadriven industry, so I understand why everybody wants to do this. But in reality, markets have lag. And that lag can really screw with your ability to say approach A is better than approach B. A lot of the time, you just have to give it a couple of months before opportunities start materializing. So, my recommendation is test multiple niches at the same time. Use a structured 90-day validation process. Pick a niche using something like my niche discovery exercise here where I have example niches, service lines, and positioning statements. I then run through them and then I just combine them. I say I build sales systems for website developers. I build finance systems for IT consultants. I build uh business development systems for high ticket SAS companies and so on and so forth. Think hard about things that you have experience with, things that you might have a unique angle or have a good opportunity to pitch to people maybe within a network, pre-existing reactivations or whatever the heck you happen to have. Think hard about that. Pick three, okay? And then just tackle it for 90 days. If you're not seeing the results that you want in that 90-day period, don't change anything. just change tac within the industry. You know, don't change the niche itself. Focus on digital first, high ticket, low regulation industries for best results. There are a bunch of them in this niche discovery spreadsheet. And then track your metrics just like we had a tracker over here for cold emails, Upwork communities, cold DMs, follow-ups, and whatever the hell else you want. When you do your outreach, figure out how many people are responding to that outreach per niche. Figure out how many sales calls you had per niche. Then just one for one compare them. After you've done this for 90 days, you'll have more than enough data that you'll actually be able to make a realistic and intelligent decision about which one is better. And you know the really cool thing about all this in AI and automation, the work that you do, let's say to test three niches is not at all three times. In reality, the same systems that you're applying to niche A, niche B, and niche C are usually duplicatable. So in order to test three times the amount of ground, usually only have to do maybe like 1. 5 times the work. And this here is called leverage. In this particular case, it's 2x leverage. As AI and automation developers and AI automation agencies, we look for leverage wherever possible. So, don't abandon your niche too early. Commit for the full testing period. Okay, here's another little SOP. Identify your promising niches. Create targeted messaging for each. Run parallel outreach campaigns. I literally did this, by the way, just uh last week. I ran a parallel outreach campaign for videography and then website agencies. I did that live in a video called Watch Me Start and Sell an AI service in just 10 hours. I started off with a 2. 7% response rate I think on one and like a 2. 8% response rate another. I've since iterated these to 4. 6 and 4. 9% respectively. And I had a third niche here called real estate agencies which after sending I don't know a thousand something emails I just realized the numbers were so absolutely ass backwards it didn't make any sense to keep on going. But this is a they're real live examples of me legitimately putting these things together right in front of you that you can just follow step by step just swapping out your own language verbage or niches wherever you want. From there you track performance metrics. At 30 days you'll have some early indicators on progress. At 60 days you'll have some growing traction. You'll be able to see this is a graph of the effectiveness of various approaches over time. You'll be able to very quickly and easily see these diverge. Right? So obviously this black one here is what we want. This green one here is kind of like, okay. Then this orange one here is a definite no. And then you just pick the one that works at 90 days. And then you just continue onwards. And usually when you continue onwards, you get better and better at that specific niche. Then you commit to it. You rebrand all your marketing assets, your website, and everything. And then you just go allin. Seems pretty simple when somebody like me sits here on my hottie ivory tower and tells you to do it. But in reality, the fact that something is simple does not necessarily exclude it from being hard. So if I'm to be frank with you, it is very simple. It's just it's also quite difficult to actually sit down and commit to it for a long period of time. So if you are capable of doing something simple for a long period of time, like testing a niche for 90 days, you will win cuz that's something that not a lot of other people are willing to do. The fourth big concept I

want to chat about and something that was really holding me back for quite a while was this idea of client focused delivery. So, believe it or not, you know how we were talking about implementation details not really being that important earlier? Well, turns out the money that clients pay you and their satisfaction depends way more on your ability to communicate with them, communicate the value and benefits of your offer and the thing you're building than the technical excellence. You could spend a 100 hours building the most amazing system ever. And then if while you're giving them a demo it just doesn't look great, they will equate that system that you spent 100 hours building to a crappy system that some intern spent two hours building that just looks nice. That's why clients are hiring you because they don't want to pay attention to what's going on behind the hood. Okay? They want to treat your system like a black box. They don't actually care about what's going on. All they want to focus on is the stuff that they put in and get out. And what you need to focus on is not this. this, the stuff that they get out. So how do you do this? You create business outcomes document to align expectations from day one. What I mean by this is when you are building some sort of product or service, when you're going through those niches that we talked about way up here, build a list of all of the things that your customers are going to see from your product. Let me give you an example. If you were building a cold email system, you'd ask yourself, what are my customers actually seeing? Okay, so seeing as somebody that sells a cold email system? Well, they usually see the leads. They usually get some sort of meeting booked notification. They usually see the CRM updates. They usually see, I don't know, a meeting recording or something like that if they're not doing the meetings themselves. So, what does that mean? That means that you have a fantastic opportunity here to package all of this stuff in as sexy a way as possible to improve your perceived value. Because this output, this is actually what clients are judging you on. They're not judging you on all the work that went into building this system. They're not judging you on all the messaging and all that stuff. What they care about are the outputs, the leads, the notifications they get, the CRM updates, and the meeting recording. So, what do you want to give them? Well, realistically, them like, I don't know, a really sexy sort of notification. Maybe you do it in Slack or something like that. You legitimately spend the time to design something that looks really nice that I don't know, maybe has a little profile pick in the bottom righthand corner that's designed and branded with the right font. You know, if you're going to spend time doing something, spend time on their experience because that's what's important. Meeting book notification, right? Don't just send them like a standard meeting book notification. Uh, I don't know, add a little like confetti thing emoji to the title. Change the fonts a bit. When you update a CRM, don't just add uh their first and last name and company name all in lowercase or something. Format it nicely. Change the way that the CRM works that the information that the customer needs and gets is front and center and looks nice. Same thing with the meeting recording. Use a nice, high-quality platform so they have everything they need. This seems silly. It really does, but it works because again, customers are judging you based off of the output, not necessarily the implementation or the input. Okay, really quick and easy way to instantly improve the amount of money that you could charge clients is just scheduling twice weekly updates. These twice weekly updates are literally like, you know, if this is your calendar, okay, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, literally just schedule an update on Mondays and Thursdays. This is a fiveinut task. That's all that that's going to take you. You can do it after you're done your lead generation activities for the day. All you do in this update is to say, "Hey client, great news. just wrapped up with X, Y, and Z thing that you wanted us to do last week. Here's what it looks like. I don't need anything from you, but just wanted to wish you a nice day. That seems so simple, doesn't it? Well, believe it or not, even if you're a completely and absolutely subpar and really crappy AI and automation agency, if you can get the habit of treating your clients like they are gold and communicating your progress with them, they'll keep you on even if you're doing a trash job. I mean, it kind of sucks to say, but this single hack here can 2x the amount of money that you charge the average client because clients see this as a mixture of professionalism and then also, and this is another thing that I had to learn, nobody really cares about what you're doing unless you talk a little bit about it. Again, you can do all that work behind the scenes inside of that black box and the customers aren't ever going to give a crap because they never actually see inside. They never actually care to. So, every time you do something cool or make a change or whatever, it's actually an opportunity for you to continue selling the client on how cool you are. Okay. A couple other things you could do to do this. Develop a template library. This is going to allow you to deliver consistent quality while reducing delivery time. Clients, generally speaking, would much rather see something in 7 days than 21 days. There's some exceptions to this. Obviously, you don't want your work to seem too simple. You don't literally want to be like, "Okay, thank you very much for the money and give me 5 seconds. Okay, here's your automation. All good to go. " They want to feel as if this is a process that they're involved in. And there's some nuance there, but generally speaking, if you can deliver faster results, you can minimize buyer's remorse, you can improve the perceived value over time, and then you can make a lot more money both for you and for the client. And then last but not least, and one of the most important points here that I wish I was harping on earlier is when you structure your final reveal. Okay, this is your delivery email or I don't know, maybe this is your demo with the team or I don't know, this is where like you create your documentation. Treat this section like it's an exam. Treat it like a test. focus for it, study for it, uh, I don't know, do flashcards so you know what to say. Draft out the first three sentences of your pitch so that you know when you start that meeting, you're going to absolutely nail it because this is way more important than the actual work you're putting into the back end. It's unfortunately way more important than the actual AI automation itself. If you can make your demo work on the first try and work exactly to customer specs and then exceed their expectations, I mean, they'll be hand over fist trying to give you more money right then and there. So, here is again kind of a step-by-step SOP. And I include these in all of my videos because a lot of people find them very valuable. Start with your initial client onboarding. Okay. After you're done with that, create a business outcomes document like I've done over here for all the systems that you're working with clients on behalf of. Write down what they're actually seeing. What are the outcomes? What are the deliverables of the system? Enumerate them and see how you can develop that project in such a way as to maximize the quality of the former. When you build, build from a template library. Give them scheduled twice weekly updates. Then test your solution. Give them a presentation or a demo or a delivery or a video. And then after you're done, check in with them. Okay? This just adds value. And not only does it add value, it also gives you an opportunity to retain the client. When you check in with them after 15 days, 30 days, or 90 days, you can legitimately squeeze an additional 10, 20, or 30% out of your entire client base by repitching them on you. Sometimes, and this is something the realtors know, sometimes you legitimately just have to schedule an annual happy birthday thing and you got to drive around the neighborhood and stop by all of your former clients whose birthdays are today and just give them a pumpkin pie or give them a cake or something. Why? Because odds are they'll know somebody in their network that needs a job and they'll think, "Wow, you know, Nick was a really good real estate agent. " I hate to make it as simple as this, but sometimes life and success in business don't really have to be any more complex. Okay, hopefully you guys

understand what I'm getting at here with this video. There were four major concepts. The first was obviously this lovely idea of focusing on becoming an owner instead of a technician. The second was the idea of daily revenue generation as opposed to just hoping and crossing your fingers that it'll happen. The third was the idea of strategic market focus, committing to a niche for at least 90 days and really squeezing as much juice as you can out of it. And the latter point was this idea on client focused delivery, which is ask yourself what are the deliverables and outcomes that a client's seeing. The work that goes into my system is less important than that. Hopefully you guys found that valuable. If you like this sort of business focused stuff and if maybe you have good automation skills or want to get better at the business side of things, then definitely check out Maker School. It's my 0ero to one daily accountability roadmap where I guarantee that you'll get your first customer in 90 days or I give you your money back. I'm that confident. We get so many people in through the door on a daily basis that end up with their first customer and in two weeks, three weeks as opposed to the full 90 days. That emboldens me to be able to make that guarantee moving forward. If you guys want to make money on the internet, turn this whole idea of AI automation into a profitable business model, that's the best place to start. Aside from that, if you guys are still here at the very end, please like, subscribe, do all that fun stuff that bumps my YouTube to the top of the algo. I'll catch you on the next video. Thanks so much for your support. Bye.