How I Made +$100K/Month As An AI Solopreneur (Step-by-Step)

in this video I'll show you how I made $100,000 per month as a solopreneur in the AI space that is no employees no contractors and really just me plus a bunch of Leverage systems and artificial intelligence should note that none of this is theoretical I actually built out this whole road map for the exact business that I'm operating today over the course of the last few years and I've really just been implementing on that road map ever since so this video is essentially going to be a summary of that road map distilled into four key phases that you and anybody watching can Implement to achieve similar levels of success to me also a lot of people are doing this right now it's not just me at the $100,000 a month as an AI solopreneur there are dozens if not hundreds of people starting businesses right around this time that are taking advantage of the unlocked leverage of AI to do the sorts of stuff we're going to talk a little bit about that in a minute so as I've mentioned we're looking at four phases here and these are distinct steps that I followed throughout my journey we'll start with my own story before I show you how you can actually practically implement this yourself the first step was frontloading client

acquis position as quickly as humanly possible now I know what a lot of people are thinking Nick are you just telling us to get clients yeah I am and no right but I don't think a lot of people put as much value on this step as they probably should and I'm going to talk about some concrete ways that I um got my first few customers and clients ASAP now the reason why this is so valuable is because if you think about it like clients and customers aren't just a part of a business they're actually the entire business if you have no clients or customers what you have is a fancy knick-knack that you work on during the weekends you don't actually have the rest of the company you can build up the most amazing back end of your AI automation agency or content writing company or videography business or whatever but it means nothing at all unless you have people going through that system right so in addition what a lot of people think about when they start a business is they think that they're at like the start line okay so they think that they're I don't know like let's say we have a graph right they think they're at the zero point the reality is when you start a business you're not at the zero point where you're at is you're actually at like negative 100 you're at negative a th000 actually when you start you're already in debt Alex horos and a couple other people talk about this but you're in skill debt technical debt client management debt you're in a ton of debt essentially that will compound very fast unless you consciously and intentionally manage it and control it and that's why you need to get your first customer ASAP I would recommend getting your first customer knowing what I know now before you even build out your product go and find some contracts lock those things down and then worry about building out the rest of the systems later but that's in the side let's talk about what I actually did so when I first started my um I mean I started a number of businesses my door to-door agency back when I was in my early 20s and more babyfaced than I am now you know I had no brand I had no portfolio I had no referrals I had basically nothing the only thing that I had was a ton of conviction and then a lot of ambition but the reality is I had very little to back it up like probably a lot of you guys in my shoes um so the thing is I had a bunch of predispositions around the sorts of customers and clients to get I had watched a lot of content from like these big gurus that were like you don't work hourly you don't do this you don't do that you tell the customer a price they accept it and then you do business but I had all these presuppositions and predispositions but when I went out there and I tried to get customers using those approaches nothing mattered and so I was actually kind of in that weird like uncanny valley of no business for a very long time and it wasn't until I just consciously said okay screw it screw what I've learned before I'm just going to try and get clients as simply and as quickly as humanly possible that I was actually able to make some progress so in my case what I ended up doing um was I opted to go on a freelance platform called upwork now upwork you know big green logo badge um a lot of people have said bad things about it namely that clients on that platform are super cheap namely that if you work on upwork you'll never really be able to escape their service fees and stuff like that you can check out other videos that I posted on why I don't think those service fees are really any big deal at all they currently charge you 10% maybe 15% of some contracts but they also deal with Payment Processing which is 3% X escro which is usually a fixed fee they do a lot for you that makes it really not that much money but anyway um the point that I'm making is I'd heard all these negative things about upwork but then I decided you know what screw Market Opinion let me actually give this a try myself and that's a recurring theme that you're going to see throughout the rest of this um these four phases so my idea was I was going to frontload client acquisition get client relationships as quickly as possible and then I'd worry about the shape of these relationships later I'd worry about optimizing my my packages and my retainers and stuff like that after I'd already done some work and had some money and that turned out great because the main benefit to platforms like upwork or Fiverr or toptw or these million in one freelance business is that like when you when you're a beginner and you have all that debt that I was talking about one of the main portions of that debt is your sales debt you probably don't know how to sell and selling is actually quite a refined science like in order to get good at this stuff it takes a long time it took me almost a decade to get to where I'm at today and I wouldn't even consider myself that good compared to some of the other people out there and the reality is sales is composed of basically at least three things at least um but in my opinion you need to understand a customer problems okay then you needs to be able to eloquently and succinctly State why you're you have a solution to that problem and then the customer needs to pick between you and the million other people that have done that so it's kind of a three-stage problem I call this the buying ladder essentially upwork solves two of those

for you and those are the hardest two for initial and beginner sales people to get so upwork okay if you think about it somebody posts a job on upwork has already solved the problem because if somebody posts a job post on that platform saying hey I'm looking for an automation engineer I'm looking for Conta for my blog or whatever they already know that they have a problem okay also you've Loosely solved the solution as well because they usually know the shape of the solution that they're looking for right if somebody posts a job looking for an AI automation engineer they know that their solution is going to involve an AI automation engineer no right so you've actually gotten two-thirds of the work done the only thing you have to do is you just have to convince people as to why you're the best pick for that particular thing um so there's a little bit of nuance there but the point that I'm making is it just solves a lot of the work for you in exchange you pay some connect uh fee that's like the way that you essentially make applications on the platform sort of like credits and then you also pay them a small little cut of the revenue that you make on a project now um you know my approach to upwork was very fundamentally different from most other people's and I learned this from a business partner that I had um Noah and essentially the key to making this work for me was not just submitting copy paste applications to everybody's job post like everybody else was doing what I did was I created a customized video

recording it was usually between two sometimes even 10 minutes where I'd actually go and I'd solve their problem so this is a quick example of one that I actually sent hey my name is Nick I'm a process automation engineer and I just came across your posting with somebody to help you with AI and automation for social media you mentioned basically wanting a way to streamline your social media and your workflows I thought I'd blow this video out of the park for you and just make it a no-brainer as to why you wouldn't want to hire me um you talked about developing AI models so I'm more than happy to assist you with this I don't know to what degree we'd actually be developing the AI models though I think probably more realistically what we'd be doing is be using pre-existing AI models to generate social media but a very quick and easy example of the social media automation I set up a while ago was one that generated um basically like social media automations using uh Banner bear which is a social media platform that essentially allows you to like create um assets automatically so this is a quick little example of a social media animation that I put together that basically got um a templated image and then it added some information down here with you know the name of the company so I do this sort of thing pretty often and uh I'm confident be able to help you with it doesn't have to be obviously real estate brokerage it could be more or less anything um and then I can also show you how to post it automatically onto Facebook Instagram Twitter LinkedIn uh Tik Tok you know Etc any hope this makes sense you any questions about this or you want to get in touch just give me a call we're happy to help thanks so that video is 2 minutes you could see a bunch more videos like this where I actually sell real upwork contracts in maker school um the point that I'm making is this approach immediately sets you apart because you actually spend a few minutes solving their problem and there's kind of a sneaky benefit to this as well if you're a total Noob like I

was you actually learn how to sell by rot repetition you become better at articulating the solution and talking I mean you're talking into a void kind of like I'm talking to a camera right now but you get better at talking about a particular problem and than a particular solution um and there there's no cost to it it's not like you're getting on a sales call and you get super nervous or anything there's somebody judging you no you're literally just talking to your camera not to mention I think talking to a camera is probably one of like the most in demand and probably best skills you could have just look at what it's enabled me to do with my channel so anyway the point that I'm making is I got started really quickly and then I front-loaded client acquisition on a platform that basically everybody else was crapping on talking about how terrible it was that have now made well over half a million dollars on by the way and um I just I just got going with this uh loom video approach where I was just you know creating a customized walkthrough of exactly how i' solve the client problem I was providing a ton of value up front now once I'd gotten my first few clients because this worked obviously if you do this like many of people in maker School you will get your first client in you know your first week or so as long as you're consistent you send a certain number of videos um you know once I'd got my first few customers and clients I would take something like 30 or 40% of all of the earnings that I made from this and then I just shoved it straight into cold

email campaigns okay cold email campaigns being the other up-and-coming technology or Approach at the time um that was renewed because of AI and personalization but essentially I would send several hundred sometimes 500 sometimes a thousand cold emails a day to a variety of Industries trying to pitch them on my service and you're probably like okay next so which industries did you Target and the reality is I had no idea which Industries to Target Niche I should go into I had no idea about any of this stuff I mean I this is true back when I was going door to door by the way it's true when I was selling content with one second copy it's true when I started my automation agency left click I never knew which Niche is to Target never had any idea so what I did instead was I picked like 10

maybe 15 okay I picked 10 or 15 niches then I developed specific offers for each basically saying hey I noticed you're probably having a trouble with this so I'm going to solve this hey you know I know a big common issue with recruitment businesses is this so I'm going to solve this hey I know a big issue with plumbing companies is that so I'm going to solve that then I just sent them out to as many people as I possibly could and obviously my copyrighting wasn't half bad which is why I you know got some traction initially and then from there um I just like ran a retrospect of one month or two months later and I saw okay which nichas responded best to my offers which you know offer has resulted in me booking the most calls and from there I was essentially able to refine and find a small subset of niches that worked really well for me so at this point what i' done is I basically said screw everything else screw my whole business I'll figure it all out on the back and once I have customers all I'm going to do right now is focus on getting customers and then I did a bunch of things that don't scale I set um you know up work profiles up I submitted a bunch of loom applications where I recorded videos of myself right 10 minutes of video required at least 10 minutes on my end sometimes more to do research and to get to the point where I knew what the hell I was talking about but the point that I'm making is I worried about all of that stuff at the very end and I just said yes to as many opportunities as humanly possible because I knew that I had a ton of debt that I need to pay down as you do this and as many people in my communities maker school and products and stuff like that quickly learn when you say yes to a bunch of stuff you grow very quickly but you inevitably cap out pretty low as well and the reason why is because when you say yes to a bunch of stuff you're usually working with sub toer clients and then you're also um doing a lot of custom work okay and this is great again from getting from zero to one but there's only so many custom projects you can do there's only so much custom uh work that you could essentially so in my first three months I landed eight or nine clients through the methods that I'm talking about and these were custom projects that range from $1,000 all the way up to about $10,000 each you can think stuff like me um building out crms for uh I don't know specific you know like SAS company or something like that or me managing outbound for a recruitment business or something so anyway I granted these custom projects for about six months I was hidden as I mentioned between 20 to $225,000 months sometimes a little bit more less um but I found that I was hitting a ceiling and that's really the next stage you know this this phase of my business was very important because it taught me a lot about what works my own skills and competencies taught me a lot about what other people do to try and fix this problem and it also taught me that you know with a little bit of Ingenuity and systems thinking you can do more yourself than dozens of people can and which is why you know I'm capable of running such a high margin business there's nothing unique or special about me I just thought a little bit about how exactly I was going to set up my business before I did it and also I was in a Ved position because I was able to take a little bit of my money and experiment and and attempt new approaches before actually doing so and the reason why is obviously because I frontload of clown acquisition now I had a little bit of money to play around with if you guys never even get to the point where you have the money to play around with obviously you're not going to be able to do this next step so you do have to do them sequentially anyway so at the time when I hit the ceiling I was juggling five or six clients my

sleep schedule was I was stressed out as hell I was tearing my hair out if you guys see a gray hairs here I don't know if you guys can but all of that was due to that period um it's really hard and this is where a lot of businesses just plateau and they just they never grow and so this freelancer ceiling sort of gives you two options okay the first is it's kind of fork in the road you can um you can well I guess there's three options you can continue doing what you're doing and then never get anywhere and then you can just operate a business at between $ 15,000 to $25,000 a month you can get a pretty good lifestyle and still a pretty high margin business let's be real if you're operating at like 80 90% margins you're still taking home more than like 90ish 95% probably um of all the people that are you know in your country so this isn't bad by any means I think a lot of people probably rest here not because they can't go further but because they just say well how important is work to me it's not really that important so I'm just going to I don't know go surfing on the weekends or whatever and rent really nice cars that's fine that's kind of option one okay option two and this is what I ended up doing is you try hiring now hiring is

obviously where you take everything that has worked for you to get to that point 15 20 $25,000 then you just try and duplicate yourself you try and distill all of the knowledge that has allowed you to you know operate at your current level and give it to like a miniu and then you say okay now you're going to do the client fulfillment work B2B and then I'm going to go find us some more clients and then that way you know we're going to go from $20,000 to $40,000 because they're two of us so I tried this a number of times when I was going door knocking like a decade ago all right I brought on a couple of guys um you know commission only guys like most door knocking businesses operate as and uh that was where I first realized that like you know how the old adage like managers are just like a giant waste of time it's like you know how many managers does Coca-Cola have Google have it's like oh they're just their leech is sucking on the business no management is actually very important because it's very difficult it is very difficult to squeeze as much value as you can out of people to consistently motivate them to do the thing that they signed up to do to hold them accountable to deadlines and to make sure that they do um you know the work that your organization needs to have done in order to grow and you know if I'm honest my management shops just were not it dog so I mean I tried hiring with my door-to-door business did not work well I tried hiring with my um writing company and that was fine because I wasn't actually responsible for the vast majority of the day-to-day management um I tried hiring for my my automation agency and my AI company as well and I got to be honest I am just I don't know whether it's that I'm not a good manager I expect too much out of people for the money that I pay them I don't know I just have some problem with it um which I'm really grateful for by the way because it made me not have to go down this route but for whatever reason hiring just did not work so I spent quite a large amount of my time um in that hiring milu um and yeah you know it was it was okay it was okay I'm not going to say that it was like terrible uh but you know one month I

might have made like $35,000 but now I had to like pay $155,000 to three staff members so it's like okay previously when I was solo preneur I was making $20,000 and it was just me and I didn't have to deal with any management headaches now I'm making $155,000 and I'm also responsible for three people's you know occasional screw-ups training management I got to do meetings I was working even more at that point and yeah um you know like my calendar ended being packed with even more meetings so like is that really the sort of Lifestyle I wanted to live no um not to mention you know at the current stage of my ceiling I was also running into an issue where like a lot of my repeat Revenue like some would churn because of the poor quality experience that they had with one of my um you know one of my contractors or Engineers so this is was not this was not a good idea this just did not enable me to make any money so the root problem I realized was not necessarily a lack of Manpower okay it was not that you know I had this thing which enabled me to go from zero to 20 to 25k a month which was these custom projects it's not that I just took that thing and then I scaled it up and doubled and tripled it okay the real problem was that what got me here won't get me there I can't just

duplicate that approach if I want to do something bigger at scale um I needed to find like a fundamentally new way and so I found that the fundamentally new way was that third route which I haven't talked about yet the third route is finding leverage so the third major phase that I had to go through involved me breaking out of that $25,000 mon ceiling was creating leverage through productization if you've watched a couple of my videos on business Consulting and sort of systems before you'll know that I've talked about productization quite a bit and there a variety of leaders that I looked up to that have taught me a lot about what I know um regarding productization but at the time okay all I really knew was that I need to take all of the stuff that I'm doing right now and I just need to list what am I actually giving clients okay how much of the work that I am doing is actually going towards the end product that my customers are seeing

okay what results are my customers paying for because it's one thing to like build a custom project where 90% of the work that you put in is invisible and nobody sees it okay and it's another thing to think about it from this perspective where it's like what do customers actually see of all the work that I do sure I'm building automations or writing content or whatever there's a lot of work that goes into things but how much of that is actually making it to like the customer's desk and how much are they actually evaluating how worthy or how much value my services based off of so what I did is I basically took all the custom projects that I done over the course of the last few months and I broke them all down okay when I noticed that they were grouping into three or four major bins the first was cold email lead gen systems I was doing a ton of cold email lead genen systems primarily through instantly a couple through other platforms where basically I would go and I'd find leads for a business I would scrape them using some sort of scraper that I developed usually custom I would process those leads enrich them maybe I'd throw in some personalization here or there and then I would add them to this big mailbox called Outreach platform and then spam out a bunch of emails and you know because very few people are doing this at the time and because I was doing it for myself I kind of had like that unfair advantage and you know I ended up uh delivering a ton of value for these clients relative to the money that they were paying me the issue is was obviously not standardized another big thing I was doing proposal automation workflows so um many of you guys have probably seen me build out these proposal generators but essentially like when you're on a sales call with a customer quick and easy um thing to do in that sales call is for you to have a little form in front of you to ask the customer questions like okay like what is your name you know uh what is your email address all right awesome cool so what would you say your major problem is then you actually go through and you you write some summarized version of their problem then you just press okay on a form and then before the meeting is even done you have a nice beautiful proposal generated by AI in your hands that you can give to them so this is something that very few people are doing at the time now it's relatively common place but um this is something that you know a lot of people wanted from me um data processing and just Integrations just in general like kind of oneoff connectors okay um you know uh like like like data Pipelines a lot of people had data in one place and they wanted to duplicate to another place I realized that you know I could I could group a bunch of these projects together and then it ended up just being very similar it was sort of just like a connector a USBC Port that went somewhere in there standardized the way the data went from one spreadsheet to another and then another one was a monthly automation maintenance so I had a lot of people that were asking me to like maintain systems like content generators and stuff like that hey Nick can you make a little update here there and I thought to myself okay like why don't I just group this under the umbrella monthly automation maintenance and so you know basically previously what I was doing was every time I get a new client I would do a super in-depth consultation with them I'd ask them all about their needs I'd walk them through my own process and which at the time is just a hodge podge of a bunch of BS if I'm honest and then I would go and I do their custom thing but once I realize that these four groups of mine are basically just the same thing every time the only thing is sometimes it's with this software platform sometimes it's for that software platform sometimes they want to log to a Google sheet sometimes they don't when I realized that it was all just the same time the same thing I realized wait a second

why aren't I just templating this like can't I just like create templates of all these things that get me 80% of the way there and then I could still provide the custom experience but then I could just sell cold email Legion systems proposal automation systems data connectors crms U monthly automation maintenance why don't I try that so I mean you know for a guy that prided himself on automation I definitely was not automating my own workflow you know so for cold email systems for instance I developed a very simple framework that could be customized for different Industries but um maintained for the same like core architecture like it was always basically the same idea so like you know four steps I would I would identify the lead Source I would scrape enrich the lead source and then I'd like do copyrighting and run the campaigns right um previously this old this cold email system because it was so customized and I was always rebuilding the damn same wheel from scratch sorry I just got something in my eye it would take me like 30 to 40 hours to build it would basically be like a full-time thing like for one particular Clan I don't know I might make like 5,000 bucks off it or whatever but like think about it that's a crazy amount of time how are you supposed to scale your business if you got 160 hours a month and you spend a quarter of those hours every week then you can only ever make you know four times whatever that project is making you per week in my case about $220,000 so if I kind of just compare the two before productization I would do a custom project it would cost me 40 hours okay and maybe I would do $125 an hourish I'd make $5,000 okay meaning that I would my my Revenue per hour my hourly rate which is all I really care about is $125 now after I productized I would build a templated solution that gets me 80% of the way there so now it only takes me 5 hours okay five hours times my internal hourly rate of $125 an hour means like you know if I hired an engineer do this or whatever which I always like to calculate in my head it would cost me $625 to do but I would still charge my client $5,000 or maybe I'd make some allowances $4,000 $5,000 here okay so I just want you to think about it um the first scenario was $5,000 divided by uh 40 That's equal to 125 the second scenario is $5,000 divided 5 that's equal to,000 so my hourly rate had literally skyrocketed to $1,000 an hour with one simple trick that the gurus won't tell you uh which is just a make freaking make. com templates and you know I was suddenly eight times more efficient I just want you to think about that if my previous cap was 20ish th000 a month $25,000 a month uh if I just multiplied that by eight I could be making like $100,000 a month right so that is that's scale that's leverage um and because of that you know and because all of a sudden that stopped being a bottleneck the amount of work that I was doing I did lower prices so instead of me charging $5,000 for that same system I might now charge $2,500 and make $500 an hour instead of $1,000 an hour but then I'd get you know one and a half times as many clients then I'd also get all the additional benefits that having many customers gives you like every customer that comes into your business has what's called a referral multiplier there's some small chance that if you work with them they'll give a referral to um somebody else to you so maybe it's like 10% in which case if somebody pays you $2,500 they're not actually just paying you $2,500 they're paying you like 1. 1 time 2500 which is $2,750 if you just think about it that way customer lifetime value math can get really deep but I'll leave it there um the point that I'm making is I was able to like make some strategic shifts in terms of how I did my business um that enabled me to grow and then reach more people than I'd ever met before uh and then my next major step was you know I took this system of oneoff projects basically that I'd created and then I started shifting them all from these oneup projects to monthly retainers and then I also started shifting my monthly retainers into like subscription packages which did not take me an hour so just from a bird's eye view what I'm doing here is I'm not just scaling up my business like most other people think I'm

fundamentally changing the shape and nature of my business as I grow so that um you know I I double and triple and quadruple down on what works I cut out all the fluff and then essentially I can still continue growing without having to sacrifice my margins and without having to hire a big slow expensive team so you know obviously there's a lot that I can go into detail on that there but I think I'll just leave it at that every approach every new client every template every that I did was just 100% like I turned every one of those things into an asset and then I took all of those assets and then you know those would help my next client so my business just became this snowball which was pretty fantastic and uh yeah I consider that true leverage right but one thing that I'll say is and this is the end of phase three and the beginning of phase 4 which is where I'm at right now one thing that I'll say is there are still limitations to this obviously the bigger that you grow the harder that it is to maintain all this and so because um I thought that there were some inherent limitations to the agency model I decided I have to I would have to change the shape of my business even further if I were to continue growing as a solar printer anyway and that's the constraint that I put on myself that's what got me to phase four which I call um content as

leverage so even with my business which I'd scaled at that point to $72,000 a month even with my business running efficiently with very high margins I started noticing that you know there were only a certain number of clients that I could personally manage and I did like to personally manage these CLI because obviously have great relationships with them these people pay me a lot more money when they like the work that Nick does they're a lot more likely to want to work with Nick after right I also noticed there was a direct relationship between the time that I was spending and then my income and then I also had a lot of Reliance on outbound marketing methods by that point like cold email for instance which was doing you know the vast majority of my business I was still doing upwork applications and stuff like that but um yeah definitely more towards cold email just because of how leverage it is so because of these you know I kind of had a thought to myself and it kind of all came to a for like what is the maximum hourly rate that I could make logically as an agency not the hourly rate that I am showing to people but the hourly rate that like I'm getting paid kind of behind closed doors I was just talking earlier about a th000 bucks an hour for a system right and you can make um you know but like how much more can you make I kind of did some math I kind of thought a lot about it I the opportunity and the various systems I could do and I tried building out a bunch of products and services or whatever this last me maybe a month or so but I realized like okay I'm probably not ever going to be able to make more than like 2,000 bucks 3,000 bucks an hour somewhere around there and I mean that's amazing I mean that's some people's whole monthly wage and you know if you can make it an hour fantastic but you know there's some additional Nuance there as well it's like okay like you can make $3,000 an hour if you have available work but can you find that much work no you're outbound lead generation and you as a sole salesperson do eventually end up being um a big bottleneck sorry just getting a call so logically I have a ceiling to that hourly rate with this business shape right so I'm gonna have to change business shapes if I'm going to want to succeed so I thought about this for quite a bit I actually ended up taking a trip to Mexico with one of my really good friends his name is Zach um we went to a small island in the Caribbean and the whole point was just to like unwind and just do a bunch of like business reflection and stuff like that and Zach came from this coaching and Consulting background he came from a background where he was working essentially as like the first mate or partner to a bunch of you know big dudes that were running their coaching and Consulting offers all the way up to you know maybe a million dollars a month or so he inherently understood the scalability of that business model and you know I also being a very intelligent guy we just kind of like rocking back and forth on like the rooftop of some Airbnb you know with the sun setting smoking fat cigars we kind of worked through some of the issues that I was having at the time and one of the main major issues was obviously that arly rate another major issue was okay like in order for me to sell right now I'm getting on a call and I'm working through people and his solution was basically like well listen you know what a lot of people are to do now with money that have successful agencies is they will start these content Brands and they will use these Brands as passive sales materials that will sell people in your audience on your value so that you don't actually have to be there in person on a sales call talking them through it you don't you know actually have to be like the one recording the loom video to you don't have to do one loom video per person okay you can do one video sell to 10,000 people and you know he's like that's super high leverage then you could form some sort of information product then maybe you could like Branch out so that you're not entirely rying on your agency revenue and I mean like it's not like he just like gave all this to me in a you know gift box or whatever like obviously there was a lot of back and forth and we kind of like hammered out exactly how I was going to take that next step and I'm forever grateful to him for that but yeah after that trip you know when I got home I sort of Hit the ground running with renewed Vigor like at the point you know I was making consistently somewhere between 50 to $70,000 a month I had a lot of money and income and you know I had a lot of resources so when you're at a point where you have a lot of resources but like you you're kind of capping out in plateauing what you have to do is you basically have to take a portion of those resources and you have to invest them in research and development your R& D fund big companies do this all the time but my R& D fund was YouTube I was like all right cool so you know we talked about contentless leverage we talked about like information products and then we talked about um selling while I slept essentially so what are some ways I could do that and one of the ways that I thought to do that was YouTube so what I did is well I actually ended up letting a client or two of mine go just because the time demands were so crazy I took additional time and then I spent it directly on recording content every day and I just did this as a total experiment it was like research and development basically for about a month or so um and I said to myself you know I'm just going to take the same principles that have enabled me to be successful here at this agency uh which you know in large part are consistency and then I'm just going to do a video every day just talking about my success and I'm just going to see where I land so that's exactly what I did I started recording consistent YouTube videos in February the 7th I recorded like 30 until March the 7th or 8th or something like that then by the end of the month I had some like 3,450 subscribers so my subscriber count had actually gone up a ton which is pretty sweet and you know obviously um the second that you start having subscribers you start having distribution you could start thinking okay like now that I have this what can I do with it but I want you guys to know that this whole time I was not 100% sure this would work this is literally just another experiment that I was doing I was going to experiment with dozens of different approaches dozens of different platforms and dozens of different ideas I just so happened to land on YouTube as my second or third and then that just so happened to actually work okay so I didn't actually make any money off this for the first couple of months by the way um the videos were not selling entirely for me

but one thing that I found really interesting that I noted was the people that I was getting through cold Outreach okay they would actually like Google me and they would find some of my videos and they would watch my videos and then when they' come on the call they'd say something like hey you know it's crazy you know I was just watching one of your videos can you give me this thing and I was like huh so my sales actually became a lot easier the second that I had my warm content selling for me basically because even if I got somebody totally cold once they were interested enough to want to sit down on a call with me what's the number one thing that people will do they'll obviously Google you and if the first five things are just like links to a video about you building a system some of them which are very similar to the systems that I said that I was going to build for you obviously you're a little intrigued obviously watch some my content so yeah what's really interesting is a bunch of my initial Subs were actually like people that I had sent Outreach to through cold email and stuff like that um and I got so lucrative well it got so interestingly there was so much Serendipity that I eventually started adding lines at the end of my emails like PS Google me if you're curious so that a bunch of people that even weren't entirely sure whether they wanted to work with me would still Google me they'd watch my videos and they'd come into my funnel so that was great another thing that I talked about with my friend Zach just before I ended up doing this

was that content provides compound returns in a way that Services never do because a service deliverer generates Revenue once okay for the most part there's some exceptions with some automated systems but if I created a YouTube video today I could realistically see returns off of that YouTube video for the next 5 years assuming it's Evergreen content and that is leverage right I've made a lot of money off of YouTube now but if I stopped recording and stopped publishing today I would still continue making money off of YouTube for the next five or 10 years it's crazy right like obviously not all of my content some of my content is very time specific hype specific bubble specific whatever you want to call it but some of my longer content is like you know Timeless Concepts that I will realistically be able to make money off of for a very long time so yeah YouTube is in my case just ended up being so many different forms of Leverage for me it was a 247 sales team that worked while I slept it was a lead nurturing mechanism it was a um and you know it ended up being like a discovery or distribution mechanism um and then it ended up even paying me ad revenue on top of that which is crazy now the ad revenue is like you know very small portion of my total income but still so yeah you know as my channel grew I started looking at opportunities to do that information product route that uh my buddy Zach was telling me about and I sort of bended it into a few categories one of them was um templates for the systems that I was building um another one was coaching and consultant Services which was separate from my agency Services which primarily did like implementation um another one was like I ended up starting a community and Community products are fantastic because they're basically like coaching and Consulting but they're like a Mr based thing which is f like it's seriously crazy Revolution um and then because of that I was able to you know massively improve both my distribution continue doing all the stuff that was making me money up until that point like with my agency services but then unlock this whole new tier of products and I was able to do it this entire time without ever really struggling for or wanting for money cuz one thing that nobody will tell you is if you try starting a business model that is super scalable like a SAS company or an information Product Company and you have nothing you're at the start line like I was it takes way longer to see success than it does if you start something that's less scalable like a freelancer or an agency outfit the way that it works is the scalability of a business model is basically a direct odds with the amount of money that you make right off the bat of that business model so if you really want to get both that's what I tell people in make school and make money with make all the time if you really want to get both the key thing that's working today in the mid 2020s is you start a freelance or an agency outfit delivering a service then eventually you transition to an information product or a coaching company teaching people how to do the service then once you have a massive distribution pipeline then you build a software product selling the thing that service used to do to a bunch of those people that are interested in it or selling something that helps people deliver that service better key point if you look at basically anybody that's big this is more or less what they all did and how they all started anybody over the course of the next uh last five or 10 years now people that are making hundred million plus that last bit is really important and it's something that I'm considering going into eventually as well so that seems to be the pipeline anyway here are a bunch of ways you can apply these principles to your own business because this one thing to hear me yap on and on um story time for freaking half an hour and I really appreciate everybody that's still with me but you know most of you guys are at the point where it's like all right Nick

how do I actually employ these approaches in my own company and you know use them to hit $100,000 month Revenue figures and so on so I wanted to take all of these highle strategies and high level stories and then convert them into like a step-by-step list that you guys could use um here it is and it's not specific to a automation by the way you can do this for any business model as long as it's a B2B primarily or at least I have experience with B2B step one is to start with

custom work to understand Market needs okay when I say start with custom work I mean don't worry about developing a product anything aside from just your ability as a service provider or a freelan or an agency so even though custom projects are not scalable long term they are the fastest way to just get your foot in the door in an industry because the supply of people willing to do custom projects is so low that naturally the demand for your services will be substantially higher even if you have no other skills um pay close attention to the problems that you are consistently asked to solve these are going to be the foundation of these products that you're going to build later like they were for me which parts of your process as a custom uh specialist are repeatable so which ones do you find yourself doing over and over and over again what results the customer values the most so like when you actually give your deliverable what are they focusing on and and what are they getting and then how much money are they paying you for the services and the ability to solve their needs focus on your hourly rate now the way that I see it is custom work is basically a paid research phase it's like um the market is paying you to very quickly and easily accumulate experience uh you know money and a foothold in the industry now you're still going to have to do some work obviously but as long as you treat this as almost like an information gathering exercise I find that the work is usually nowhere near as big of a deal like when I'm inherently interested about something and I inherently want to uncover and learn more about how to do a product or a service or deal with a new technology it's not really work to me it's just it's fun it's play so if you frame that first phase in your mind as play it'll be a lot easier for you to make it to the second speaking of

the second is to document everything and start creating templates so you know most people will cap out as I mentioned and they'll instead of doing this hire a team that works off of crappy templates instead okay record processes for every deliverable my recommendation is using loom or Google doc Sops break these complex tasks down into a step bystep so make sure that you have them to the point that basically a monkey could do it not because you're going to be hiring monkeys but because this is important in the age of AI where you can take a step-by-step breakdown and actually hand it to a model and have it get 80% of the way there and then create reusable templates for everything from proposals to deliverables to client Communications you should not really be sending customized emails after I don't know I want to say like your $25,000 to $30,000 month Mark the communications that you send okay should not be willy-nilly haphazard you should actually have like a bank of templates where after you deliver a project you just take your client delivery email you copy and paste it and maybe make a minor adjustment if you don't get in the habit of doing this then your ability to scale past this $225,000 Mark is it's very unlikely I guess so just make sure that once you make it past that custom work phase and now you're getting more into higher level projects that you're just relentlessly documenting everything not because you're going to hire a team if you do end up hiring a team later on down the line fantastic you now have a giant knowledge base you can hand them basically for free get them up and running quick but more for yourself and for this next phase which is going to be

packaging your services into distinct products here you take these custom services that you've been offering and you transform them all with very clearly defined um timelines deliverables Scopes pricing and then concrete outcomes and time frames okay make sure you know everything that there is to know about a particular product and how to deliver it once you're at that point you can basically the way that I see it it's like analog versus digital okay when you listen to like a record player spit out some amazing music it's really highdef andite super high quality right and there are a lot of people out there that are like oh like you know Bluetooth headphones sound so different I got to get my record in my living room the reality is 99. 9% of people they'll never be able to tell the difference and Bluetooth and MP3 these compressed file formats and these compressed technologies that make it really convenient to listen to music these are sufficient or great for 99. 99% of people digitize your work turn your work from this analog flowy artistic thing into a concrete set of steps that you do the same every time if you do 99. 9% of clients will be more than happy with that and then you'll be able to copy and paste like you can In Mp3 that same approach into millions of people's businesses as well so what I mean by this is don't sell social media management anymore okay sell a 30-day LinkedIn engagement package where you have specific outcomes specific deliverables where you have a specific number of posts that you make and so on and so forth and then finally

um create systems that reduce your time investment so once you're done with this is where Ai and automation basically become Force multipliers in addition to the productized um Solutions is leverage like I was mentioning just now so use AI to streamline repetitive tasks I mean duh if you're not already using AI to streamline repetitive tasks then look through that giant list of step-by-step deliverables and step-by-step guides that you just created and have ai go through and try creating a bunch of assets build automated workflows for client onboarding and also client handoff just in case you never want to be spending more than maybe like 45 minutes to an hour dealing with like the the friction points of the entry and then exit of a client through your system and then ultimately another big high leverage thing is to create self- serve resources for customers like create a Google drive folder where all of their assets will be uploaded to create slack channels per customer where you don't actually have to deliver the thing that they ask you for they just go to a slack Channel or a Google drive or some board somewhere and they just see everything that they need as well as maybe a I don't know their analytics or their stats or whatnot we have a couple of additional steps um shift to recurring Revenue

models this is like the Mr based model like I was talking about where you go from having the vast majority of your business be these one-off projects into recurring monthly services that deliver consistent Revenue to you never want to be in a spot where like every month you make $25,000 and then the first day of the next month your revenue is back down at zero you want to be at the point where like let's say you're at 25 Grand on the 30th day of the last month on the first day maybe you know one of your clients turns and now you're down at 20 the Gap there is so much smaller and it's so much easier for you to project your Revenue start making plans then ultimately you know Implement them over longer time scales than just a month and then last but not least the thing that I did that really enabled me to scale past $100,000 a month I made over 150,000 bucks in Revenue last month was leverage

content to attract pre-qualified leads so choose a platform like YouTube like LinkedIn um Instagram podcast whatever like whatever you do just pick one okay for now pre-commit to a 90-day period of producing content on that platform consistently and then just share your expertise now don't do this if you don't have a business you're just listening to me right now and you've never started a business or you're at the start line of your company haven't made five or 10 or $5,000 a month end don't start here okay because there are a million in one other people that are starting right where you are and they think oh I'm going to become a content creator millionaire overnight the reality is there's so much Supply that there's very little demand for you I hate to say it but unless you have some cool accomplishment like I did when I started my channel I could confidently say I made $40,000 last month here's how I did it you know here's a system that generates me $20,000 a month unless you have some noal proof or accomplishment or something that makes stand out with a megaphone and the Sea of broadcast voices you're not going to make it so only do this at the very end of your journey only do this when your business is already big enough that you can mold it into this really cool content shape like what I've managed to do here and

when you do it here's some tips to make sure that you nail it deliver value

constantly your value to um ask ratio should be 99 to1 at least I recommend even more when you create content make sure that 99% of that content is just giving and if you do have a section in your content where you're asking to receive just make sure that it's like less than 1% of it okay my videos have like small little CTA sprinkled through them all but you'll notice they're very organic I mentioned a product here there I mentioned a community here there I really don't harp on it doesn't even seem like I'm doing any sort of sales share your Frameworks share your

methodologies share everything um give people free templates give people free lead magnets make sure that everything is as easy as possible for the customer or for your I guess viewer to take watch and then do something with and then ultimately build a library of

content that serves not just as a distribution channel in of itself but it'll also help all of your agency and freelance um outcomes as well if you start with you know just trying to make it big on YouTube or whatever you're going to be missing like half the pie because that initial period is where you're going to be transitioning for B2B services or I should say um like agency or implementation services to primarily coaching Consulting ones right like you're going to miss that whole transition period where you could be nurturing leads and helping people solve problems I mean all videos are templated Consulting if you think about it right so it's just another form of standardization and productization similar to what I was doing in phase three all right so that's all I have for you guys today I think I've Abed for

almost an hour now so I'll leave it um the magic glowing rectangle is telling me I should probably do a CTA here so yeah let's wrap it up I recommend you start with custom projects now that got me at about $25,000 a month but obviously came with some serious limitations surrounding scale and I was also tearing my hair out after you're done with that you kind of have a fork in the road where you can stay where you are you can choose to hire or you can build leverage systems I highly recommend you build leverage systems that's what I did and that's what enabled me to continue growing then eventually after you're done with all that stuff then you can start thinking about more scalable business models like a SAS company or maybe an information product coaching or consulting company like me I think that the most powerful Insight from this is that you know in today's economy software and services and artificial intelligence can actually like make up the bulk of a team you know if before I needed 10 people to do something now I have me but it's like 10x me and it's not because there's like 10 mini mes or I've trained 10 chat gpts or whatever but it's because I've been very intentional about how I set up my business and I always focus on the highest leverage action first so you know as you grow the highest leverage action is going to change of course when you when you're at the beginning make sure that that's always lead genen when you're at the middle make sure that standardization and scaling then when you get bigger and bigger pass $100,000 a month make sure that's more focused on distribution and then building a product of some kind that can subsist uh persist without necessarily you being around to monitor it if you guys are interested in Ai and you guys want to learn how to start your own Ai and automation agency using the exact same road map that I implemented in my own business where I actually like the whole point of my community maker school is just to implement that road map and give it to you on a silver platter with day-by-day accountability then definitely check it out link is a first one that you see in the description um the price is going up we just hit 1,400 members so as of the time of this recording may be a little bit different when you're watching it do you guys have any other questions or anything like that just drop a comment down below and yeah do all that fun YouTube stuff you know like subscribe bump me to the top of the go I'll catch you in the next video thanks so much