# My Worst Mistakes Running An AI Automation Agency

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Nick Saraev
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eex1XkQwoMc
- **Дата:** 07.03.2025
- **Длительность:** 32:29
- **Просмотры:** 12,955

## Описание

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Summary ⤵️
Storytime! Here are the MAJOR mistakes I made building and scaling my automation agency on the path to $72K/mo.

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Why watch?
If this is your first view—hi, I’m Nick! TLDR: I spent six years building automated businesses with Make.com (most notably 1SecondCopy, a content company that hit 7 figures). Today a lot of people talk about automation, but I’ve noticed that very few have practical, real world success making money with it. So this channel is me chiming in and showing you what *real* systems that make *real* revenue look like.

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Chapters
00:00:00 Introduction
00:01:25 The Custom Project Trap
00:08:08 Doing Everything for Everyone
00:13:56 The Fear of Commitment
00:18:13 Consuming the Wrong Content
00:20:18 Neglecting Expenses
00:22:05 The Importance of Asking for Payment
00:26:58 Learning from Bad Clients
00:28:37 Hiring Inexperienced Developers
00:31:04 Scaling Without Hiring
00:32:41 Conclusion and Call to Action

## Содержание

### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eex1XkQwoMc) Introduction

here are the worst mistakes I've ever made running an AI automation agency and I've made a ton on my journey to 72,000 bucks a month this video is just going to be more or less story time where I run you through all of these mistakes so that if you guys find yourself in the shoes that I was in a couple of years ago and I was starting all those hopefully you can avoid the mistakes and you know make a lot more money a lot faster and with fewer gray hairs so I can think of a few projects right off the top of my head that I would consider mistakes for sure um if I di it back like the biggest mistake I made right off the bat was doing custom projects for too long a custom project I will Define in this video as a project where the client doesn't really know what they want and so you have to come in and you have to educate them on what they want you have to consult with them then once you know what they want you have to discuss and scope how you're going to do it for them then you have to go through some protracted sale process to iron out the specific deliverables then you actually sign the deal then you have to go and you have to build the project then you have to present it to them and do a bunch of revisions and then finally if all of those things are perfect Hail Mary you get your invoice paid and maybe you get a little deposit before then who knows but basically in order to make money you got to deal with a bunch of BS now uh I actually recommend you do custom projects if it's your first second or third gig in AI Automation and the reason why is because of market economics um I mention this

### [1:25](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eex1XkQwoMc&t=85s) The Custom Project Trap

all the time in maker school I make money with make. com these are my autom communities where I show people how to build automation businesses from scratch and scale them up to 25k and Beyond man that was a hell of a sales pitch uh but like market economics when you're a beginner are you lack like you lack client management skills probably you lack sales skills most likely you lack automation don't understand the systems necessary in order to like have a good pipeline or good lead generation funnel most likely and so you're kind of put in this really tough spot right but if you think about it from the client perspective you know supply and demand like when there's a lot of something um we tend not to want it as much as when there's very little of it and it's scarse and we want it a ton well if you think about it supply and demand wise if a client has this custom project that they need like how big is the supply of Freelancers or agencies or service providers that'll really be able to do that super custom Nuance thing with like all these random ass software apps and all these weird scripts that you have to write to maintain stuff and like odd front ends like if you think about it logically like the supply of the market actually able to fulfill that and willing to like prostrate themselves and get whipped on the back for months on end in order to make it happen is actually really low right so the demand for your service is really high so if you're still with me you're basically artificially inflating the demand which means you who might be like a relative nobody with no skills no nothing you can actually seem pretty valuable if you're just willing to do the thing that they asked you for and you demonstrate some middling level of competence so because you're a total beginner my recommendation is actually like get up and run and do a couple right the problem is in my case I made the major mistake of doing custom projects too long when I started a left click my automation agency I did so with my partner Noah and Brilliant guy um basically we got on this idea of doing the same thing that we were doing for our content writing company at the time but just for clients and what did we do for our content writing company at the time well we were building these amazing systems to solve super nuanced problems we were writing scripts we were you know building really sweet infrastructure and stuff like that um and all of it was super custom right and we thought how cool would it be if we could just build all the same stuff we're doing for our company but then do it for other people which are way more interesting because you know it's all new niches and stuff and then we get paid massive multiples for it that would be incredible right but we operated like that for way too long and one thing that I see all the time in AI automation agencies especially in my programs is they'll be like just signed a deal for $5,000 and I'm like hell yeah right amazing job right 3 months down the line I'm like how's the agency going are you at 20K yet and they're like no I haven't made any money except for that $5,000 because since that project all I've been doing is working on that client demand this is like one of the most common classic issues ever you have this massive Revenue Spike quickly because you make a lot of money doing custom projects and then after you're done you know signing the deal and stuff you actually have to deliver it's like holy this is like 3 four months of back and forth scope changes constant revision requests right you never actually get anywhere so anyway hopefully I've given you enough background about what the hell a custom project actually is uh to run you through a couple specific examples we had one uh no and I where we wanted to it was the biggest project we had ever won at the time okay essentially what it was it was a platform for contract laborers you can think of it as like uber but for contract labors and the whole idea was and obviously we were the only automation agency willing to accept this Uber for contract labor who the hell else was going to do this right we were total noobs um the whole idea was there are a bunch of like grunt contract laborers that do jobs and I don't I think there somewhere in Africa or maybe the Middle East essentially um there a bunch of them that do jobs but there's this very annoying process that they have to go through um where they have to like present themselves to the company and there's all this legal red tape or whatever so this platform wanted to solve that by just having like a sign up portal where they'd sign up they'd fill all the documentation already and then when a company wanted like some contract labor really quickly to help unload their ships or something right uh or I don't know carry pallets or whatever they just like click a button and then voila the purse would be there the payments would be handled so that was the whole idea it was Uber for contract labor basically uh we ended up having to refund them because that project went like four or five months uh you know when all a sudden down we made like 9,000 bucks off it or something and that refund that sucked um that whole process sucked so like yeah we got a big spike of Revenue quickly but we also had a very negative client there was experience I think I mean Noah maintains that it wasn't that bad and that the guy was like pretty happy with it most of the way through we ended up placing him with somebody else to do the rest of the project and stuff and just not just not a good experience man like I we probably spent over 200 hours on that um just like backbreaking labor I was designing the website the front end I was you know Consulting with with my partner and then a couple of other people to like help design the database and stuff it it was a nightmare client would request change after change G us for weeks and months at a time when all said and done I'm talk we're talking like 20 bucks an hour if that right so listen is fine if it's your first gig and it's a great way to learn and boy did I learn a lot of strong client management skills going through that experience and other similar related experiences but is that really something you want to be doing 3 months in 6 months in N9 months in no you know if I had jumped off of the custom project train a lot earlier and I had moved over to templated intro offers plus some sort of like scalable recurring service which you know these concepts are gaining a lot of um notoriety right now they're first popularized by a guy called Matt Larsson I do a podcast with them check them out if you want but if you move over to that sort of structure after your first or second custom project like instead of your Revenue being kind of like mine which is you know kind of went up and then just plateaued for God knows how many months like your Revenue will consistently and steadily rise as you add Mr and um you know scale your business so I guess to make a long story short that big mistake about custom projects like like custom projects are okay a trial by fire is okay upskilling and leveling up your client management skills and understanding how Scopes work on all stuff that's okay do that for a little bit but don't like keep doing it it's kind of like how you know if you ride a tricycle or sorry bicycle with the training wheels on right it's faster and easier for you to learn how to ride the bike I would imagine right if not then why the hell it's so many toddlers Do It um it's probably faster and easier to learn how to ride a bike but once you learn kind how to ride the bike like if you keep the training wheels on are you really figuring out how to ride the bike or are you just like going to be continuing to Pedal at 1 km an hour never really

### [8:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eex1XkQwoMc&t=488s) Doing Everything for Everyone

getting anywhere so yeah that's my first major mistake for sure my second big one um was that I was addicted to doing everything for everybody if you do everything for everybody you do nothing for nobody for more than half of my agency's life if somebody sent a request in you know one of my ask clients or referrals or something and they said hey you're in Tech right oh great well can you build us a website with all the bells and whistles we'll pay you really good money like I would not say the logical thing which is hey that sounds really great let me refer you to over to somebody who does this for a living we actually do automations so you know I'm going to pass on that but really appreciate your business here's the person that can fulfill for it instead I would be like of course I'm a website Pro I'll take care of that for you for the low price of $987 I do this all the time right and it's great for again the short-term Revenue Spike but like man I was an automation agency what the hell am I doing websites for right or an autom you know I'm an automation agency what the hell am I doing social media marketing packages for right if you get in the habit of accepting things that your system is not optimized to do the way that I see it is you're basically pouring like the wrong gasoline in the tank you know how like some cars are optim to run off of like the highest octane fuel and if you pour the crappy gas in I mean it'll sputter and start and just slowly muck up and ruin your engine right alternatively I think it's the other way around for some cars at least it is for my Subaru you pour in a bunch of the good quality gasoline into the tank and it's like worse for the vehicle because it's optimized to run on a specific one I don't know I'm not a car guy so maybe I'm speaking blatant sin right now and if I am uh leave a comment down below telling me why but uh the point that I'm making is the whole purpose of your agency is you want to do something way better than everybody else right if you typically have to invest in creating some sort of like structured standardized pipeline some infrastructure that'll allow you to fulfill orders for a particular type of thing better than other people so if you grow addicted to just like putting all sorts of fuel in your car okay all sorts of BS in your engine then you'll never really be able to get up to the top speed that you otherwise like you know uh want to be able to like I in addition to hitting that Plateau because of the custom Revenue Uh custom projects that Revenue Plateau I want to say um I also further plateaued because I was just saying yes to everybody and so I'd have these minor little spikes here with these oneoff projects that might make me an additional $5,000 but then it was like okay great I made $5,000 this month what am I making next month right so the way that I see it is when you do this the these short-term everything for everybody type deals what you're doing is you basically have a wound somewhere in your body and you're like putting a bandaid on it and that's good because it solves a short-term need of the wound it's exposed and you know it's like dangerous and it hurts a lot right so you need to cover it but you need to address the thing that resulted in the wound in the first place right so you know slap the Band-Aid on do it for the first few times whatever get your short-term Revenue up but all the while be thinking constantly okay how do I stop doing this thing because this is not allowing me to scale my agency the reality is you need a niche in this business model you also need a niche just more generally but most people think when they hear the term Niche they're like oh this Niche you know uh I need to focus on women-owned dog walking businesses in Iowa City that make between 25 and $45,000 they think they need to go so dang deep that like the Tam or total addressable Market is like two people or something right obviously there's Nuance there you don't need to go women-owned businesses in Iowa City that make between 25 and 45k okay uh you can Target a whole vertical or a whole Niche you could Target like the recruitment industry B2B ecommer I don't know you could Target like specific type of e-commerce product you could Target like B2B growth companies you could Target like creative agencies PPC agencies um you know manufacturing companies right you can Target a whole vertical just the fact that you're targeting a whole vertical is going to make you like 50 times as effective as what you're doing before and then in addition to targeting a vertical Target a specific sort of thing so like if you're an AI automation company don't just be be like a a CRM company or like a like a growth system company like I am or something of that nature you know what I mean so just add a little bit of texture to your business and then the next time that one of those damn request comes in for something that sure might make you a little bit of short-term money uh but ultimately screw with your long-term growth don't be afraid to say no obviously take everything I'm saying with a grain assault like if you're broke and you need to make rent like do whatever you have to do I distinctly remember a moment I was just reminded a few days ago where I had spun up my door to-door marketing agency and I had knocked on between 50 80 doors a day for three months with another business partner of mine at the time and at the end of it all we had made like s bucks or something okay seven bucks in three months it was pathetically terrible I had rent looming I had responsibilities coming aboard my parents were ashamed of me I sitting on the side of the street in early December as snow and freezing rain fell on my face and my little thin H& M blazer for $240 that I got in the clearance rack and I was just thinking I need money right now don't get yourself in the same situation that I was where where you have all that stress and it's just slowly eating you away like if you have a project that you could take on that ultimately solves that need and puts that Band-Aid on do it but you know ultimately start working towards saying no and being more in control of your intentions and it's good that I mention

### [13:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eex1XkQwoMc&t=836s) The Fear of Commitment

intentions cuz I have a couple other things that I want to say stories and and also mistakes um probably the biggest one regarding intentions is for a very long time I was super afraid to commit to anything and that ultimately further impacted my ability to grow my agency and resulted in many a middling month where less than $10,000 were made um I think a lot of people are afraid of commit well I know commitment but not like consciously they're afraid of commitment because they've intellectualized this idea that you should be maximizing your opportunity at every step they think okay I need to go to school and get a degree because it maximizes the likelihood that I'll get a job it maximizes the things that I can do and the opportunities um when I travel I'm going to go to this place in Central Europe so that I can maximize the opportunities and maybe I'll go here maybe I'll go there I'm going to have the most options um you know I'm going to go to if I do go to school I'll go to school for a very specific degree that I don't know it's some general study thing that lets me do as many other things as I want um I want to start a marketing business because it'll afford me the most opportunity to do PPC and SEO and and AD campaigns and all this stuff if you live your life basically in such a way that you are maximizing your opportunity I guess what I'm trying to say is you are not dedicating yourself to anything and if you don't dedicate yourself to anything you are by definition dedicating yourself to nothing it is better to dedicate yourself to something because the way that it works at least in my automation agency the second that I dedicated myself to a particular Nation a particular way of doing business it's not necessarily that like I made the right bet it's not like we were paying uh I don't know a roulette or something like that and then I happen to pick the right number card or however the hell you play roulette I don't actually know I've never played Roulette in my life bad example it's not like you putting all your money on a specific thing right uh or picking a specific lot of number and then just happens to work the truth is when you commit to something you literally alter the universe's probability of that thing being a good pick I don't mean this in some sort of wishy-washy way I mean if you were to hypothetically right now commit to being a B2B Growth Company that works exclusively with manufacturing businesses um to generate them you know a 5 to 10x Roi in the first 30 days with their money back if you commit to that the likelihood that actually be becomes a good Niche to pick it goes up 100% it's almost like if you if you offer somebody a guarantee or something if you put your ass on the line if you tell somebody hey I guarantee you I'll deliver these results and if um I don't I'll give you your money back it's like if you were to offer a guarantee versus not offer a guarantee in which of those two circumstances do you think you would work harder realistically you would have a higher likelihood of achieving the thing that you just guaranteed the person I'll tell you what it's not in the world where you don't offer the guarantee obviously it's in the world where you put your ass on the line AKA it's in the world where you commit right dedicate yourself to something I think you could probably extend this concept in many different parts of life you could extend this to relationships the person that is willing to uh commit to a relationship probably has a higher likelihood of that relationship working out than a person who's constantly just searching for options you could probably see it in many other Realms uh knowledge education um skill Mastery skill development I mean I can think of 10 or 15 off the top of my head but I'll leave it there for brevity essentially um you know if you are not afraid to commit to a specific thing um the likelihood of you achieving that thing will go way up and in my case you know because I was doing everything for everybody and therefore doing nothing for for nobody for quite a while um I didn't really get to take advantage of that when I started being the B2B growth guy cold email guy that works primarily with businesses that make between 50 to 100K a month that are located in the United States you know every Everything shot way up and I also just want to make one more caveat to that um one other mistake that I made pretty early on was just consuming the wrong sort of content and that content just

### [18:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eex1XkQwoMc&t=1093s) Consuming the Wrong Content

messed with my head for quite a while so one final thing that I'll mention here in terms of like the biggest mistakes running my AI automation agency um are that I didn't really realize it but the people I mean I know it sounds really dumb but the people that are in your life are ultimately the same people that you will emulate and you will borrow behaviors and thought patterns from and in my case when I was running my AI automation agency I had a lot of people in my life and a lot of um content creators in my life people that I was watching and listening to that uh they were basically like Trend uh shiny object syndrome hype jump on people that would just look at like the next beautiful shiny object thing the next three or four-letter acronym uh business right like AI AA or smma or ABCD or whatever the hell right uh and then they jump on it be like wow you know so much potential here so much growth I uh I picked up a lot of bad habits from shiny object people I would say and it wasn't until I got to distance myself from that and just really be on my own for a little while and just figure my own stuff out I would say that uh my automation agency began to grow um yeah that that was a really big thing for me like when I was doing the AI automation stuff there was um when I was at the peak of operating my agency there were a million and one people talking past me every 5 minutes talking about how you know you need to be delegating uh growing an email list you need to be doing this that if I tried to say yes to all of those things and actually like take all of that at face value I never would have gotten anywhere it's true that worked for the people that were recommending that I do things or the content creators that were telling me that I should have but ultimately at the end of the day like I have my own preconceptions ways of doing things I have my own behaviors and I also had my own intention which is that I was going to operate my business in that very particular way um and like we just talked about me setting my intention in the world improves the probability I'll achieve the thing that I want to achieve not necessarily that I'll achieve the thing that other people want me to achieve so that was pretty big definitely big some strategic mistakes that I made um probably the

### [20:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eex1XkQwoMc&t=1218s) Neglecting Expenses

biggest strategic mistake I made was just not keeping track of my expenses I signed up to like a number of TRS and stuff like that for software products that ended up ballooning and costing me way too much money um a very notorious one for this and this is going to date the video a little bit but it was Google workspace so if you find yourself subscribed to Google workspace these guys I'm not going to say anything ill about them or their mothers but uh they know what they're doing for sure when you sign up to a go workspace account they basically subscribe you on one of the highest tiers possible and then they'll tell you that you're on a trial and that eventually you'll be build so just make sure to double check and and you know change the plan but the vast majority of people completely forget and they never do so at one point I'd signed up to God knows how many mailboxes you know probably 50 or 100 or something and ended up with just like a bunch of thousand a month bills and that was not a good time for me when that came in the good news is you know a lot of the time you can ask for a refund or get some sort of partial refund so it's not the end of the world but um yeah I remember like just not really keeping track of my expenses not really knowing the amount of money that was coming in and out of my bank account if you contrast that with now what I will do literally every morning is I will open up all of the bank accounts for my businesses and I will manually move over every transaction or line item on every bank account to my own spreadsheet you'll probably say Nick that sounds insane what the hell are you doing all this for doesn't that take forever first of all it doesn't really take forever I realistically have like 15 transactions a day that I need to move over copying and pasting 15 transactions from one tab to the next takes like 3 minutes I know because I time it every morning but second of all the purpose is not the amount of time it takes for me to do it the purpose is to constantly have awareness as to my inflows and outflows and so that if there is a mistake I can catch it within a day and it just reenters my mind constantly on the thing that actually matters in business which is making money so that was a pretty big

### [22:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eex1XkQwoMc&t=1325s) The Importance of Asking for Payment

tactical error another big tactical error that I made like a massive mistake and boy these are really flowing now was um uh not asking for my money I know this sounds really simple but it's hell of a tactical mistake and a lot of beginners really struggle with just saying hey I've done the project i' like my money now so the reality is paying you is the worst part of any client's life and so you just need to get it in your head that you need to push and make sure that you get paid before anything else okay I can't tell you how many times I had several thousands of dollars maybe 10 maybe $ 15,000 outstanding that I was supposed to have in my bank account that I did not have simply because I was too afraid to ask the client upfront bluntly hey do you mind paying that invoice that I sent you four weeks ago and I followed up with every week since right another thing is a lot of the time people are so afraid to sign the deal or whatever that they'll like to get the payment that they'll assume that a deal is closed before the invoice has actually been paid or before that the transfer has been made in reality a big tactical mistake I made was assuming that I closed the deal before I got the money because probably 30% of the deals that IID assumed I had closed I didn't actually closed there was some issue they ended up not wanting to pay me or they found some other service provider or whatever another big mistake I uh Learned was that agreements mean basically jack in small to mediumsized businesses if your project sizes are on average less than $25,000 agreements don't matter especially in a digital world I can't tell you how many times I've had and this wasn't was specifically with my automation agency this did happen uh twice but I can't tell you how many times I've had situations where you know you deliver some sort of service and then you've done all the work and incurred all of the costs and stuff and because the client you are invoicing is paying you after the project is done you are currently at a negative and then for whatever reason their business either defaults or they try and Sherk you or whatever they don't pay I can't tell you how many times I've had conversations with people that like oh well you should sue them you should go after them you should send them threatening legal letters well let me tell you the truth is I have and it hasn't done anything ever okay I've had situations where people have owed hundreds of thousands of dollars to the companies that have owned and or worked for and it doesn't do anything because those payments individually were like five,000 bucks here 10,000 bucks here 3,500 bucks there the cold hard truth is if you're working a digital business in the 2020s there are so many local and Regional uh provincial uh you know laws and regulations and stipulations that if I'm working with some dude in Ohio and he didn't pay his $1,500 invoice for a project that I did in 5 hours it's actually more worth my time to take all the time I would have spent emailing him and fing up with him and hassling him and trying to get that money it's more worth me to just take that time and then spend it on acquiring a new customer for $1,500 that doesn't suck I can't tell you how many people fundamentally misunderstand this don't get caught up in like the oh this guy owes me 2,500 bucks like obviously follow up you know set like a follow-up sequence that like spams this dude or agency or chick or whatever like 10 times over the course of the next like month and a half okay every two weeks hey just wanted to check in about this I know it's been a really long time but I need to have this sorted just set some want to do that for you of course right that's very low uh High leverage just in case in the OB chance they do but if they don't like don't let it uh keep you up at night you can't really sue somebody for like a $2,000 project and then be better off to be honest um until you get to the point where you're talking like five figures and even five figure projects still like 50,000 880,000 100,000 even then you're just kind of at the middle ground between it like making sense and not the reality is if you're watching this video and if you've made it to this point you're probably ious and consistent and tenacious enough um to make more money and intelligent enough and you know enough to make more money just like going after new clients than trying to follow up on people that might know you a little bit um so my yeah my Earnest recommendation to you is just don't sweat it I remember one time where uh I was running my content writing agency and we were working with this great guy uh he was awesome and he was under the impression that we weren't using AI for a content and I believe I had told him or I had uh implied or I had asked him how he felt about Ai and content and stuff like that and he said something along the lines of like oh you know that's okay you know I don't really think a content's that bad you know it's perfectly fine this is right around the time the chat gbt came out and everybody was really worried about like the AI generated scores for Content or whatnot so I was using AI to fulfill his content and so uh you know I told him okay cool so to be clear what's important to you is that the AI generated scores are below a certain number and he's like yes and I'm like

### [26:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eex1XkQwoMc&t=1618s) Learning from Bad Clients

okay great so I consistently made it so that the AI generated scores were below a specific number then one day he used a different AI um like an AI validator score tool and all these tools are total BS but he used one of them that like said the score was 83% or something and at that point he had owed me $122,000 and he didn't pay the $112,000 I remember being so furious with him for like 5 minutes it took me 5 minutes to be like I can't believe this guy I'm going to assume I'm going to get all my money back $112,000 all you know all he cared about was the AI score I did everything he asked I used the platform he asked he just used a random platform I'm gonna I'm going to send letters to his house and stuff that was minute five a minute Zero by minute five I was like all right I'm probably not going to get that money back so I might as well move on and just get new customers uh aside from now I haven't thought about that guy in you know the better part of like a couple years realistically and he's a cool guy we just obviously happen to have that disagreement there's obviously no way in hell I'm ever going to get that money back so God bless his soul um I guess the point that I'm making is if you adopt that sort of approach it's much more effective than if you just let it eat you up inside the reality is there really are like no hard well this is what make me sound evil it's not that there are no hard right or wrongs in business it's just that you need to operate under the idea that or under the notion that nobody has a moral compass and if you operate just assume and expect that the people that you are working with do not um you will perform substantially better as a business so that was a really big tactical mistake that I made trying to follow up with people for money and just wasting a ton of my time um another really big thing uh that I screwed up on was I hired some very inexperienced developers so um you know

### [28:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eex1XkQwoMc&t=1717s) Hiring Inexperienced Developers

when you're a new AI automation agency and you're told constantly hey you need to hire obviously eventually you're going to try taking one of them up on it you'll be like all right I should probably hire but the issue is you know when you're new you probably don't have that much money right and so what you're going to do is you're going to start looking for deals well what I've come to realize is it's very difficult to get a good deal on a person okay it makes me sound really doubly bad yeah you can't get a good deal on people these days but you really can't okay you really can't um if you try and cut $300 a month off of the salary of the person and you make a decision to choose the person that's cheaper uh but that maybe is a little bit less experienced but you figure you'll train them if if you do this the vast majority of the time you're going to lose way more than the $300 or $500 a month that you save by hiring that person as opposed to somebody more expensive and more skilled cuz hiring is just so damn difficult it's so dang hard to get right it is the big thing that makes a like a successful thriving company a company it's the big skill to learn if you want to make like a you know $100 million a month sort of of Empire and it's just way too hard really for me at least to wrap my head around at the low levels um and so every time that I've tried to hire people that are unskilled I've always just been majorly disappointed I'll usually hire somebody that's unskilled or you know that has some middling level of skill but like doesn't really understand how to do job and I've done this multiple times for left click from my automation agency and from my content writing company I'll get a good deal on them and I'll think oh man first month I'm already up 500 bucks and then by month two they'll have burned me on $5,000 worth of projects and I will be out 4,500 bucks you know what I mean not to mention all the time and energy that I spend training them so you know if if I could really sum summarize that mistake it would be don't hire inexperienced people push your bar for when you think you need to hire like twice as high as you actually think um that it is like if you think you need to hire at 10,000 bucks a month don't hire at 20,000 bucks a month instead focus on Building Systems that enable you to get to 20,000 bucks a month without hiring because then when you do hire at 20,000 bucks a month you'll be able to hire people that are substantially more experienced and then when you combine with your really good systems that are now super dialed in and optimized well now the next time you hire you won't have to hire until they're at 70 or 880,000 bucks a month you know um yeah I mean I made it to 72,000 buckss uh per month with literally one VA I mean it was me and it was a VA and the VA did you know a fair amount of work don't get me wrong it was full-time

### [31:04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eex1XkQwoMc&t=1864s) Scaling Without Hiring

hours well uh 30 whatever hours a week on average but like the reason why that worked was because we sold super scalable offers uh we had like a good recuring service um you know I received some deposits uh that I was waiting on I I had uh multiple months come in I had a lot of people um come in because of a particularly successful cold email campaign I guess the point that I'm making is like don't worry too much about hiring especially today because the likelihood that you'll be able to use that hire for more than a few years just given our technology going is really low and then the likelihood that you're going to get hiring right on the first go if you're a new AI automation agency is also very low so look for automated Alternatives however possible I mean you are an automation specialist after all okay I can tell this video is getting a little bit long and I do have an appointment that I got to get to so I'm gon I'm gonna call it there hopefully you guys found a lot of value in that and listening to me yap on um full face wasn't super boring I'd love it if you guys have had any similar experiences to what I talked about here if you just drop a comment down below I'd love to hear them you know me I read every comment I'm more than happy to get back to you if you guys have any questions about anything I talked about let me know um if you could do me a big solid like subscribe do all the fun YouTube stuff try and get me to the top of the algo I'm doing a lot of numbers on YouTube recently and it's all thanks to the lovely people that make it to the end I'd really appreciate it and yeah I guess I'll just see you on the next video thanks so much for your time take care bye

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*Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/12509*