# I Sold AI Automations for 749 Days: What I Wish I Knew Day 1 ## Метаданные - **Канал:** Nick Saraev - **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52yOx4nAGM8 - **Дата:** 16.04.2025 - **Длительность:** 51:08 - **Просмотры:** 31,932 - **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/12299 ## Описание Join Maker School & get automation customer #1 + all my templates ⤵️ https://www.skool.com/makerschool/about?ref=e525fc95e7c346999dcec8e0e870e55d Want to work with my team, automate your business, & scale? ⤵️ https://cal.com/team/leftclick/discovery?source=youtube Watch me build my $300K/mo business live with daily videos + strategy ⤵️ https://www.youtube.com/@nicksaraevdaily Excalidraw I used in the video ⤵️ https://excalidraw.com/#json=RdM6GTFtO1Fn0mypdVEzE,DGQqFZ7ZPXJMBJfPy8qo1w Summary ⤵️ After almost 2 years of selling AI automations, here's everything I wish I knew when I started. My software, tools, & deals (some give me kickbacks—thank you!) 🚀 Instantly: https://link.nicksaraev.com/instantly-short 📧 Anymailfinder: https://link.nicksaraev.com/amf-short 🤖 Apify: https://console.apify.com/sign-up (30% off with code NICK30) 🧑🏽💻 n8n: https://n8n.partnerlinks.io/h372ujv8cw80 📈 Rize: https://link.nicksaraev.com/rize-short (25% off with promo code NICK) Follow me on other platfor ## Транскрипт ### Introduction [] I've sold a automations for 749 days and now I make over 170 grand a month. Here is literally everything that I wish that I knew on day one when I got started. I've made basically every mistake under the sun and my hope is by doing so you guys aren't going to have to. So I'm going to deliver this blackboard style in the way that I normally do. Let's start with the biggest which is the reality of AI and automation. And automation sounds really fancy. It sounds really new. It sounds very ### 1. The reality of AI automation [0:23] special. Has the word AI and automation in it. How cool. But the reality is AI automation is just a business. The exact same rules apply to an automation that apply to literally any other business out there. Whether it's a plumber, whether it's your aunt's flower shop down the street, whether it's NASA, you know, whatever it is, the same rules are going to apply. You're going to have some sort of lead genen at the top end. Okay? Then you're going to have some sort of sales to convert those leads. fulfillment to fulfill the promises that you made during the sale. Then finally, hopefully, you'll have some sort of mechanism to retain people. And once they retain people, you'll either cycle them to um sales or you'll go right back to fulfillment, eliminating that step completely. So, this isn't just AI and automation. This is any business model. The only thing that's really unique about AI and automation is this part right over here. This fulfillment step is usually, you know, the building of systems that solve particular business problems. Okay? I've said this in a number of my videos, but I think it's really important because there's so many people getting into the space nowadays. This is just a business like any other business. It's just a specific sort of thing that we're selling. So everything that you've been able to learn about other businesses applies here as well. The only thing that it doesn't apply to is this section. Okay? So anything you've ever learned about lead genen, you can leverage it in a automation. Anything you've ever learned about sales, you can leverage it. Anything you want ever learned about retention, you can leverage it. The only real thing that's a little bit different here is just the way that you build systems relative to the fulfillment of some other service. Let's say marketing or websites or something. Okay, that's the biggest thing. So, just to get that out of the way, now that that's good, we can actually talk um real things that, you know, I wish that I actually knew on day one. And the first is that business value is a lot more important than like the technical value of the solution. Most clients don't actually care about the systems I deliver. It's really interesting because I brand myself uh as like a systems person, but the reality is most clients don't actually care about systems, right? they couldn't be damned whether you're building a cool AI automated system to do it or you're sending it to some offshore agency to have it done for you. The only thing they really care about are the results. Okay? They care about the results. Uh cost in order to deliver those results. Basically, if you look at these two, they care about the return on investment. So whether you do it through some fancy AI and automated system or you do it yourself working 45hour days somehow or you know have some blend of both human and automated means in order to fulfill something. Customers don't actually care about the system that you built. Um your make. com or n automation is awesome but like nobody actually really gives a [ __ ] if I'm being real. What they care about is they care about the return on investment. If they spend $1,000 with you, how much money are they going to make? Right? If they invest $10,000 on the system, are they going to make over $80,000 or whatever their ROI threshold is? So, I'm saying this because I've had so many situations in my life where I have frontloaded the technical aspect of it and I've just talked a tech all day. Cool system, cool model, here's what the flow is going to look like. Here's what all this stuff does. They don't actually care about that, right? When you're selling a service to a business B2B, you're selling to another business and businesses really talk just in terms of dollars and return. Next, focus on fundamentals, not fancy tech. I can't tell you how many months of my life I spent chasing down various rabbit holes to learn new technologies. Can't tell you how many months of my life I spent learning a specific tool stack cuz I thought the specific tool stack was going to be amazing. The reality is any noode or any automation or hell even any like programming platform cursor or VS code or whatever the these all do the same thing. Okay, these allow you to build systems in the cloud for the most part that accomplish some sort of customer problem. So all you need to do is just learn one of them. They're all the same at the end of the day. Sure, some will allow you to do things easier. for a little bit less money. Some allow you to do things faster. That's totally understandable, right? Naden versus Make versus Zapier, Lindy, all those other platforms. They all have their pros and cons. But all you really need to do in order to check off that little box of the um business side of things that we talked about here, this fulfillment stuff, all you need to do to check this is you just need to learn one. So, if you really want to make money with this stuff, do not bounce around every new fancy drop, okay? Just focus on mastering one platform or one solution. Get really good at it. Spend three whole months in it. Pre-commit 90 full days. I promise you uh you won't regret it. When you get really good at that one thing, you use that for all the subsequent builds. You'll be faster, more efficient, um the client will be happier, and you'll be able to focus again on the things that actually matter, which is your ability to drive business value, not technicals. In a similar vein, clients care about results. They don't care about how you got there. So, this is really interesting to me because I used to get in the habit of trying to like justify all the work that I was doing to clients. And this is a really big problem when I was starting out. You know, like I would feel like a client wasn't really paying me enough money. I thought, you know, well, I did way more work than $500 worth of a project. I want to get paid more for it. The reality is uh it doesn't matter how much work I put in to get something done. What matters is what we agreed on initially and then the value that I drive. If I'm not driving value because I took a very circuitous pathway to get to the system I built for a client and it doesn't matter. Client doesn't care. Clients again they care about dollars for the most part. They care about the deliverables. There's a difference between applied systems and academic systems. So a lot of people get into AI automation thinking that they're going to learn a lot about artificial intelligence. They're going to get to play around with like models. training. The unfortunate reality is um what we are we're basically applying systems that other people have built. We're not building the AI. super cool chat GBT consumer model. We're taking these technologies that other people have basically you know spent their entire lives theorizing and writing on you know uh chalkboards about and doing all this complicated math over and then we are asking ourselves how can we apply this technology into a business and actually have that produce a demonstrable ROI for the business. You know if you really want to make a ton of money with the services model I'm showing you guys and a bunch of other people on YouTube are showing you guys. It's not actually about like developing some cool proprietary new system. That has nothing to do with it. It's just how can we take systems that already exist or tools that already exist and incorporate them into systems that solve a particular customer problem. Finally, you just sell solutions. You don't sell tech. So, you solution obviously begs the question, in order for there to be solution, there has to be a problem. So, if you get good at selling solutions, not technology, you know, just a wider answer to somebody's prayers, you will virtually always guarantee yourself an income source. You don't have to worry about any of that. I'm going to show you guys two paths that I see some new AI automation agencies go down. Okay. Um, basically the first path focuses on tech and the second path focuses on business. So if you focus on tech like I see a lot of people that enter my communities and my programs and leave comments on my YouTube videos do unfortunately um you know you're going to be delivering extraordinarily complex solutions. These complex solutions are going to take a lot more time for you to deliver and then people are going to subjectively see them as a lot less valuable. So it's going to be more time. less pay. You're going to spend your time working on these academic systems or trying to like build something really cool that doesn't really matter anyway. You're going to spend a bunch of time trying to make it technically perfect, which the clients don't care about. And you're going to grow really slowly scale in a very limited capacity. Instead, if you take a business focus, like I recommend you do, not the tech focus, you're going to focus on simple solutions that work. literally taking automations from my channel, maybe a couple of other people's channels that talk about using this stuff specifically for business purposes, where you're going to, you know, browse through templates and look for ways to solve problems using the templates, not look for templates, and then try and figure out the problems afterwards. You're going to find simple solutions that work that aren't freaking rocket science. Okay? Then you're going to apply them to real businesses. You're going to focus on client results. What's the deliverable they get? What's the ROI? Then ultimately, you're going to grow a lot faster and scale your business like this as opposed to something like this. So be blue. Blue is where we're at. Blue is what I want you guys to be. That's sort of number one. ### 2. The mindset shift [7:25] Number two is a big mindset shift that I had about halfway through running my automation business because listen, I'm not like a mindset or like a belief guru. Really, I focus just on how do we strategically and tactically implement systems like this into businesses and then how do we make money selling those things, right? But I think there is something to be said about mindsets and how they help you do that. So I had a big mindset shift. Basically, I've come to realize that your beliefs determine your ceiling. Okay? I used to think that was your inherent capability that determine your ceiling. And I thought there are some people out there that are just better. They're faster. They're more efficient. They're more intelligent. They have more business experience. They have more connections. They have more of all this stuff. Okay. What I've unfortunately had to realize um and that I wish I had internalized earlier is that stuff. It's just like if you're lining up in a marathon and you know somebody fires the gun so everybody starts. All of those things that I talked about are advantages that will buy that person an additional 0. 5 seconds off the start line. That's it. That doesn't mean anything. Okay? 5 seconds in a marathon means absolutely nothing. Sure, it'll help them get going from their perspective. They're going to be ahead of you for a real long time. I guess you know half a whole second or whatever. But the people that actually make it, the ceiling of how fast you go or how far you can run is entirely based off your beliefs. If you believe that making a $10,000 a month revenue or income or whatever is very difficult or it's impossible or whatever, it is going to be very difficult or near damn right impossible to do so. If you believe that dragging and drop modules across a screen and working from your laptop in, I don't know, Bali or Indonesia or Thailand or Australia, where wherever the heck you are, Australians probably don't want to work in Australia, but you guys get my point. Then it's going to be very difficult to make money dragging and dropping modules across the screen and working from your laptop. But if you treat it as no big deal, if you see that there are thousands if not millions of other people out there that are doing the exact same thing, and if you can find a way to convince yourself that it's not a big deal really to be making a ton of money or to be reaching a lot of people or to be implementing cool technologies and cool businesses, then the likelihood that you actually achieve that thing is so much higher. Okay, I see this at basically every top performer in their field, whether it's a politician or it's an athlete or it's a business person. The work that they do, they see as just really objectively not a big deal. Ever since I adopted this, I started being like, well, what am I really doing at the end of the day? I'm doing some lead genen activities. I'm doing some sales calls. I'm not like hitting the pipeline, you know what I mean? I'm not like hustling my ass off in order to do this. I'm like working essentially like a desk job that I built for myself here. The second that I started doing that, my income shot through the roof cuz my belief was, hey, this is no big deal. And so, if you really just want that sort of unflapable, unfasable confidence, rewire your brain to think that what you're doing is just not really a big deal. Cuz objectively, it isn't. We're not exactly hunting tigers in the savannah anymore, right? We're sitting down. We're trying to take tools that other people that are extraordinarily intelligent and driven and motivated have have built and sweat and bled over, okay? And then take those and implement them into businesses and actually just produce an ROI. What we're doing is really not that incredible or amazing or whatever. Um, and the amazing thing is if you think about it from that perspective, you can still build the best lifestyle on planet Earth for yourself despite the fact that it's nothing super special, which is, you know, what I think is actually special. Okay. Next big thing is to focus on revenue generating activities, not busy work. I spent the big bulk of my first few months as an AI automation agency focusing on busy work. I focused on stuff like, hey, I got to get the perfect website. Hey, I need to print out business cards. uh post on Facebook. Hey, I need to show activity on Instagram and LinkedIn. Hey, I need to go to um I don't know, networking events or something. Okay. And I guess what I'm trying to say is I was um I was spending time on literally everything except for work. Um you know, I was trying to make my stuff look pretty. myself look legitimate and professional. Um but actually, the more that you the more time that you spend trying to look legitimate and professional, the less likely you're actually to be legitimate and professional. Actually, the guys that end up being legitimate and professional, they always start not looking legitimate and professional at all because they just get going and then they start they have like a cardboard box for an office and they start talking to homeless people on the street to try and sell them services. Do you know what I mean? Like that's the way that you make it. Okay, if you have that sort of mindset, if you focus on revenue generating activities, a read talking to customers here instead of busy work, it is inevitable that given enough time, you will make it. Uh on that note, most revenue does not come from glamorous activities. I used to think that, you know, the best and coolest companies on the planet earth had the most amazing and intricate sales funnels. My salesunnel here is the simplest legitimately. It was cold email upwork. I did a little bit of community posting. I did some like cold DMs. Okay, that's it. You just do the most boring, unsexy, unglamorous activities just repeatedly for a long enough period of time and then you make it. So, if I just focused on that literally from day one instead of day 100 like I eventually realized, I would have been so much further ahead. It would be crazy. On that note, you know, we talked about doing things a really long time. Successful automation entrepreneurs aren't special. They're consistent. So, just repeat after me. Humans are persistence hunters. This is really the one thing that makes us stand out. Okay, when we have a goal, it is not our ability to sprint at the goal that makes us really good at achieving the goal. It's just the ability to dog after it for long enough. Even if you're walking or jogging or going really slowly or from your perspective, things are barely changing. If you just continue doing it for long enough, you continue doing those boring, unglamorous, unsexy lead generation activities for 2 years, you'll eventually make it. Yeah. On that note, what I've come to realize is that in order to really crush it, I've needed to treat business like a game with specific levers to pull. Now, I make a ton of analogies. I used to play a lot of Runescape as a kid or like Maple Story. I used to play like obviously a lot of competitive shooters like Call of Duty and stuff like that. Like I think a large portion of my audience, which is primarily male and between 20 and age 40 probably understands these video games have ways to be exploited. They are exploitable. You if you're playing Super Smash Brothers with your friend or whatever or some arcade fighter, you know, Street Fighter or Tekken or whatever, if you press a certain combination of buttons in rapid succession, it's kind of like an exploit. It's like a hack, you know, like the enemy can't react because they're just too busy getting hit with the fastest little tiny punch all day. I forget the character. Uh who is it? Like I don't know, falcon punch guy. Uh the point I'm trying to make is there's like a certain combination of moves that just make you extraordinarily likely to beat your enemy and everybody on planet Earth just says, "Well, that's cheating. " Well, that's exactly what you need to do in business if you want to get ahead. You need to do those sets of moves that everybody else is like, "A thanks, you're cheating, man. What are you going to do? You're going to make an Upwork profile? That's a that's not a business. What are you talking about? " You need to take the lowest hanging fruit and you just need to attack it consistently and systematically. spam the A button or the X button or whatever controller you're playing on or you know my other analogy is a casino. If you wander into a casino and you see a slot machine and every time you pull this little lever, it just goes 777 and you're like, "Oh my god, I'm rich. I won. " But then, you know, instead of you giving a getting a million dollars, what you do is you make $1. Okay, it's not exactly glamorous. Okay, you made a dollar. But what if this machine's rigged and every time you pull you make a dollar? Wouldn't you despite how much money I mean, you know, if you're a quadrillionaire, probably not. But for most reasonable people, wouldn't you just sit there and just pull that lever all day? Like even if it just makes you a dollar and I mean, you know, your arm's getting kind of tired. I mean, it's pretty consistent, right? Like it's boring and it's like I could do here I could do this for 17 hours and, you know, I'd just be looking at the same screen all day going 777. But you know how much money you'd make by the end of that day assuming you pull that lever every 10 seconds or whatever? You'd be insane. So this is basically the way that business works. cuz you will find a slot machine with like a broken lever that just rings 777, makes you win every time and it pays a slight little bit more money than all of the other slot machines. That's what you do. So, just treat it like a game. Treat it like Super Smash Bros. or Call of Duty. Go spawn camping, you know? Treat it like Runescape, right? Like fish for the lobsters in the specific optimized way and you will win. Personally, I think that a big issue that a lot of people have with businesses is that they focus too much on like the intentionality and their mission and the values at the start line before they've even like played the game for a little bit. And like when you're they're trying to like design the perfect life before they even know what it is that they can do and what they can't do, right? Within the constraints of the game. So I was kind of like that. I started to really take off the second that I just zoomed out and was like, "Wait a second. Why don't I play the game a little bit and then I'll kind of feel out what I want my perfect life to look like after doing that for a bit. " Um, so go figure. Okay, so real success usually looks really boring from the outside. Now I kind of touched on that with the consistency aspect and like the 777, but it does look pretty boring from the outside. And then small consistent actions are way more powerful than spread dy heroic efforts. So, I meant to write sporadic. So, is what it is. Can't win them all. If this is your starting point, you guys ### Starting point: limiting beliefs [15:29] are right over here and you guys kind of want to run through and determine what are some of these revenue generating activities. I guess what I'm trying to say is when I build these out, I basically say what are two possible universes or futures. If you focus on non-revenue activities or you focus on revenue activities, if you focus on non-revenue activities, you're going to spend years working on the perfect landing page. You're going to spend months telling all your friends about what an amazing business opportunity this is and about all your ideas for this angle and how we're going to implement X, Y, and Z and do this amazing market. Okay? Nothing's ever going to come out of it. you're going to be busy as hell 247. You're not going to get any results because you're just afraid to like bend over and pick up the dime you see on the street because you think it's not worth your time. Or you feel afraid to sign up to the freelance platform that everybody looks down upon. Or you feel afraid to pull the lever, you know, a bunch even though everybody's like, "Well, that only gives you a dollar, right? " These are all self-reinforcing limiting beliefs. If you think something is hard, it's more likely to be hard and it'll force you to stagnate. And if you contrast that with revenue based activities like talking to potential clients. So you know I mentioned a bunch here but like cold email is really big right now which I'll touch on a little bit more later. Obviously Upwork is one of my faves but you know there are a bunch of other ones. Fiverr top and so on and so forth. This is a really cool one in Europe that is starting to pick up some traction. I think it's called Malt Malt. Yeah. Malt. com. So if you just get on these things that a lot of people don't consider real businesses. Just talk to enough customers. You kind of figure it all out later. Same thing with community posting. Then you'll get a bunch of real feedback and opportunities. And then you'll be able to kind of start that cycle, that feedback loop that eventually just makes you better and better. And then even if you had limiting beliefs by doing this over and over again, you basically get to collect what are called like reference experience. You get a big list of wins basically. And then the way that your mind works is every time you're contemplating making a decision, it just looks at the total number of wins versus failures when you've tried to do that thing and you know how intensely you felt those. Then if you have more wins than you have failures, it'll be like, "All right, well, it's really not that big of a deal. " So you'll actually be able to convince yourself of something just through pure action even if you didn't believe in it begins uh at the beginning. Anyway, that's how you get your mindset shift started. You then consistently start executing our revenue based activities. You compound results and then yeah, that's how you essentially establish new belief systems. So there's only so much like soul surgery you could do just talking to yourself in your room alone or writing your teenth journal entry talk, you know, about all the things that you want out of life. A lot of the time you really just want to like make something happen. You just have to start and you have to not know exactly where you're going, but you just have to believe and trust that you are the sort of person that can take feedback and then iterate and improve your strategy, your angle of attack. And I think that really at the core is what confidence is. It's the ability to say, "Hey, I don't actually know what the right answer is right now, but I'm confident that if I just do this for long enough, I'll eventually figure it out. " Couple ### 3. The necessary evil: custom projects [18:01] unnecessary evils that I wish that I knew a little bit about before, and the biggest one for me, at least for AI automation agencies, was custom projects. So, I know previously we were talking about mindset and before that general business. Well, now we're really diving into like what is specifics about an AI and automation agency that I wish I knew. We got some funny memes in here. What is a custom project? Basically, a custom project is one where there is a custom scope. So, if you guys have ever worked on any sort of freelance platforms before, you'll know that a lot of the time it's like, "Hey, I'm looking for a freelance that can help me do X, Y, and Z. " And X, Y, and Z is like this thing that they want done, right? This is in contrast to templated projects where you've actually built out the thing before, okay? and then somebody says, "Hey, I want a sales system. " And you're like, "Oh, okay. Well, here is a sales system, right? " Obviously, templated projects are a lot easier to scale because you don't have to do any work. But custom projects are a lot easier to sell because you can do specifically what it is the customer is asking for. Okay. So, yeah. Um, custom projects are custom scope. They're usually kind of like long kind of like arduous affairs. They require a lot more client management because, you know, you have to go back and forth with a client. There's usually some sort of like revision period or something like that involved. And basically like this is what it is to be like a you know if you think about it like a service business you are servicing a client and usually a lot of the time when you do custom project it's a different route every time you start here and this is a goal. The first time that you do it you might go like this. The second time that you take this path you might go like this. The third time you try and deliver some project maybe you I don't know takes you a lot longer than you thought it would and then eventually you get to it. Um so because of this now that we're all on the same page a lot of people think that custom products suck and that you should never do custom products. So a big recommendation in a automation generally if you go on a lot of other people's um channels and stuff like that they say you should never ever do custom projects. Custom projects are unscalable and never make it with custom project. Uh but I always disagree custom projects are like training wheels. When you get started with something you have to make it as easy as humanly possible for somebody to say yes to you because you have no experience, no credibility, no real skill. You're probably not the best automator. Um you basically just have to make it as easy as possible for somebody to say yes to you. So you can at least get that flywheel that we started talking about in the last section started, right? And custom projects are the simplest and most straightforward way to do that. So despite the fact that it's not scalable and it's kind of like eating a Twinkie diet for the rest of your life, you know, it's like if you're in a bind, um, custom projects are the best way to get started. Then you can worry about scaling and doing like the hyperoptimized business model after you hit that inflection point and actually like see a little bit of growth. Okay, so yeah, the danger is that they're time inensive. They have very unpredictable scopes. A lot of people think that they create revenue plateaus and burnout and they definitely do if you just do your custom projects all day. You won't be able to scale past maybe like 15 or 20k a month. Hell, some people 5k, right? It really depends on your own productivity and the sorts of products to take on, but they become really accessible to beginners. So, you should just take them really quickly. And then their real value is they just help you pay your knowledge debt down quickly. I'll talk about debt a little bit later, but basically when everybody's at the start line of a business, they and start line of anything, they just have all these debts that they don't, you know, really realize exist. They have like skill debt, knowledge debt, they have client management debt, they have like, I don't know, limiting belief debt, they have confidence debt. They have a bunch of debt. And the easiest and quickest way to pay down that debt is just to get started even if you don't really know what you're doing. So, what I recommend you do with custom projects is I actually recommend that your first step is like, I got to go custom. Okay, custom and I just got to like build stuff out for people because it's going to maximize the surface area. amount of experience you get in the shortest possible time. Is it going to maximize the money that you make in the shortest possible time? No, but it's going to maximize the experience which when you zoom out will eventually maximize the amount of money you make. So use custom products to learn and then you basically like kind of graduate to productized services or templated services like I was talking about earlier. Usually the best timeline looks like 0 to 3 months kind of focused mostly on custom projects. Then after you spend some time productizing, then after that you actually like scale. This little section here with the custom projects, this is a graph of your revenue over time. You know, like at the beginning you're probably not going to be making a lot of money. you're going to like shoot up every time you get a project and you'll make like zero the next time and then maybe the next project's a little bit bigger, but it's not very scalable and predictable. Eventually, you'll get over to the point at which you're actually productizing and you have enough money and then it's usually like a lot more linear from there. So, yeah, that's my recommendation for you guys. Just start with custom projects. Try and do them within the first 3 months or so. If you find yourself doing custom projects after 3 months or maybe between 5 to 10k in revenue, the likelihood is you're probably going to plateau. But uh yeah, looking back, I definitely would have done more custom projects if I could. I tried to, you know, productize or template a little bit too early before I really knew enough about the problem I was trying to solve to do so. And that yielded a plateau for me right around $15ish,000 for 3 or 4 months that we did not effectively break through until I did a bunch more custom projects. I remember me and my business partner, I should say, landed one that was just about $10,000. And it was in working through that custom project that I learned enough about how A and automation works in general and the problems that my audience was suffering from that I could actually take that next step, start templating and then start spiking my rev. We got two paths here, right? If you go custom products forever, you are going to have short-term revenue spikes with long fulfillment periods. You're plateauing and then you're going to burn out and probably stagnate and go back to square one. Um, but if you do it for, you know, zero to three months, then right after you're done, you can start productizing really quickly, create templates and systems using all that knowledge that you just built, and then grow consistently with a scalable business. All right. Next, I want to talk about some unsexy lead genen that actually works. So, if I had just taken ### 4. Unsexy lead gen that actually works [23:09] into account the various unsexy ways to make money when I was at the start line of my business, I'd probably be a lot further ahead than I am right now. But again, I was kind of focused on the sexy ones, right? Like, I spent a lot of time dabbling in paperclick ads because I thought paperclick ads were just really sexy. I thought that like, okay, if I want to be a successful business, I need to run ads because that's what all other successful businesses do. But I didn't actually stop and ask myself why. Like, I just kind of tried to pattern match what they were doing. And pattern matching is okay, but you know, it's a very big business usually that's running ads or they they've worked through some funnel or they spent a lot of money. And it's usually different from like a beginner who doesn't have any money. They don't have any experience. They don't know what their offer is. They don't know product market fit. So, yeah, as I mentioned before, best lead genen, always unsexy. Go for the unsexy ones. If I had two lead genen approaches here, okay, one was sexy and one was unsexy and that was all that I knew about them. Literally, there was nothing like one just looked really cool and it was all futuristic and automated, whatever, and the other was like boring and lame and it's like you could have been doing that for the last 50 years. I would actually choose the unsexy one every time because odds are that would be the higher ROI producing one versus the sexy one. Everybody wants to do the sexy stuff, right? And so because everybody floods over to the sexy side, the unsexy side usually ends up being the hidden gem and then eventually the unsexy side becomes sexy and then we you know find a new unsexy lead genen approach. But yeah, so you know when you have people avoiding a platform for instance like Upwork or Fiverr or Toptal or Malt or whatnot because of some preconceived notions about profitability, you know, obviously there's less competition and there's a lot more opportunity. Okay, I'll run you through some Upwork success strategies. I've recorded a bunch of videos on exactly how to get up and running with Upwork. So, I'd recommend if you really want to learn a little bit more about how Upwork works, definitely check those videos out and get that deep dive. But just as like a, you know, from a bird's eye view, a lot of other people, for instance, are really hesitant to make like custom videos. So, I just did custom videos on Upwork. I recorded a custom video solving a person's problem. And I did that every day, and I did like 10 of those every day for a very long time. Eventually, I'd sent, you know, a couple thousand of these. And because the custom videos had such a high return on investment, when somebody actually watched my video, they were so much more likely to convert. I was able to take a platform that most people think you can't make more than like $500 on per project and I was able to routinely get clients that were over $15,000 in CLV. That's pretty wild, right? Like that's a 30x on people's beliefs versus what I actually did. variety of other success strategies. By optimizing my profile and by figuring out what the actual problem is that I was solving and by doing some pointed copyrightiting and by making minor tweaks to my profile photos and so on and so forth, I was able to just crush it and take kind of like an engine that a lot of people might have just walked by at some junk heep and be like, "Hey, you know what? There's actually a lot of value in that engine. I can actually tune that puppy up and slap it in a car and maybe it's not the newest and most amazing engine, but I can make that thing go way faster with a proper tuneup. " I'm not a car guy if you guys could tell. Uh anyway, yeah, there are a lot of psychological barriers that stop people from using these methods. So, as long as you're just the sort of person that cares more about the return on investment than anything else, then you'll be just fine. Another big thing that I'll talk about in a second is cold email. So, variety cold email approaches that generate 2 to 5% reply rates. You really don't need more than a two to 5% reply rate to crush it, right? You send like 500 emails a day. Hypothetically, even if you received a 5% reply rate on the 500 emails a day, that's 25 replies. If even five of those are positive, you can convert like one of those um to a meeting a day. So you have like one meeting a day basically. Do you know how many companies out there have one meeting a day? Like no companies day. It's crazy how few businesses have the ability to have one meeting a month. Okay. Vast majority of services businesses out there only get their business through referrals. Which means they get one in a blue moon and they will hound that one customer to the ends of the earth and try and do the best and most amazing job ever. So the please sir, may I have a referral um thing actually happens for them. But that's so unstable, right? I mean, month by month, they're all over the place. If you could build a consistent lead generation strategy that gets you one meeting a day, okay? And you can actually do that with a 5%, you know, hell, even with like a 2% repier, you can probably get a meeting a day if you send enough emails. With just doing the same thing all day, you do that for like two or three hundred bucks a month realistically with carrying costs. Like you're in like the top. 1% of businesses already. Just do that for a year, you'll be making $50 $100,000 a month assuming you play your cards right. Yeah. There's another big model called communities, which I wish that I had known a lot more about earlier. I mean now obviously I run communities so I can actually firsthand see the value and the power that they had but communities were just getting started right around the time when I was getting started with my automation agency. Like I joined a couple of communities. A really cool one that I was in was called Demand Curve. And because I was in this community I basically, you know, there were people that previously would have been so inaccessible to me to to even be able to talk to. they were like up there shrouded and in light, you know, it's like they had freaking halos on and I was like down here and you know there's like 20 layers of people in between us just in terms of skill and capability and execution potential and stuff. Um but in a community um they kind of flatten all of that, right? Like you're just a member just like basically everybody else. So even if there's people out there that are like extraordinarily rich and powerful, if they're in the same community as you, you could literally just shoot them over a message and like connect with somebody that you might have otherwise never been able to. So anyway, the reason I bring that up is because I wish that I had known about communities way earlier. I think it would have made a lot more money. highly recommend that you guys do not sleep on communities because they are blowing up right now and it's a great opportunity to get into a bunch of communities for either very low amount of money or for free and then use the relationships that you create in those communities now even if it's just 10 minutes of checking your posts on your top three communities a day and responding to them building like a digital reputation a digital presence and then in a few months using that to just like build a sales empire and then yeah focus on the ROI not how cool the method seems so okay there's some sexy um lead genen approaches and then there's some unsexy ones so Let's look at the sexy ones. Some really sexy ones are content. Okay, so like YouTube, that's super sexy right now. Everybody's talking about YouTube. Everybody's like, "Man, Nick, uh, should I make a YouTube channel? Nick, please, should I, you know, make a YouTube like you because your YouTube's so great and you're making a ton of money off it and stuff. " Um, the reality of the situation is if you try and start a YouTube channel right now, you have no experience, no skills, no nothing. You're just doing the ads thing all over again. You're just copying a successful creator like myself, but you don't really know what goes into it. you're just trying to like copy the I don't know like the the form of it, not necessarily the function of it. So content's really sexy and very few people actually make money with content. I want to say like 99. 9% of people will like spend all their lives trying to produce content. They never make a dollar from it. Don't focus on content. Look sexy. It's nice. You get tons of followers. Everything's cool. Um you don't really see the reality that goes into it. Don't focus on things that are really high effort. like ads for instance. Okay. Um and don't focus, you know, stay away from things that have long times to ROI. Instead, focus on the unsexy, boring stuff, like direct outreach. That's by far the least sexy and most boring thing here. But it works. You just send people DMs and cold emails day in and day out for a very, very long period of time. Here are three. Upwork. You get direct access to buyers that are actually looking for people to solve specific problems for them. They've already done all the work sourcing the people. They're on their hands and knees salivating, waiting for you to give them a treat. They spend some poulry sum, maybe a couple bucks, in order to make the connection request or reply. But these are real customers. How many connects do you actually have to spend in order to like talk to somebody that you otherwise would have never been able to talk to? Really just a few dollars. Treat it that way and I think you'll see there's a very large return on your investment. Same thing with um you know cold email platforms like instantly. And then communities like school, right? None of these are very sexy. I'm not going to lie. A lot of people look down on them. A lot of people are going to think, "Oh, you do cold email? No way. You're a spammer. " It's like, "Well, that's what you think. " When I was in college and um you know, I was trying to throw it was an event management company in college. I was doing a bunch of promoting for one of my parties and we were trying to like fill the joint up. This bar that we were throwing our party at had like never seen more than like 50 people in it at one time. So we were committed and proven to trying to get more than 50 people in. One of the most viral and simplest marketing strategies for us. You know what it was? We would print out a bunch of posters. Then we just go into the bathrooms above the urinals for the guys or at the backs of the bathroom stall doors for the girls. And we would just have people either myself, you know, for the guys or we pay a girl to do it or just, you know, a girl was part of our friend group, she'd go do it. um and just paste them in the bathrooms. So when people were taking a piss, they just looked at our freaking posters all day. That is probably the least sexy marketing method ever. But we had like 400 people at that event and that was like the primary way that we did it aside from some Facebook marketing as well. That lineup was out the freaking, you know, almost down the mountain. I went to university in a freaking mountain. Like crazy stuff. The least sexy marketing opportunity ever. It's funny. Every time I tell that story, people are like, "Really? People actually go? " Because And I'm like, "Yeah, cuz nobody else was doing it, man. You have I don't know how many people go to my university, but a lot of people probably 50,000 people saw that while idally taking a piss and being like, "All right, well, yeah, I'm going to be up there anyway. I might as well drop by, you know? I mean, I go to the bar every now and then. Why don't I just go at that specific time? " The these unsexy marketing methods just crush. Okay. And when it comes to AI automation agencies, Upwork is one, instantly is one, school's another one, and these are the ones that I'd recommend that you do. Okay? Here are a couple other things that I wish I knew more about early on, and that's the idea of daily systems. So, I'll give you a quick story. I remember one time we were scraping some leads or something and we had to run some campaign send it and we had to do it very quickly. There's some opportunity out there, some piece of news that like recently hit and we want to capitalize on it and I was chatting with somebody I was working with at the time and we needed to like scrape 500 emails. I remember telling him like, "Hey, like, okay, if you do 250, I do 250. We could probably do this in the next couple hours, right? " And he's like, "Well, dude, I'm not going to like scrape emails. " Like, come on, man. That's like a that's like an assistance job. Let's just get one of our assistants to do it while uh you know, we focus on more important things. But this is the rate limiting step. This is the most important step. In order for us to send emails, we need to have the emails, right? So I was like, "No, dude. Like we should do this ourselves. This is really boring and I know it's annoying, but we got to do this ourselves. " And you know, the guy was working with us was just like, "Ah, I don't really want to do it. " Anyway, I tell you this because what I've come to realize is that throughout my entire business career, I have always been the bottleneck. So if I can get better at doing something, then the entire rest of my business usually increases at least a proportionate amount. If I am the bottleneck, okay, then I get 50% faster at scraping leads or something like that or I get 50% uh more accountable or 50% more committed, my business will grow at least by 50%. So it's like a direct one-to-one relationship between myself and then the company and companies that I run. So I don't know if this is just me. I personally think a lot of entrepreneurs like this. The best way that I have come to massively ### 5. Building daily systems that stick [33:10] increase my potential and my capability is by building daily systems that stick and just doing a lot of very small boring things like I don't know scraping leads for instance or whatever every day for a very long period of time. If you can just get into the habit of building super simple systems, I don't mean automations, I mean like your own systems. I wake up, I go to my coffee machine, I make coffee while the coffee is steeping, I dripping, right? dripping, I open up my laptop and I respond to three emails and then I go back, get my coffee cup, pound it back, respond to another three. Legitimately, if you could just build a simple system like that, that might make you 10% more effective, your revenue might go from $100,000 to $110,000 in 3 months. I know it sounds really simple, and dumb, but we are the bottlenecks in our companies. So, if we can just become a little bit faster and a little bit better, the potential is insane. So, systems beat motivation, and they beat willpower every time essentially. And the systems don't have to be complicated. they can be boring and unsexy like I was talking about earlier. Another one of my systems is my daily community management right now. So I went from not knowing anything about communities um a year ago to being I think I'm top three or top four by revenue on school right now. School being the largest community platform on planet earth. So I went from like being nobody and not knowing anything to like being one of the top ones. Do you know what the simple system that enabled me to do that was? When I wake up my laptop is usually on my nightstand. I will roll over all crusty head and I'll grab my laptop and as I wake up I will go through and just respond to all of the community posts and leave a comment on everybody. Uh because I save, you know, 15 or 20 minutes like slowly waking up when I do this. Um and because it's the very first thing that I do, I knock it out before I do anything else. That simple system has enabled me to build a suite of information products that now generate me over $100,000 a month. Sounds simple, but again, it's boring. It's unsexy and it works. So anyway, focus on revenue generating activities. When I say revenue generating activities, I mean talking to customers. I mean setting aside 15 minutes every morning to go through and do three Upwork applications. I mean setting aside 30 minutes every morning to respond to a bunch of community posts or DM five people on your school community that you find interesting or send cold DMs with a video breaking down 10 people's Instagram profiles and just do that every day for like a year. Structure your environment to make important work inevitable. I was talking about rolling over and getting my laptop. I think that's a really good example. But some other examples are, you know, make your workplace a little bit more effective or efficient to work in. If you are working on a really crappy computer right now and it like negatively impacts your ability to do some sort of custom Loom video or whatever, like invest a little bit of your money into like a nice computer so you have like an easier experience. If you find yourself hating your work because your back hurts after a while, like invest in like a nice chair. Structure environment to basically make important work not only inevitable, but I think more importantly enjoyable as well. And then yeah, you know, I've gotten more accomplished in one or two hours of consistent daily action every day. I don't know how many hours realistically I'm spending on all of this combined now. I think it's like three or four. So maybe not just one or two. I've gotten more done in that time period and I'll usually like, you know, I finish with my most important daily actions by 9 or 10 a. m. than most people will do all the way up till, you know, 5 6 7 8:00 p. m. And that's just because I frontload the most important stuff and I do it. In order to do this, obviously you need to identify your lever. So in my case right now, because I'm um shifting primarily to information products, for instance, like coaching and YouTube and stuff like that, my lever, the most important thing for me to press is content. And so what have I been doing every single day? I've been publishing a video. And I've done this now for the last couple weeks. And my engagement's through the roof. I'm making more money now than I ever had before. You know, another one might be communities for me. Okay. When the vast majority of my revenue was uh from my agency offerings, okay, every morning, what did I do? I did cold email 30 minutes. I would go through my cold email stack. I would make one tiny change, one improvement to every cold email campaign that I have. I'd do some copyrightiting. I'd analyze the replies. I'd think about better ways to do it. I'd build systems that enable me to do it better. I would do Upwork, okay? And I would do um between I mean some days I did 20, but at least 10 applications a day for a very long period of time. I would do this just immediately the second I woke up. Why? These are my levers, right? I'd send emails. I'd send cold outreach to people that I found important. I would have certain numbers I need to hit and I would just do them. The shape of that is going to change, you know, depending on the sort of business model that you're doing. At the end of the day, the system of just doing the most important thing immediately does not. I'm big on streaks. I uh believe strongly in streaks. The power of streaks for me is immense. I don't want to lose a day not doing my outreach because I, you know, see it in my calendar. I've gotten 29 days the 30 days of the month. I really don't want to lose that last one. So, I call this whole idea momentum. And you only build momentum through consecutive days of action. Um, so for me, you know, I focus on momentum. I focus on streaks. If I just build up enough momentum over a long enough period of time, I basically inevitably become unstoppable. And I didn't know that when I started, which is really unfortunate. And I think I could have been a lot better had I learned that earlier. I have a couple of example stories that I could throw at you guys, but I think I'll leave it there. I know the video is getting a little bit long and then yeah, um I touched on this, but design your lifestyle to minimize friction for important work. Okay, so if you guys want to like do this really efficiently, here's my recommendation. When you start, okay, you want to build an A automation business. The very first thing you do is you identify your revenue generating levers. You list them out. You itemize. You're like, "Okay, my revenue generating lever right, you know, right now is this and then this and then, you know, after that it's this. " Okay. And then it's like, all right, so how do I structure my environment in such a way that I could do these three things every day for a full year? That's my litmus test, right? So it's like, okay, maybe I restructure where my computer is. Hm, maybe I wake up at a different time so I can record my stuff or send my outreach or do stuff like uninterrupted or hm maybe I block my phone or I put my phone in my car before I start my work or something. Design your environment to minimize the friction. Set some minimums for these. So maybe this is 10, maybe this is, I don't know, 30 minutes. It's tough to quantify this because obviously it depends on the systems you have. Then maybe this is another 15 minutes. Okay, set your timers. Build your daily minimum viable action. Then just build some accountability structure. It's like, okay, like by the end of the day at 11:59 p. m. I need to have these three things done. If not, I'll text three people and tell them I'm a loser and buy them all coffee or something, right? If you just do that every day for 30 days, you will crush. And it doesn't have to be for 30 days, but I do like the finality of a month. I think a month is very powerful. So yeah, you know, if you guys can just follow that, I think regardless of what business model you're using, whether it's a automation or whether it's something else, you guys are inevitably going to crush. Another big thing I want to talk about is client ### 6. Client psychology & what actually matters [39:14] psychology, what actually matters. So we've touched on this initially. We got to focus on results here, not implementation. So I don't actually talk about software and systems unless somebody asks me. I will say, hey, I can totally do what you're asking for. For context, last month, I built a really similar system for somebody else and that enabled them to achieve an additional $25,000 a month in monthly recurring revenue. We did this through this cool mechanism, but I'm not telling them about the software. any of this stuff until somebody asks me. The vast majority of the time when I say stuff like this, people are just like, "That sounds awesome. " Okay, great. Just do that. Just do whatever you just told me, and that's awesome. Like, unless somebody specifically says, "Hey, so what is the system that you're going to be using in order to build this? What tools are you going to be using? What no code programming wires, scripts, servers, all this stuff? How are you going to do it? " I don't even tell them anymore. When I started, I told them everything. But what I've come to realize is clients actually prefer the simplicity of like a blackbox system. What is a blackbox system? It's something that they can put money into and then get a lot more money out of. And a client doesn't actually care about this. They don't care. All they care about is that this works. So if they can see that they put in this and then they get that, they'll be very happy and they don't ever need to peer inside of this opaque black box. The behind the scenes journey is invisible to the client and should be. A couple other little tips I want to give you guys right off the top of my head. Prioritize the first demo experience above all. So like I don't mean demo as demo. Like don't brand or pitch it as a demo, but like the first time you demo a thing, uh show them a service, the money that you've been able to generate for somebody else. Like actually think really deeply about how you want to construct that experience cuz first impressions matter a lot. Like I think just pound for pound they're probably like four to five times as valuable as like subsequent second, third, and impressions. So um you should spend you know four to five times the time to really nail that first one I would say. So yeah, speak their language business. um don't speak yours technical and then if you have to spend a ton of effort and time on something do it on the stuff that's visible for the client. Okay? Don't do it on the stuff that like they can't really see. So what I mean by this is like hm you know well should we spend 800 hours trying to make this system work for all sorts of data under the sun for hexadesimal inputs and binary inputs and like fourth number system inputs and fifth and sixth and seventh and whatever. Uh no nobody cares about like you mastering every single edge case. So, don't worry about all that stuff the client's never actually going to enter in as an input to your form or your flow. Instead, it's like, what should you actually be spending an extreme amount of effort on? This is going to sound dumb, but it's like if your system generates an email or something, make the email really pretty. You know, if your system generates a Google doc, make the font nice on the Google doc. Make the colors cool. Look a little bit into design and aesthetics. The stuff that the customer actually sees is oftentimes much more important than all the work that went into producing it. Believe it or not, we are entering an era where it's like form over function in many cases. So, design and presentation matter a lot more than uh than you think. So, you know, your actual work might actually be, you know, you have a bunch of technical challenges, tons of implementation details, you have to pick the software, you have to do tons of bug fixes, you have to make all these architecture decisions. The reality is client doesn't care about any of this stuff. It's irrelevant to whether or not they're going to want to pay you or get you on for a follow-up project. You know what the client actually sees? They see that initial um showcase where you run them through the system. They see the uh quality of the interface like what do the emails look like? They see whether or not it solves their problem. Wow, man. This sol this is exactly what I want. This I was totally struggling with this for a while. And also, most importantly, was it on time? You know, he told me Tuesday, it's Thursday. People are going to think less of you for that. You know, deliver stuff on time. It doesn't have to be difficult. Um, but if you focus on client satisfaction and things that impact client satisfaction instead of stuff that makes you happy, okay, you're going to get some follow-up work, and that's where the money is. We make money on follow-up work and retaining our customers. Next up, I want ### 7. The art of leverage [42:50] to talk a little bit about leverage. So, leverage is the idea that you can produce a greater output from a smaller input. The idea about leverage is kind of where the name comes from is the idea of a lever. Okay? And a lever, just to make a long story short, is kind of like if you have a big rock over here, this is a boulder and it's 10 lb. The distance between this point where the boulder is and then this um thing called a fulcrum, you know, this is just like X. I know we're doing math right now, but bear with me. In order to lift this up, what you need to do is you need to apply the same amount of weight that thing is just on the other side at the same distance from the fulcrum. Okay, so you have kind of a couple options to lift this thing up. Basically, you could provide 10 pounds of force here. But what if you go further along the line? Okay, if you're at 2x, believe it or not, actually, just mathematically, in order to lift this 10-lb boulder, you only need to put 5 lbs of force in here. The place at which you choose to apply force is very important is basically the metaphor. I don't know if it was Archimedes or one of the old Greek guys, but he said, "Give me a lever long enough and I will move the world. " The idea being that like, you know, if we can just stretch this puppy out really long and eventually we can go, I don't know, like a 100x, you could literally have a gust of wind applied to this thing and that gust of wind would be enough to lift this 10 pound rock. I should have made this a,000 pounds or something, but hopefully you guys can see my point. So, now that we're done with the physics stuff, uh, what is leverage? It's just more output from less input. And the way you do it is you do it by applying force in a very particular place. This is at the definition of why automation is great. Actually, the whole industry is all about leverage. You can make systems that apply pressure at a specific point. Well, then you can massively improve the profitability of a system itself. So, anyway, the first thing I do nowadays, I calculate the ROI before I do any sort of automation. How much money is the customer currently making on their time? Okay? Okay. And then I lay things out as like a pipeline left to right. And then once I see this pipeline left to right, I'm like, "Okay, what are they currently doing? Hm, I wonder what points there are that I could apply a little bit of pressure by building an automated system that would massively increase leverage. So templates are your biggest leverage point when you're building a system for a customer because it kind of lets you start at 80% complete. Uh, you know, instead of you having to spend a month building a solution and like working through all the weeds or whatever, you can actually get something that works pretty good in like 5 minutes and then you just make a couple of fine tweaks to the blueprint or template and then you upload it to the no code tool. These are personal leverage systems. This is about you, right? But you know, if you find a way to use templates, what you could do is you could massively improve or increase their results by putting a tiny bit of force up at like the specific points that matter. In a templates case, that might be you could tell a client, hey, I'm going to deliver this for you in 72 hours. I don't actually recommend delivering projects much faster than that because the longer you take a project to fulfill a project, usually it's correlated with the client thinking that you had to do more work in order to do so and they're willing to compensate a little bit more for it. But, you know, you could have that be one of like your benefits and you could use templates in order to like significantly out compete everybody else that's pitching them at like 3 or 4 weeks. Get that initial business and then, you know, have your company scale from there. You can spend less time on it. You could do a lot of things, but that's just one simple example of leverage. I personally don't believe in automating high value client touch points. I don't automate anything in my community, for instance, because there's a lot of perceived value in just you talking to me. Why would I automate that? I mean, why would I give anybody the impression that I am not personally the one talking to you? What are highv value client touch points in the agency space? Um, it's like your initial call, your initial contact. I see so many people out there, they're like, "hm, what if I create an AI voice caller and have my AI voice caller close the client? " It's like, clients don't care about that. Clients definitely don't want that. Do not have the first point of contact with you, which is a very high leverage point of contact be an automated system that kind of screws up half the time, right? So, it's about just choosing, picking and choosing where you apply that force. I mentioned this previously, but design matters just as much as function. Some tasks are actually worth doing manually forever. So, I check my bank balance every morning. Takes me five minutes. I copy over some transactions between accounts and stuff like that. And I have like a record of all the money that I've spent the last 24 hours. I do that manually. It's actually worth me doing it manually because it takes me 5 minutes and then I know exactly how much money went into my account yesterday, is going out, which is very, very powerful to have as a business owner. Anyway, the point I'm basically making is lay out the system from start to finish. Okay, just on paper. This is a client system. You know, this is um this is sort of the first thing that happens. This is the second thing that happens, the third fourth thing that happens, and this fifth thing that happens. Once you have it on paper, then you get just lay it out in front of you. Then you can choose what points you should build systems for. Hm, I can really automate four. And if I automate four, the whole throughput of the pipeline is going to go up. The customer will be able to make a lot more money. Or maybe I'll do one and four, but I'm not going to touch two, three, and five cuz they're okay right now. So once you've systematized first, you've identified the points of high leverage, then you can go ahead and build systems that scale up. Here's like a quick little flowchart or decision tree basically of how exactly to go about employing this process. So is it a high leverage activity? If yes, is it client facing? If yes, is personal touch critical? If yes, you should do manually. Okay, you should do manually, 100% manually. There should be no robots involved in the process. You should create templates and SOPs. Then you should revisit this periodically just in case and then grow your business that way. If it is not a high leverage activity, then very easily consider automating or delegating that. build systems that enable you to, you know, achieve 80% of it with like 20% of the work. If it's worth it for you to build an automation, like actually spend the time going through the process of putting together an automation, which may realistically take a few hours, then you know it's worth it. Build the automation, monitor the effectiveness, and then optimize. But if it's not worth it, then a lot of the time there are a lot of systems that are in my business nowadays, they're like, I should not have tried automating initially. So, I just keep them manually because, you know, there's some very simple things to do as a person that if you do them yourself will massively improve leverage. One thing that I've started, well, I'm not doing them as much anymore. One thing that I started doing after about I think like eight or nine months my agency was I started recording customized videos walking people through a proposal. So, I had like completely automated my proposal process, which is great and I think the proposal generally is fantastic. So, highly recommend it. This doesn't change um my recommendation to use it. But um I found that like when I recorded a custom two-minute video and then I attached it to the proposal and in that video I literally just walked through my proposal top down saying, "Hey Peter, how's it going? Just wanted to record a quick video for you walking through my proposal. " My conversion rate went up something like 15%. So my conversion rate already was like 15%. So I basically doubled my conversion rate for two extra minutes of work. Super simple, super easy. Why? It was the warmth. It's the perceived value of like having a consultant walk you through the thing. It's like, hm, this is really complicated, but if I watch that video, then I'll know everything that I need to know in 2 minutes. And that, oh man, that Nick guy is so nice. I like working with him. I want to work with professionals like that, you know. Is it fully automated anymore? No, it's not. But I was able to double my conversion rate with just a little bit of manual work. I applied at the right place. ### Outro [49:11] Hopefully you guys appreciated all of the points that I made in this video. These are all points that I wish I could write on a letter and bury in a time machine and have go back 30 or 40 years. Unfortunately, I can't. So the second best thing I can do is just help as many of you guys avoid making the same mistakes that I did by getting your belief systems right from day one, getting the and just understanding the fundamental concepts of leverage for instance and like the idea of doing some things manually even though we're an automation agency. Really just not different from any other business if I'm real. So most of the same tactics and tips that I'm helping you guys apply to your current AN automation company will apply for all future businesses. If you internalize these early, you'll be a lot better off than if you try and sort them out later. And yeah, I I really enjoy having the opportunity to do this. So, if you guys like these sorts of videos, definitely drop down a comment um asking for a video on some other subject. If it's a good recommendation or suggestion or question and I haven't actually answered it in a video elsewhere, then I will absolutely consider doing it. And I get most of my content ideas and Rex from you guys at this point. Not too I run Maker School, which is the simplest and fastest path to building an AI and automation agency today. Uh, we just crossed 1,900 members as of the time of this recording, and I make the price go up every 100 members just to reflect the increased value of the network and assets. If you guys are on the fence about starting an AI and automation agency, you have thought about doing one for quite a while, and you just made it to the end of this video and found yourself nodding along, uh, you will really like Maker School. It'll jump start your ability to go from zero to one and get that first customer. So, I'd highly encourage you guys to check it out. you guys already have a successful and thriving business, check out make moneywithmake. com, which is my premier automation community, which instead of taking you from zero to one, takes something that works, takes some one, and then helps you scale it to 100. So, this is how you scale your business to $25,000 a month, $50,000 a month, $100,000 a month, and beyond. These are all the things that we talk about in the program. All right, I think I'll leave you there and cap the ad off. Really appreciate having all of you guys with me. Thank you very much. Like, subscribe, do all that fun stuff. I'll catch you on the next video. Thanks so much. Bye.