You MUST Understand This to Scale Your AI Agency

if you are looking to scale your AI agency there's a few things you need to understand to make the process as easy as possible so in this video I'm continuing on from where I left off on my general versus Niche agencies video which I'll put up here it's important that you watch that before so you understand all the information I'm going to give you here U but this is based around the difference between niched and general agencies and how you can use this difficulty value Matrix to decide when to transition from General to niched agencies there's a lot to get through it's very important if you are looking to be in this business model long term and you're looking to optimize how you build your business over time so that you scale it as easy as possible so the difficulty value Matrix is where we're going to start here I it is freezing cold here in South Africa so I am wearing a hoodie it's a little bit more casual than usual but I'm sure you guys will appreciate the value rather than the uh attire so let's get into things so first thing we need to go through is a little graph like this all right and so up here right and up here we have 50k 100K and say this is 300K and this is monthly rev so we have monthly revenue of 10K 50k 100K and 300,000 now this is not retainer income um necessarily it's just the amount of cash collected each month that you're doing and we have option number one here which is the niche agency niched and here we have General so this is step one um is understanding the difference between the two models and when you should pick one the other and when you should look to transition your general agency into a niche agency because if we're looking to scale which we're going to get to in a second the niche agency is Superior in terms of scaling operationally you are going to be running into less issues you've got less complexity throughout the business you're going to be selling the same thing to roughly the same set of people over and over again so it makes it much easier to repeatedly sell that thing and dial in your marketing and your messaging over time start running ads Etc so scalability the niche agency has the crown here um as you'd expect uh but the general agency is where most of you are going to be starting um I've been over in my recent video the one that I mentioned that you should have already watched before watching this that the niche agency is only really ideal for people starting out who have connections or experience in a given industry so if you have connections in say the Home Services industry and you have experience and you deeply understand exactly how those businesses run and the problems that they face then you can go in and either use your own experience to identify a niche solution and build that out maybe hire a development team or try to build it out yourself or you have your own experience from working in that industry and you know everything and you don't need to go to anyone else but also the connections are going to be helpful because you can then go and sell it to business owners in that space using your warm connection so niched agency because you have to come up with a product or a service and an offer initially it's a lot harder to start as a beginner um but long term it is superior if you're looking to scale aggressively right so the General agency which is what most you're going to start which means you don't need connections you don't need experience this is kind of a longer process to get started but it's a way to ease into the model and ease into running online businesses I know many of you are new to online business in general and easing into it took me 14 months to make my first dollar in profit when I was doing online business in the e-commerce base and that was cuz I had to ease in and pick up all these other skills that are necessary to actually succeed it's also it's mindset it's habits there's a complete transformation of you that needs to happen and the general AG is a way that you can ease into it without having to go through all the difficulty of coming up with an offer identifying a problem to solve Etc so General agency is where most of you going to be starting um but that is not where if you are looking to scale which is the whole purpose of this video you going to end up longterm and as I mentioned before the operational streamlining that you can have from a niched agency where it's like okay we have built this one product or the suite of products for a certain Niche or for a certain Avatar it's much easier for us to s that repeatedly and also to acquire customers because we can run ads Etc got into circles here but you get the idea the point of this video is to give you a framework the difficulty value Matrix to let you know when to transition this General agency into a niche agency because the good thing about a general agency is cu you are working uh with a various different types of companies you're taking requests on things that they want you to build for them like morning site AI my own company we are in the process the reason I'm making this video is cuz we are in the process of doing this right now so we are looking to we've been trying to scale the general agency which has taking custom projects past six figures per month and it is just been an absolute nightmare like it is pushing shed uphill because there's so much operational complexity of running these custom projects every time because every time we go to take on a client this a gigantic process there's a lot of exploration we need to do an entire exploration Milestone with them that's going to take a week and we need to hop on do a proposal write the whole proposal up do the Contracting custom every time go back and forth on the contract over a lot of stuff goes on just to get one client signed because

there's so much it's custom we're doing custom development they do it on request they come to us with something that they need they've watched one of my videos whe they've seen something elsewhere and they come to us and say hey can you build this for me I'd like a quote or proposal so and then because every time you go to build a project as a custom AI Solutions company like morning side we are solving problems that we potentially haven't solved before so we have a track record of previous projects we've done and we can draw from that how we can execute on these new ones but at the end of the day we haven't covered even a fraction of the potential use cases out there and so for us every time we go into a project we are dealing with an element of unknown and that means there's a a risk factor that there's going to be issues that pop up on the project that's going to take longer than expected there's more managerial Insight involved um and so it's difficult has been difficult for us to get past this 100K per month Mark so we are in the process of niching down warning side this is a little bit of an announcement I'm going to do a whole video on it but we're in the process of niching warning side down into a specific Niche I'm not going to tell you just yet you got to wait for that video but we're going to Niche down to scale past that 6 Figure per month or low cap that we've been facing so for those of you who are starting off agencies I want you to get this very clear on your mind right now even if you're just starting even if you haven't started understand that this Dynamic is at play where Niche agencies can sort of scale right through because they get do all the hard work early General agencies get to taste all the way along so they're doing little all these different projects that you do at the time at some point you're going to find something that's going to allow you to Niche down and that's what the next part of this video is about is how do you know when you found that so let's go into the next part now so here we have the difficulty value Matrix a framework that I've come up with for looking at the solutions that you provide as a general agency that you can pass through this as a filter or as a lens uh to determine if the solution that you're providing is something that's potentially an option for niching down towards so I know it's probably not rocket science but we have value along the bottom in terms of the value to the client so if you create something inherently the solutions that we build our whole job as AI automation agency owners is to be able to use AI technology to create value in businesses so that's our skill we need to identify opportunities for it and then we need to deploy the resources and the team necessary and have the managerial oversight to see that uh that project delivered and executed so that we can create value for the businesses and we're going to be able to extract some of that value back for ourselves in the process of creating it so that's how we pull and siphon out some money from this AI wave and the AI Revolution or whatever buzz word you want to use we need to create value with AI and we get a share of it of whatever we're able to create so the value that we create for clients it can either be low and something that's quite small and more of a quality of life thing or it could be a serious uh impact provide a serious impact to the business and drive massive growth or cost savings Etc so high value low value not too complicated then we have difficulty in terms of the difficulty of you to deliver it it's low difficulty and high difficulty um this might be a little automation custom platform the High difficulty ones might involve a lot of moving parts and different Integrations the low difficulty ones might use a very basic setup with just one or two softwares so I know you guys are smart enough to understand the difference between hard and easy projects and also low and high value projects but in the middle here is where it gets good and this is the lens that you can look through to identify what Solutions you should consider niching down towards so first we have in this bottom corner low value Solutions low value to the client but also low difficulty so it's easy for us to deliver but it's not providing that much value to the client so these are kind of quality of life little they can be good for UPS sales where if you're targeting a certain Niche you can say hey look I'll also throw on this this and this it's easy for us to do like not much cost to us but we can throw them in there it's not going to be the main driver of value for the offer but they can be handy things to get a deal over the line or just to provide some extra value um for the client on the whole so low value and easy next we have solutions that are of low value to the client and are hard for us to deliver so I'm not even going to continue talking about that let's just cross that off that's not what we're interested in here and if you've delivered one of these you probably want to put that on a black list of like let's never do this again um cuz providing not much value to your client and making it very hard for yourself and your team is not the equation that we want out of these businesses right personally I'm trying to build a business that is to some degree a lifestyle business as well that allows me to live the life that I want to and if I'm taking on a bunch of stress stressing my team out and not delivering much value I can put my time in and I should be spending my time on different areas of this quadrant uh in future so jumping across through here we have high value and hard Solutions so these are these custom platforms that you have to put a lot of effort into like the biggest project that we've done at morning side is now uh over $120,000 or so um and it was a complete SAS AI SAS buildup that we've done that was both high value for the client and also very hard for the team so that was the most difficult project we've done by far took basically all of our resources for a while but we're able to deliver that and so while these can be good at certain stages of your general agency it's likely not something that you want to Niche your agency down to unless you want to end up like in our case being

like the AI SAS Specialists personally I wouldn't be trying to Niche down to it and that's why us as morning side didn't we did consider it of saying hey let's just keep doing AI SAS projects CU they're quite large they're high ticket and we can get a nice track record up of like clear definable platforms that would built but on the whole uh we weren't interested in doing that we're looking for a sort of smaller win that we can scale a bit more aggressively because this hard we are in a stage with the AI space right now where we have the luxury of being early we don't have to at a at a later date people are going to solve these problems cuz hard is all kind of relative right people can solve hard with good systems and good processes and really talented teams so hard can eventually become like medium if you've done the same thing like 20 times and you've really dialed in the process on how you execute on delivering an AI s platform but on the whole we are in the early stages of this AI Revolution and we have a luxury of picking the lwh hanging fruit so you watching this video right now as a posting you have the luxury of picking a low bring fruit that are easy to deliver and high value which is our next one so this is not a complete no neither is this but this is high value to the client plus easy to deliver which is a big check mark from uh Mr artley here so that is exactly what we're trying to go for if you are niching down to a specific type of solution that you want to sell repeatedly for example you may have found an automation or a chain of AI automations that when applied to a specific type of business can completely change the way that they are acquiring clients and that's a massive value ad for the client but also easier for you in some cases the strengths of generative Ai and llms can just be applied perfectly to a specific use case and you're able to get a situation like this with high value to the client and easy for you to deliver so if we are talking about when to go from Niche to General and you remember on the uh the little thing I had all these lines and then what's this big star moment where we're going to actually go up to the niche rout this is what you're looking for this is the lens the high value and easy to deliver so just a recap high value and easy is what we're looking for low value and easy are good for upsells SL bundles so not something you should completely disregard but keep them in the back pocket if you want to add more value to a deal or offer them to your client as a as an extra um high value and hard can be good um and you can turn this hard into medium over time um but we are in the early stages and we get to pick the low hanging fruit here's a little tree is what we're trying to get there and that's what high value and easy to deliver Solutions are so moving on from that I want to point out all Al something that you may not be aware of when you are building these Solutions and working as a general agency in particular there is no contractual obligation unless you put it in the contract that if you build a high value and easy to deliver solution for a client that you can't go and then take this and go okay how can I find more businesses so you've delivered a high value and easy to deliver solution for a specific type of business the question you should be asking next if you're choosing to Niche down here or want to explore it further do a couple more iterations and implemented in businesses a few more times and get a bit more experience your question should be how can I find more of these businesses because what you've just built here unless in the contract with the client they ask for exclusivity where if you build this for me you're not allowed to build it for any of my competitors or anyone else in the space and for them to ask for that in the contract you will need to put your price significantly up because if in most cases AI is quite a broad field right now there's a lot of overlapping Solutions it might be an AI automation it might be a chatbot if you as an agency say I will never build another AI chatbot for this you're wiping out a massive potential chunk of revenue for the phable future so and unless they're willing to pay five six 10 times more than what you actually put on the regular ticket price for a project like that you're entirely allowed to take that exact same solution that you built for them and then go and find other people like it you go on Apollo you go on use instantly lead finder you go on any of these lead finding platforms you go on LinkedIn sales Navigator you can try to find other business owners like that using any of the lead generation methods that are out there right and then once you take that you've already got it built now you can just try and copy and paste it to some degree there's always going to be some complexities and replicating it across another business but for the most part you've got a significant chunk of it done and they you're able to take it across so these businesses that you work with unless they ask for it explicitly in the contract you are able to go and find more businesses like them and then you have the ammunition required to say I buil built X for y do you want it and then once you do this you have the ammunition when you are reaching out to them to make your Outreach so much more effective because you can say hey I just built X for y your competitor are you interested in learning more about it or do you want to hop on a call to discuss how it could change your business as well this is tapping into a the sort of psychology of business owners right now where they know AI is the wave it's coming many of them have ski IAL about it they're not ready to invest in it but this is

the kind of thing that can nudge them over the edge so being able to say that hey you're direct competitor I just built this crazy AI system for them and that's getting insane results for them would you be interested in hopping on a cour to learn more about how it could potentially help your business if not if it's not a good fit no problem but you've just learned a bit more about how AI is helping businesses in your industry so I want to link this very quickly to some of the research that I've been doing I'm always uh furiously researching the macro environment behind the scenes because if I'm going to be giving you guys information I want to make sure that I'm giving you relevant information given the macroeconomic context and all the trends that are going on so based off a report that I was reading I'll put it up on screen now so you can read it says the tension between the push to offset slowing labor force growth with Automation and the pull to slow automation roll out to prevent massive disruption will play out over the next 10 to 20 years but once the first companies begin deploying new forms of automation others are likely to rapidly follow suit to stay competitive this tie directly into something that I've talked about a lot before which is this Tech adoption life cycle so we have Bam Bam if you haven't watched a video on why you aren't making money with AI I break this down and explain you need to understand this if you want to be in AI business and selling AI solution so watch that up here the tech adoption life cycle not to hop on about this over and over but if you remember from that video we have the innovators here we can ignore them we have the early adopters which is where we're selling most of our AI Solutions right now so early adopters are this segment here and then we have the early majority which is this big chunk here and then we have the late majority which we're not too interested in right now but we are in the stage with the AI space right now on the consumer side it's a little bit different cuz chat GPT is allowing us to the early majority is getting into chat GPT right now but when it comes to business adoption of AI Solutions I can tell you firsthand and from all the thousands of people in my community that we're still in this early adopters category and this is what they call the the crossing the chasm so I didn't really draw it as you would but there's a gap between early adoption and early majority and it's the businesses right now who are able to jump from these early adopters who many of you are probably talking to when you're doing your lead generation you're making content you'll be talking to a lot of early adopters in the space who are interested in just trying AI out in their business because they know it's the future and they're willing to experiment and they see where it's going to go they are not as worried in direct Roi but more on just being in the front foot so they will take a bit of their profits and reinvest it into AI just purely on the potential for what it could do for their business long term but this early majority take a lot more evidence and data they're going to wait for the early adopters to have a go with it let me know I want to see some data it actually working and then I'm going to jump in and start using it so that's what the sasm is and this is the information that allows you to start tapping in to this early majority you can say I bought this system for your competitor do you want it are you interested in it he is or she is an early adopter you've sold it to this person initially that you've used their money basically to build the thing out and do with the R& D for it and now you can go to these early majority and start reaching out to a much broader part of the business s of population and start sending this these kind of messages where it's hey you are in this category and you need information like this here's all the proof here's how it worked here's a demo of it would you be interested and now you were able to start tapping into this much larger chunk of the business owner population or business owner Market globally wherever you want to Niche that down to but broadly speaking this section of the early majority is what you're able to tap into and that is really what the race is on for right now between you me everyone else in the AI agency space the small group of us that are after this opportunity right now we are gunning for this and so if you're able to build a solution for a business that is high value and easy to deliver you go and find more businesses like that you start to send messages and let them know that hey I've built stuff for your competitors would you be interested in learning more about it you were going to see a sizable increase in the response rate when you were reaching out to businesses so I think that's all I want to cover for this video I know that's been quite a synthesis of all the different stuff that I talked about on the channel but if you're new to the channel and you don't know who I am or what the hell I'm talking about then go back and watch my other videos there's plenty of stuff on the channel talking about this me in front of the Whiteboard waving my hands around but this information is so important for you to understand if you are looking to do this longterm and scale your agency as myself and the team at warning side are doing right now we are looking to break past that ceiling that we've hit for so long and to do that we need to Niche down we've realized that and this is the way that we've done it I'm just sharing with you what we do so that you guys can do it in your agency as well and see similar success so aside from that if you've enjoyed leave a like uh subscribe to the channel for more videos like this and leave a comment if there's anything that you want me to cover in future if you have any questions about any of this please drop it down below if there's good questions I will go and reply to them if it's just rubbish I'm not going to bother replying to them by the way so yeah that's the difficulty value Matrix that's all for this video see you in the next one