Build Your First AI Business in 6 Hours (Ultimate Beginner Guide)

Summary

Nick Saraev presents an in-depth guide on starting and scaling an AI automation business. Emphasizing the potential of AI as a profitable opportunity rather than a threat, the video covers a comprehensive roadmap from launch to scaling to six-figure revenues. It touches on the importance of core business skills, leveraging automation tools, and effective sales processes. Viewers are shown how to structure businesses, target niches, automate tasks, and deliver impactful results. The guide ultimately aims to transform beginners into thriving entrepreneurs equipped for the digital future.

Highlights

• Nick guarantees your first client in 90 days through his Maker School or your money back! 💰
• Scaling an AI business to six figures without hiring can be achieved by leveraging the right strategies. 📈
• Core business skills are more vital than you might think - focus on sales, lead generation, and customer retention. 💼
• Technical tools like APIs and webhooks are essential in automating processes. Ensure you know how to use them efficiently. 🤖
• AI automation can future-proof your business, positioning you ahead of market trends. 🚀

Key Takeaways

• AI is an opportunity, not a threat. Embrace it to build innovative businesses! 💡
• Master key business skills - they matter more than technical skills for success. 🧠
• Effective sales processes are crucial. Learn to pitch like a pro! 💬
• Automate tasks and streamline your business operations. Save time and increase efficiency! ⚙️
• Focus on delivering exceptional results to retain clients and grow your business. 📈

Overview

In this ultimate guide by Nick Saraev, we delve into the world of AI automation businesses. The video highlights AI not as a job-eliminating threat but as a tremendous entrepreneurial opportunity. By learning to harness AI technologies, entrepreneurs are shown the path to build scalable and efficient businesses with significant profit potential.

A major focus is placed on the importance of mastering business fundamentals over technical expertise. Nick emphasizes the need to understand core concepts like sales processes, lead generation, and client retention, which are crucial for sustaining and scaling a business. His methodical approach offers a step-by-step guide from business inception to substantial growth.

With practical strategies and real-world examples, viewers are taught how to target specific niches, automate their operations, and deliver results that keep clients satisfied. By the end of the guide, aspiring entrepreneurs are equipped with the knowledge to transform traditional business models into cutting-edge, AI-driven enterprises.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction: Build Your First AI Business in 6 Hours The chapter serves as an introduction to the AI agency business master class led by Nick, aimed at helping individuals start an AI business or begin freelancing with automation. Nick shares his experience of scaling his AI automation agency to over $72,000 per month and consulting for multiple seven and eight-figure companies. In his Maker School community, which includes about 3,000 entrepreneurs, Nick guarantees gaining the first paying client within 90 days. He approaches AI not as a job replacer but as a business opportunity.
• 00:30 - 01:00: Why AI Business Opportunities are Exploding The chapter discusses the current surge in AI business opportunities, emphasizing they should be seen less as a threat and more as a chance for innovation and entrepreneurial endeavor. It frames AI as a definitive element of the future economy, suggesting that those who strategically position themselves now will lead future markets. The narrative encourages seizing the opportunity promptly as market windows can close swiftly. The chapter promises to guide the reader from a beginner's understanding to a proficiency in creating and selling profitable AI automation systems.
• 01:00 - 01:30: Overview of Video Content and Structure This chapter provides an overview of the video's content and structure, focusing on the business aspect of AI and automation. The content creator invites viewers interested in the technical side to explore nearly 100 hours of content available on their channel, with timestamps provided for easy navigation. Viewers are encouraged to bookmark the video for future reference rather than consuming it all at once. The chapter outlines the topics to be covered, including the 80/20 technical foundations of AI and automation, strategies for finding paying clients, proven sales processes, effective pricing strategies, client delivery systems, and more.
• 01:30 - 03:00: Core Concepts and Technical Foundations This chapter provides a roadmap for building a successful AI automation agency business by 2025 without the need to hire additional staff. It emphasizes the importance of establishing a solid foundation before seeking clients or growing the business. The chapter introduces core concepts essential for mastering the technical and business aspects necessary for success. It covers the 'AT20' essentials, including APIs, webhooks, AI prompting, and various business fundamentals.
• 03:00 - 05:00: Lead Generation and Sales Processes This chapter focuses on the importance of business skills over technical skills, emphasizing the need to understand automation as a business model. It introduces core concepts that are foundational to mastering client acquisition, sales processes, and scaling strategies. The chapter suggests that without a solid foundation, these business strategies will not be effective. It strongly advises viewers to pay attention to these foundational aspects to ensure success in further learning. The chapter begins by addressing a seemingly boring but essential point that is criticial to understanding the overall process.
• 05:00 - 07:30: API and Webhook Integration Techniques The chapter challenges the hype surrounding AI automation, emphasizing that it should be viewed as a regular business rather than a trendy phenomenon. It argues that the skills required for success in AI automation are comparable to those needed in more traditional businesses, such as plumbing, recruitment, or e-commerce.
• 07:30 - 09:00: Effective AI Model Prompting The chapter discusses effective AI model prompting by exploring various business models. It begins with lead generation strategies, including cold emails, pay-per-click ads, and referrals. These methods are used to attract potential customers to a business. The discussion then moves to the conversion phase, where these leads are typically funneled to something like a sales call.
• 09:00 - 10:30: Test-Driven Development for Automation In the chapter titled 'Test-Driven Development for Automation,' the focus is on the business process involving client acquisition and relationship management in the context of AI automation businesses. It stresses the importance of sending proposals or estimates to potential clients and how they evolve into long-term partners through effective engagement and retention strategies. The chapter underscores that this approach not only applies to automation but is a universal strategy across various business models.
• 10:30 - 12:00: Starting with the End in Mind for Automation Projects The chapter discusses the foundational aspects of starting an automation project, emphasizing the similarities between AI automation businesses and traditional businesses. It highlights that the primary difference is in the fulfillment section, which varies depending on the business type, such as repairs in plumbing or new hires in recruitment.
• 12:00 - 17:00: Roadmap to Building a Profitable AI Automation Business The chapter discusses the foundational aspects of building a profitable AI automation business. It emphasizes that while the fulfillment process may be unique to AI automation, other elements like driving leads, closing deals, and impressing clients are common across major digital business models. The focus should not solely be on the AI aspect but also on these shared foundational practices.
• 17:00 - 18:30: Clientless Money and Affiliate Programs The chapter titled 'Clientless Money and Affiliate Programs' emphasizes the importance of focusing on fundamental business concepts rather than relying solely on AI automation for success. It advises directing most efforts towards driving leads, selling, and retaining customers. Mastering these foundational skills is portrayed as more profitable than prioritizing AI, even if one's AI capabilities are not top-tier.
• 18:30 - 31:00: Start an Automation Business from Scratch: Step-by-Step The chapter emphasizes that the success of an automation agency or business is not primarily dependent on advanced technical skills or fancy technology, but rather on a balanced understanding of both technical and business aspects. It highlights a common challenge where individuals with technical backgrounds, such as engineers or developers, often struggle with the business side, particularly marketing. The key takeaway is that being skilled in development is not sufficient for running a successful business; one must also improve their marketing and business skills to truly succeed in entrepreneurship.
• 31:00 - 34:00: Sales Call Strategies and Scripts The chapter emphasizes the importance of solid marketing and sales skills over technical abilities in the initial stages of developing an AI automation business. The narrator suggests that focusing on being a good marketer and salesperson is crucial, and only thereafter can one afford to delve into technical aspects. The content appears to be aimed at beginners in the AI automation field.
• 34:00 - 39:00: Pricing Strategies for AI Services The chapter discusses the importance of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) in AI automation and agency fulfillment. It explains that APIs involve a server URL that allows sending and receiving requests. The chapter highlights how APIs are integral to popular AI automation tools like make.com, NADN, Zapier, and Lindy, which are often associated with no-code, drag-and-drop platforms widely recognized for their ease of use.
• 39:00 - 45:20: Onboarding New Clients Effectively The chapter titled 'Onboarding New Clients Effectively' discusses the limitations of relying solely on built-in integrations with AI automation for business purposes. It stresses the importance of using APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to create custom connections with various platforms. This approach enhances the ability to offer more value to clients than just using drag-and-drop modules, which clients might manage on their own. The chapter highlights the need for creative and customized integrations to truly leverage technology for client benefit.
• 45:20 - 51:20: Delivering Automation Projects and Maximizing Client Retention The chapter focuses on the importance of connecting to APIs when delivering automation projects and maximizing client retention. It discusses how platforms like make.com and Zapier offer simple endpoints, but using APIs provides more parameters and options. The guide provides a walkthrough of connecting to an API using popular tools like make.com and naden, emphasizing the importance of considering Oth (likely a reference to OAuth) during the connection process.
• 51:20 - 57:40: Scaling an Automation Business without Adding Staff The chapter is focused on strategies for scaling an automation business without the need to hire additional staff. It begins with a discussion on creating a basic, working example by copying and pasting code, and from there developing a minimal yet functional API call. Once a working API call is established, which usually involves dealing with method endpoints and headers, further development becomes more straightforward. The speaker is planning to demonstrate this process through examples on make.com and N8N platforms. Moreover, the chapter introduces a specific API called Fire Call, touted as a useful tool for scraping data from websites efficiently. Fire Call is increasingly being integrated into their automation projects. Overall, the emphasis is on leveraging APIs and tools to enhance automation capabilities without expanding the workforce.
• 57:40 - 59:00: Conclusion and Final Thoughts on Building an AI Business The chapter provides a conclusion and final thoughts on building an AI business, focusing on a specific tool, leftclick.ai, designed for B2B growth systems. The narrator describes their website and the functionalities it offers, such as running a web scraper. This tool operates by spinning up a server, accessing the specified site, and extracting data, demonstrating its practical application. The chapter emphasizes the utility of such tools in enhancing operational efficiency.

Build Your First AI Business in 6 Hours (Ultimate Beginner Guide) Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 Hey, welcome to the most comprehensive AI agency business master class ever created. It's absolutely free and if you want to start an AI business or begin freelancing with automation, you are in the right place. My name is Nick. I've scaled my own AI automation agency at over 72 grand per month. And I've also consulted with many seven and 8 figureure companies you're probably familiar with. Right now, I work with nearly 3,000 a entrepreneurs on lead generation and scaling in my private community called Maker School, where I actually guarantee your first paying client in 90 days or your money back. So, I'm pretty confident about this stuff. Anyway, while everybody's talking about AI replacing jobs, intelligent entrepreneurs are seeing it less as
• 00:30 - 01:00 something to be feared and more as an opportunity, and they're building new businesses around it right now. This isn't some trend. I hope it's clear. AI is very obviously the future. And it's abundantly clear that the people that position themselves right today are going to be dominating the marketplaces of tomorrow. The way that I see it, the window is still open as of right now, but it is closing quickly, as all market opportunities do. So, you might as well jump on it now. This video will take you from complete beginner to somebody that is capable of building not only automations but profitable AI automation systems and then selling those systems to companies that are desperate for solutions. It's primarily about the
• 01:00 - 01:30 business side of AI and automation. But if you guys want to deep dive into the technical side as well, I have almost 100 hours of pure building on my channel that you guys can find. And I've made sure to add timestamps for every section down in the description. So if you guys want to come back to a specific part, feel free to jump around. And also make sure you bookmark this video right now so you can come back to it later. I do not expect you to watch it all in one shot. So here's what we're going to cover. First, the 8020 technical foundations behind AN automation. Then, how to find paying clients. Then, we'll discuss proven sales processes, pricing strategies that actually work, client delivery systems, and then ultimately
• 01:30 - 02:00 how to scale to six figures or more without hiring anybody. This is your complete road map to building a futureproofed AI automation agency business in 2025. So, let's dive into the foundations and get going. Starting with the core concepts you need to master. So, before we actually jump into finding clients and building your business, we do need to establish the foundations. So, this first whole section is going to cover what I call the AT20 of the technical and business essentials behind AI and automation. That means we're going to chat briefly about things like APIs. We're going to talk web hooks. We're going to talk a little bit of like um AI prompting. And then we're also going to get into the business fundamentals that I find a lot
• 02:00 - 02:30 of people actually miss. By the end of it, you guys are going to understand why focusing on business skills matters more than being a technical wizard. You're also going to know how to approach automation as a real business model and then some of the core concepts that everything else in this master class depends on. Once you have the foundations locked down, the clan acquisition and sales processes and scaling strategies that we're going to cover next are going to make total sense. Though without them, you'll be building on shaky ground. So, I do highly recommend that you make it at least to the end of this initial video. Let's dive into the essentials. Why don't we jump right into the very first point, and it is the most boring point ever. And you're probably like, Nick, why did you start with this point? Well,
• 02:30 - 03:00 it's because I think a lot of people see AI automation as this hype train and this big bubble. And I want to push back against that. AI automation is not really all of that. It is just like any other business. Don't get caught up in the hype. Don't get caught up in the shiny objects. The skills that make you a successful AI automation business owner are the exact same skills that make you a successful plumber. They're the exact same skills that make you a successful recruitment agency owner. They're the exact same skills that make you a successful e-commerce business owner. I'm going to draw a business
• 03:00 - 03:30 model on the right hand side here, and I just want you guys to kind of like see which business models this matches. Okay, we start with our lead genen. And there's a variety of things that we do for lead genen. We could do cold email, okay? Maybe we do PPC. That's pay-per-click ads. Maybe we do referrals. These are all ways of getting people interested in your business. And what do you do with all these lead genen mechanisms? Well, you then shuttle them to some sort of conversion. So, usually this is a sales call. Okay. What happens on the sales
• 03:30 - 04:00 call? Usually, you'll send a proposal of some kind, also known as a quote or an estimate. After that point the person becomes a client. When they become a client you then fulfill and ideally at the very end of this there would be some sort of retention mechanism that you know gets them back in through some other call and then you just repeat and this is really what makes you money. Okay. So I just drew that and that is how all AI automation businesses work. But kind of just like zoom out a little bit. If you squint what you'll notice is this doesn't just apply to a automation
• 04:00 - 04:30 businesses. That exact funnel that I drew literally applies to like 90% of B2B businesses all over the world. And so I say this to mean the only difference between an AI automation business and the vast majority of other businesses that you may or may not have experience with. The only difference is this section right here. It's that little fulfillment section. Okay? So, you know, in a plumbing business or whatever, that might be, I don't know, repairs. That might be, you know, new pipes. In a recruitment business, that
• 04:30 - 05:00 might be a candidate being placed. in a PPC agency that might be some ad creatives being developed or something. The point is the fulfillment is the different part. Okay, that's the AI automation part. But everything else, your ability to drive leads, your ability to close those leads, your ability to impress the hell out of those leads, whatever, all of this stuff is foundational and is shared with literally every other major digital business model today. So, the reason why I say all this is because don't focus
• 05:00 - 05:30 90% of your energy on that tiny little bit at the end that just happens to be AI automation. If you guys really want to crush it at this business model, focus the vast majority of your energy on the same foundational concepts that you'd have to learn in any business. Focus on your ability to drive leads. Focus on your ability to sell to those leads. Focus on your ability to retain customers after they've made it through your pipeline. If you guys are incredible at that, and even if you happen to be second rate at AI automation, you guys will make way more money than if it was the other way around. Okay? So, the fundamentals are
• 05:30 - 06:00 always what make your automation agency or business successful. It's never fancy fancy tech. It's never your implementation. Um, don't overthink the technical aspects like I see a lot of people coming from, you know, programming or development or engineering backgrounds do. And certainly don't underthink the business side of things because the number one thing that I see when people enter my communities and my groups and my products, they're always like, "Hey, Nick, I'm an engineer and I'm great at building products, but I'm not very good at marketing." And then I'm like, "All right, well then you're not very good at being a business owner. So, we need to fix that first." Right? Your development
• 06:00 - 06:30 and engineering skills, those things can wait. We need to make sure that you're a good marketer. We need to make sure you're a good salesperson. And ultimately, we need to make sure that you're good at business development if we are to develop a business. Cool. So, I mean, you know, understated hopefully, but uh yeah, I think that's probably one of the most important parts. Now that I've covered that, we can actually start getting into some technicals. Okay, so I think a lot of people that are watching this are probably at the start line of their AI automation business. I mean, if you weren't, likelihood of you watching content like this is probably lower. So, I know real Sherlock Holmes over here,
• 06:30 - 07:00 but one of the core foundational parts of AI automation agency fulfillment is your ability to use an API. So, an API just stands for application programming interface. All that really means is essentially for our purposes it is a server URL somewhere in the internet that we can send a request to and then we can get things back. And the cool part about APIs for us is you know those AI automation tools that we tend to really know and love. Stuff like make.com stuff like nadn stuff like zapier stuff like lindy all these drag and drop no code platforms which are really what most people think about when
• 07:00 - 07:30 they think AI automation. Well these don't have built-in integrations with every platform that you might want to connect them to for business purposes. Okay, in those situations, we need to use an API or an application programming interface to build our own connection to those services to allow us to get a job done. I want to say that if you only use built-in integrations, not only is your ability to do anything actually really cool for the client severely limited, a lot of the time the client scales just do that stuff themselves by dragging and dropping modules across the screen. But not only is it super limited, you can't really drive as much value as you
• 07:30 - 08:00 realistically could out of any platform because a lot of the time the simple endpoints that are exposed by make.com or Zapier or any event or whatever um you know they're just a lot more parameters. There are a lot more options uh in the API versus just the the drag and drop. So what I'm going to do here is I'm actually going to run through how to connect to an API and I'm going to do it using two tools that are really popular right now, make.com and naden. And hopefully this is going to give you guys a walkthrough what I look for when I connect to an API. Um, as we see the number one thing that I always do immediately is I look for Oth. Then I
• 08:00 - 08:30 look for a way to copy and paste a simple example and then from there I basically build a minimum viable API call that just works. The second I have something that works which usually involves some method endpoint and header shenanigans. The second I have something that works everything else is so much easier. So um yeah, let me show you one example in make.com and then I'll show you another example in uh N8N as well. What's the API we're going to be connecting to? It's this really cool one called Fire Call. I've been using Firecol a lot more recently. Essentially what firecrawl is is just a way to scrape like any website and then return
• 08:30 - 09:00 the results in what's called markdown. So this is my website right over here. Okay, leftclick.ai growth systems for B2B companies. Got a handsome photo of myself in the top right hand corner. Then a bunch of other BS. I'll save you guys the time. Essentially what we do is um you know they have this little playground here so you guys can visually see what's going on. But let's say I want to run a scraper for a leftclick.AI. Essentially what's happening is on the back end it's spinning up its own server and then it's calling my website and then it's extracting all the data for me and then what I end up getting in return is I end
• 09:00 - 09:30 up getting this markdown here and markdown is just a compressed version of the HTML on the website. So I have like access to formatting with these headers. I have access to the links. I have access to basically everything I'd need. What's the value in scraping websites and stuff like this? Well, I talk about scraping a lot. Most of the examples in this video are going to be all scraping based. Um, just because I think there's like tremendous um kind of strategic sales value. Uh, but you know, the vast majority of the time anytime you're whipping up an email campaign for somebody or you're sending any sort of outreach or you're doing any sort of
• 09:30 - 10:00 marketing that really matters, you're going to be doing some sort of scraping in Aon Automation. So, I just wanted to make sure this is hyper relevant. Okay, cool. So, um, that's more or less the the playground. So, what I want to do now is I want to run this through API. I'm going to open up my make.com scenario over here. Uh, I just have it called API call example. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm just going to open up an HTTP request. And then what I always start with is the make a request module right over here. Okay. So now I'm going to head over to firecol. And what do I want to do? I want to use their API, right? So I'm going to go firecrawl API. I always just Google the API that
• 10:00 - 10:30 I'm looking for. And I see there's an API reference here. Awesome. Looks good. Now I'm confronted with kind of an intimidating page. SDKs, APIs, like what are all these threeletter acronyms? Well, the good news is this specific API is actually pretty upto-date and it's pretty clean. Um, not all APIs are like this, but essentially the very first and most important thing that I'm looking for is always the authentication. I think I might have called it authorization back here, but really what I meant was authentication. Okay, so we need to authenticate. Now, the way that authentication typically works is there there are two or three primary methods
• 10:30 - 11:00 nowadays. Um, the simplest one is what we see over here, which is why I picked this API and it's called authorization bearer. Now, authorization bearer is super simple and it's super straightforward. And essentially all this means is we need to add a header in our HTTP request that includes the term authorization and then the value of that needs to say bearer and then a space and then we need to have our API key. Okay, I think this nuance is lost on a lot of people. At least it certainly was for me when I got start started with all this stuff. So, I'm just going to show you guys what this actually looks like step by step with this real API and then I'm
• 11:00 - 11:30 just going to um change my API key afterwards so you guys don't all run up my fire crawl dev. Uh okay, cool. So, let me just see here. Um, what endpoint do we really want to call? I guess let's find an endpoint. So, I'm going to find the simplest possible endpoint. I'm just going to try recreating the playground request. So, I think it's a scrape, right? I'm just going to click scrape. And what do we see here? Post scrape. Okay, cool. The very um important thing is on the right hand side, you see how there's this curl request. And usually most APIs nowadays will have a big snippet of code. Well, this is where I
• 11:30 - 12:00 basically go to copy and paste a a code block with everything I need as quickly as humanly possible. Now, what we see is if I go back to my um Excala draw here, we start with the authorization and we figured out how to do that. That's fine. Now, we're going to look for a copy paste example and then we're going to put together a minimum viable API call. So, we've done this. Okay, we've done this and now we just need to put together this minimum viable API call inside of make. So, I'm just going to drag these docs all the way over to the left side so I could just very quickly and easily accessmake.com. And then what I'm going to do is I'm just going to copy all the
• 12:00 - 12:30 fields that are relevant. Now, the fields that are always relevant are always going to be the URL. So, I just grabbed the URL directly from here. I'm going to copy and I'm going to paste it inside of my URL bar. The method, which if you guys remember said post over here, it's usually going to be get or post. And then the headers. So, authorization bearer token. This is where we put our API key. Okay. So, in make I'm going to go down to headers. go authorization. Then I need to type bearer. And now I need my API key. So where am I going to get that? Top right hand corner. I'm going to go to my um firecrawl. Then I'm going to go down API
• 12:30 - 13:00 keys. Obviously every platform that you're using is going to have a different UX for API keys and stuff, but this is what firecalls looks like. Okay. And then I'm going to go to API key. And I'm just going to copy this API key. I'll go back to make and I'm just going to paste that in. Okay. So now we have the authorization taken care of, which is really cool. The next thing we need is if we go back to this doc, you see how um there's a uh content type application JSON header. Well, in make it's really easy to do. You just go body type and then you go raw and then content type you just set to JSON
• 13:00 - 13:30 application/json and then uh under request content. That's where this data flag is going to come in. And it's always a data flag in a post request. So what I'm going to do is I'm actually just going to copy this entire thing. Okay, I'm going to go back into my make and then I'm going to paste it in. And all I want is I want my URL, which in this case is being covered with a string. So I'm just going to paste in leftclick.ai. Now you see there are a ton of options here. Include tags, exclude tags. Usually in APIs like this, anytime you see these strings with this,
• 13:30 - 14:00 it's kind of like this code. This is just like a standin or like a template or like a placeholder. So I'm just going to get rid of all of these. And to be honest, do I do I even need any of these? I don't really think so. It looks like the only thing I actually need is just the body, right? I'm just going to remove all other options but this URL. Maybe I'll leave the markdown, too. Okay, get that out. Going to make sure that everything is still formatted in JavaScript object notation. That's definitely a good skill to learn if you guys are using APIs. And then I'm going to rightclick this and press run this module only. I see it's taking some time. It's a pretty good sign. Usually when things take time and on make.com
• 14:00 - 14:30 side, that means you're not getting an instant error. And what do I see if I go down to the bottom of the screen? Metadata markdown. I have all my markdown in this variable over here. If I scroll even further down, I have my entire website. And then I also have a bunch of other fields like source URL, scrape ID, description, title for my meta, all that stuff. So what have I done here, guys? I've successfully built an API request, inmake.com. As you see, it only took maybe 2 or 3 minutes as long as you know where to look and where to start. I'm going to do the exact same
• 14:30 - 15:00 thing now in naden. And you'll see it's actually even simpler because, you know, the solutions usually do a fair job of giving you what's called a curl request. And you can actually just copy and paste a curl request directly into NAD. Does most of the work for you. So now I'm going to open up an NAND workflow over here. And then I'm just going to type an HTTP request. Same thing as before. Then you see in the top rightand corner it says import curl. Well, what you can do is you can actually just grab this curl, copy all of it. Okay, curl is just a way that you send a request using your terminal. Then I'm going to click import curl. Paste it all over here. Import. And then now we've actually
• 15:00 - 15:30 automatically filled out all of that data. Okay. By just copying and pasting a curl request. This is why a lot of people like NAN. and it ends a little bit more developer friendly and geared towards people doing API integrations and stuff like that. I need an API token. So, I'm just going to copy this over, go back over here, paste this in. Super easy. Now, what else did we have? We just had a URL, right? So, I'm just going to go httpsleftclick.ai and then I'll leave the formats part and just delete everything else. This to me looks like pretty good JSON. If you're ever unsure
• 15:30 - 16:00 whether something's good JSON, just go to jsonformmatterater.com, paste in your JSON, then click format or beautify. If it works, you're going to get something like that. If it doesn't work, let's say we have an extra comma, it's going to tell you where the error is. And usually you'll be able to look at the fifth line and then be like, "Oh, okay. I have an extra comma there." Anyway, now that we know that that's good, I'm just going to go back over here and I'm going to click test step. Same as before. We do not get an instant error. What we do get is we get the data on the website scraped ready for us basically instantly. Okay, so
• 16:00 - 16:30 yeah, API calls are not magic. They're actually pretty easy and pretty simple and pretty straightforward. You just have to be smart about how you use them. So next up, let's talk a little bit about the other side of the equation. We just talked about sending data. Well, let's now talk about receiving data. And the best way to receive data is using something called a web hook. A web hook, to make a long story short, is just like an API call is a way to connect something that doesn't have a connector built into your note platform. Uh it's a way to create your own connection um sending data out. A web hook is just a way to do that for sending data in. So
• 16:30 - 17:00 web hook is just a custom URL basically that you are creating that enables you to point other services to you and then when you do something like maybe you change a record or you update a status or uh some new email comes in or whatever you can actually trigger a web hook on the make.com or the nadn or whatever your no code tool is end to start some flow. Okay so highly encourage you guys to figure this out because if you do figure it will make you unstoppable. Learning web hooks and learning APIs are probably like the two
• 17:00 - 17:30 I don't know I'd say they're probably like the two highest leverage things to learn in the actual AI automation fulfillment side of things aside from you know those business skills we talked about earlier. So how exactly would you do that? Well in make it's pretty easy. All you do so you just go to this web hook node or module what you want is custom web hook. Okay then you create a custom web hook and I'll just say my example web hook. And now what you have is you have a server essentially that is willing to receive a request. All you need to do is send a request to this server and then you are going to trigger your make.com flow. So if I click run
• 17:30 - 18:00 once, you'll see it's waiting. Okay, the simplest request you could send with a web hook is actually just you trying to access a website. So if I just take the URL, which was this one up here, and then I paste it in, what do you think is going to happen if I press enter? Well, my browser is going to send a request over to this web hook URL, which is going to trigger my flow. So I just press the button. As you see, it says accepted. And then if I go back here, this make.com operation, it actually got triggered, which is pretty crazy. Now, there's some built-in logic with web hooks that they don't really teach you about, but because web hooks are just a
• 18:00 - 18:30 server request, you can also do things like pass query parameter uh query parameters over. So, um, if I were to put a question mark and then say query parameters equal example, then press enter. What you see is I now have access to a variable called query parameters. Now, I'm doing this with a browser, but you can actually do this with any service you want. You can do this with u monday.com. You can do this with ClickUp. There are a variety of different ways to do this. If I go over to app.clickup.com, which is just a simple project management tool that I really like, then I click on their automations uh feature. You'll see here
• 18:30 - 19:00 that if I click manage all automations, I have the ability to set up an automation where when I do something, basically I can fire off a web hook request. Now, if I fire off a web hook request, if I paste this URL in here, then I just say, I don't know, task created. So, every time I create a task, I'm going to call a web hook. I do this. Okay. Then I go back to my make scenario, run this, go back to my ClickUp, and again, ClickUp can be whatever the hell you want. It doesn't have to be ClickUp. It could be monday.com. It could be pandadoc. Basically, every one of these tools has
• 19:00 - 19:30 a web hook feature. Then, if I say this is an example record, I press enter. Then I go back here. What you'll see is ClickUp just triggered that web hook and then sent it over to the address that I listed, which has now enabled me to start a flow in my no code tool. So it's as simple as that. Does not have to get more complicated. So I'm sure you guys can imagine NADN is basically the exact same thing. There is a web hook node. The only difference between um uh make.com web hooks and then NADN web hooks are there's a test URL and production URL. Um and generally when
• 19:30 - 20:00 you are testing something you need to have this web hook- test in the URL. When it is live and it's ready for production and your your workflow is on, it needs to just say web hook. You also need to specify the method. It needs to be either a get or a post. But I'll leave all that to specific programming videos. Um, it's more or less the exact same flow here. So, if you know how web hooks work, you're already 90% of the way to being what I would call a good automator. Um, you know, web hooks, API requests, these are basically like the tools of the trade. And to be honest,
• 20:00 - 20:30 anytime you're using a built-in automation or, you know, a drag and drop node anyway, all you're doing is you're you're you're using web hooks. They're just not telling you that you're using web hooks or you're using API calls, they're just not telling you that you're using API calls. All right. Okay, cool. Next up, I want to talk how to prompt AI models effectively. As the AI and AI automation probably implies, most of our work involves weaving in artificial intelligence into some sort of business process. So, I have the simplest possible way to think of this and I'm going to give it to you right now. There are basically three types of prompts and
• 20:30 - 21:00 these three types of prompts are present across more or less all of the current at large language model tools. There is a system prompt. Okay, there is a user prompt and then there is a assistant prompt. These are the three types. Now, the way to prompt an AI and to consistently achieve pretty good results, you know, you got to go a lot deeper if you want to get amazing results, but if you want pretty good results, results that are enough for you to whip up a flow in a few seconds and then impress a business owner. What you need to know is that the system prompt is how the model
• 21:00 - 21:30 identifies. So this is where you say you are a data entry professional or something or you say you are a skilled recruiter. You are the president of the United States. I don't know whatever the heck you wanted to roleplay as. This is the identity that you're giving the model. Okay. The user is where you give it a task where you say your
• 21:30 - 22:00 task is to do a thing. Then the assistant prompt, okay, is what the AI gives you back. And usually the way that I like to do things is I like to have the assistant give me back my stuff as a JavaScript object notation um JSON uh string. So it's going to look like this with curly braces with a key and a value. And the reason why I do that is because when you get in the habit of doing this, you can then very easily integrate this with any tool on planet
• 22:00 - 22:30 Earth. You're using what's called structured data. And once you have structure to your data, you can obviously um you know forward that over to some software platform, parse out the keys, add the values to to other variables and stuff. It's pretty cool. Okay, so that's more or less what this looks like. just to run you guys through it very quickly with an N8 flow that I built to personalize um real client or real lead data. I've since sold this system many times. I've also put this up on Maker School and make moneywithmake.com, my two automation communities. We've had many many people
• 22:30 - 23:00 sell this. This is exactly what a real functional system that you guys can charge money for looks like. Um the AI model for this system essentially has a system prompt where we say you're a helpful intelligent writing assistant. That's its identity. And then we have a user prompt where we give it the task. Your task is to personalize an email. You'll do this by taking a prospect LinkedIn profile and then editing five templates for different sections of the email. Subject line, icebreaker, elevator pitch, call to action, and a PS field. Your templates are below. Then I
• 23:00 - 23:30 give it some templates. Then I give it some guidelines. Then finally, to make a long story short, I say respond in JSON using this format. Okay. Then what do I have? Well, this is where things get a little bit more complicated and where most people kind of lose me, but essentially after um the system prompt, you put a user prompt. After the user prompt, you put a second user prompt where you actually give it the data that you want it to operate off of. And then finally, when you're done, the AI will return essentially an assistant prompt. So, this is sort of the behind the scenes sort of, you know, the the best
• 23:30 - 24:00 way to think about using this sort of stuff um live. And it's what I follow every single time that I build a system that prints money. I mean, I I follow this cart blanch. I'm going to have this Excala draw in the uh description so you guys can just click the link, look at this exact structure and use it in your own platform. Um I'm using uh just NAM for that example, but keep in mind you can do the exact same thing in make.com, exact same thing in Zapier. That's why I drew this out just so you guys had something that's platform agnostic. Okay, number five is to use what's called testdriven development. Now, I
• 24:00 - 24:30 don't think a lot of people fully understand what this means, but usually the way that people will build out workflows is they will try and in their head map out what the whole thing looks like. And then they'll drag and drop like 50 modules together and then click run or test. Then obviously there'll be an error at some point during the flow and then when the error occurs, they're not entirely sure where they need to go to fix it or why it happened in the first place. Don't do that. Instead, do what's called testdriven development. when you start building stuff, okay, start by dropping the first module in. Okay, then test to make sure the first
• 24:30 - 25:00 module works. Test to make sure that with the inputs that you provide that module, everything the outputs are as expected. Once you're done with that, then and only then do you drop module 2 down. Then you test module 2. Then and only then do you move on to module 3. And so on and so on and so forth. The reason why is because if something in your flow breaks, okay, and you know that everything up until here was perfect and then all of a sudden there started being a break right over here, where do you think your error is?
• 25:00 - 25:30 Obviously, the error is right over here. So, this is where you're going to look. The reason why this is valuable is because when you're building systems, debugging, the process of going through and trying to figure out what the problem is is a massive time sync. It's like a binary search tree in technical terms. It's super freaking expensive time-wise. But then if you test driven develop like I'm doing here, every time you test a module after you put it in, it actually just it's a fixed time cost. It takes like 30 seconds every time you do that. Your flow has 10 modules. What
• 25:30 - 26:00 are you doing? You're testing for 5 minutes total and you know the whole thing works and you know exactly where the debug um is, right? So instead of your uh debugging kind of looking like this, if this is time and this is um I don't know let's say debug time and this is like your step in process basically your debug time looks like this which is a lot more consistent uh like this a lot more consistent a lot more measurable and a lot more reliable.
• 26:00 - 26:30 Okay, so just a much simpler and easier way to think about it when you guys create something. Okay, just like I tested the web hook, test the web hook first before putting down uh the next module. Okay, when you're done with uh whatever you're testing, actually test the whole flow again. Okay, right click on it, click run this module only and say, hm, you know, did the uh value y come out like I expected? Yes, it did. Okay, great. Now I can move on. The second you get in the habit of this, your builds are going to be a lot faster. Okay. And then the last thing I wanted to cover is anytime you're building
• 26:30 - 27:00 something, start at the end. Don't start at the beginning. So, you know how earlier I was talking test driven development, start with module one, start with module 2. Well, actually, I was kind of being tongue and cheek. What you should really do is, let's say you have 10 modules in your in your desired flow. What you want to do is you actually want to start with module 10. You want to test to make sure module 10 works, and then you want to work backwards to module 9. You want to test to make sure module 9 works. Then you want to work backwards to module 8. Now, I know you're probably thinking this is silly, but let me give you a quick example flow. Let's say you have a very simple proposal generator. Okay, this is a proposal generator flow that I've
• 27:00 - 27:30 built and shown on my channel many times. The way that this works is usually you will have some form. You will have the salesperson full information about the prospect in this form during a sales call. You'll then have AI to generate content, whether that's a copy for a proposal, maybe you're customizing an email to send out or something. Then you will customize an asset, so either a Google Slides or a Panda doc. Then finally, you'll send an email with the Google Slides proposal. How would I actually build this thing? I actually wouldn't build it left to right. What I would do is I would start
• 27:30 - 28:00 with the last module. Okay, this is where I'd start. I'd actually put down a module that sends the email that I want that contains a link to the Google Slides proposal. You know, if my flow starting left to right is supposed to start with a type form or something, I wouldn't actually start with the type form. What I would do is I'd go all the way on the right here and I start with the email. Okay? I would have send an email all the way on the right. I would then add an example of the data that I want along with the attachment type that
• 28:00 - 28:30 I want. I would do all of this and then I would test it. I would make sure it lands. And only when I make sure that it lands. Only when I make sure that the end does what I want to do would I then work backwards, which in this case might be a Google Slides module or something. Okay. So maybe now um I would do Google Slides and then I would go create presentation from a template. Now this is a little bit backwards. So I'd stick it right over here. Then you know after that what would I do? I would go and I would add an open AI node. Okay. I would
• 28:30 - 29:00 test to make sure that OpenAI node works and then I would we're doing create a completion and make sure that's all good to go. Okay. Then maybe before that I have some other data processing stuff. But the point that I'm making is I would actually this entire time work this way, not this way. And there are a couple reasons for this, but to make a long story short, when you work backwards, what you're doing is you're eliminating wasted time on all of those paths that lead nowhere. So if this is the flow at the end of it, okay, it's four modules
• 29:00 - 29:30 or nodes. In order to create it, what you actually had to do is you had to make this and then you had to try this and then that didn't work. And then you had to go back here and you had to try this and maybe that worked, but then you tried this and that didn't work. You tried that and then you got back here. Okay. And then finally you got over here. So like this is the the the actual flow. And I think I drew an extra one here, didn't I? Yeah, I did. That's all right. But during the building process, you experimented with all these weird ass paths. It didn't actually lead anywhere. These are all wasted time. Okay. It's kind of like how you have
• 29:30 - 30:00 like a million in one ways, okay, to make it to X over here. So, these are all the ways that you could go. If you just started at X and then picked one of these, let's say, let's make this blue. Let's say this one here. You'd actually only ever spend that time building it backwards and traversing that one path. You don't actually have to try all the all the candidate paths it's called. So, yeah, start at the end, not at the beginning. Easily the simplest and most
• 30:00 - 30:30 straightforward way to getting this done. If your goal is to send an AI written email, have the AI write the email first and then send it. Don't actually like start with the trigger. Don't start with all the introductory logic. Don't do any of that. All right, hopefully that makes sense. Now that you guys understand the core foundations, both technical and business, it is time to get practical. You know what automation is and why it works as a business model, but how do you actually get going with your first few steps? The next section is your complete dayby-day roadmap to building a profitable AI automation business from scratch. We're going to cover everything from how to choose your niche to setting up your business infrastructure to the specific
• 30:30 - 31:00 tools and systems you need to start landing clients. This is where ultimately theory meets reality and you guys can get going. So, by the end of the section, you'll have everything you need to actually launch your business and start generating real revenue with AI automation. And by the way, if you guys are serious about turning the concepts that I'm talking about now and going to continue talking about throughout this course into real income, definitely check out Maker School. It's my AI automation community with a 90-day built-in accountability program that shows you guys step by step exactly what you have to do so you guys can minimize your overhead. All you have to do is just show up and then get going. We have
• 31:00 - 31:30 almost 3,000 members as of the time of this recording who regularly close thousands of dollars of deals every week and I consider it the straight line path from a beginner to running a thriving AI and automation business. Anyway, let's dive in. Very first thing right off the bat, this was not around when I started my A and automation agency, but it is for you. And what I'm calling this is clientless money. There are a lot of very low-hanging fruit where if you just take advantage of some of these at the very beginning of your AN automation business, you will essentially instantly be making 10ish% more margins than all other competing AI and automation businesses. And what I'm going to do in
• 31:30 - 32:00 the next few minutes is I'm just going to guide you through what these strategies, tools, and techniques are. They work as of the time of this recording. If you're watching this in like 5 years or something, likelihood is these tools will have changed the way that they do their business. But yeah, let me just give you guys all the secret sauce. And if you watch this within a few months of this video going live, this will probably work for you. Okay, so just before I show you guys the pipeline, basically the way that this is going to work is we are going to sign up to a bunch of affiliate platforms. Now, a big chunk of this business model is you basically getting clients to sign up to software platforms on your behalf. A lot of these software platforms can cost
• 32:00 - 32:30 money, $100 a month, $200 a month, some even cost $300 a month or beyond. Now, if you're driving a very large return on investment for a client, the money that they're spending on the platform doesn't really matter too much to them. You're usually delivering multiples on it. that if they're spending that money to the platform and then there are affiliate platforms or affiliate techniques that allow you to take advantage and kind of recoup some of that, why don't we do it? We should probably do it anyway and then we can make a percentage of the money that the client is spending on the platform and just divert a few percentage points to us. In practice, these percentage points can be quite hefty. I want to say a lot of the platforms I'm going to show you in this
• 32:30 - 33:00 video are going to have 30 to 40% affiliate payouts. So essentially what we're going to do is we're going to sign up for affiliate platforms for all major tools. So make.com's obviously a big one, nadn's obviously a big one. instantly is obviously a big one and so on and so forth. And this is going to create a passive revenue about 5 to 10% on all the tools that your clients ends up using. There is a step-by-step process to get quickly approved for all these programs. I'm going to walk you through what some of those look like and then I'm also going to cover some other ways that you can save a ton of money right off the bat using what are called coupon aggregators. So, first things first, you want to make some client list
• 33:00 - 33:30 money. We're going to start with the affiliate program. So, I listed three here. Make n and instantly. Let me just walk you through all of them. There are 20% commission payouts if you sign up to make. You just go to make.com/yen/affiliate for that. There are 30% affiliate program referrals on NADN and that lasts for a full 12 months. Just go to wwwv2.naden.io/affiliates. There are 40% recurring commissions for instantly. Just head over to instantly./affiliate. This is a quick little pick of my own dashboard for
• 33:30 - 34:00 Instantly Affiliates. I'm making anywhere between 4 and $5,000 a month US off of this. Now, obviously, I'm now in the creator space and the coach space. So, the numbers of people that I get signing up to these platforms is a lot higher. But even when I was running my AI automation agency, I was making a good additional 1% margin literally just from this one tool. So, you guys have 10 tools. I'm sure you guys could see how you'd make a bunch more. Let's just blitz fire through a bunch of other ones. Any MailFinder, this is an email finder service. 30% commission on every referral right over here for 12 months. Appify, this is easily one of the best
• 34:00 - 34:30 scrapers out there. And hey Jay, what's going on big guy? Hope you're doing well. Um 30% recurring commission up to 2.5K per customer. Smart Lead, which is sort of Instantly's main competitor right now. 35% recurring monthly commissions for life. And then there are a variety of other ones. Okay. Now, I have an exhaustive list of every affiliate program, which you guys can find in my school community. Uh if you guys just head over to Maker School, and then you go over to classroom right over here, month two, and then we click on setup five software affiliate links. Down at the bottom, I have this giant list of basically all of the affiliates
• 34:30 - 35:00 that I found that work for this business model. So, if you guys want to jump into Maker School and get that for yourself, feel free. Aside from that though, there are a couple of other ways you can make a ton of money with this. The first is coupon aggregators. There are two main ones that I like to talk about. The first is called Secret. Other one's called AppSumo. I think most people have heard of this. I don't think a lot of people have heard of this, but maybe that's cuz it's technically a secret. The way that Secret works is essentially they negotiate a bunch of deals with popular software platforms. Considering the whole job of an automation uh service provider is to be like, you know, somebody that glues together a
• 35:00 - 35:30 bunch of different software platforms. I think you guys can see the leverage here. So, you know, you could claim up to $6,000 for notion. You can get 6 months free on the plus plan. Wave $20,000 in payment processing for Stripe, which saves up to 500 if you do the math. Uh you get a bunch of free perplexity credits. Uh obviously, there are no code platforms like Make where you get, you know, 20 240,000 operations for free. Google Workspace for our emails, Web Flow, right? I'll let you guys be the judge of this. Um I'm affiliated with join Secret. I should let you guys know. So, if you guys
• 35:30 - 36:00 choose to use the referral link in the description, just know that I'm going to be making a little bit of money off of that, but essentially, you pay one bulk sum to this platform. I think it's like $150 or something like that. Uh, apologies that I don't have the price off the top of my head, and you um just get access to this giant like coupon library. And then before you even start your business, you're kind of in the black, if that makes sense. You've already made a tiny bit of money off of all of the rest of these software subscriptions. Some of these have signup processes, so you don't actually just receive the coupon immediately. Just make sure to note that. But you can usually sign up multiple times or repeat
• 36:00 - 36:30 your signups with just different email addresses or something if you need to. So a lot of people in Maker School and Make Money with Make have taken advantage of the Make.com one. So they've gotten 240,000 operations. That's what the 12 months free um equates to. They've also done a lot of like Air Table stuff and there's Apollo stuff as well. Uh so I'll I'll leave you guys to that. Aside from that, AppSumo is another big deal aggregator. And basically the way that these guys work is they will give you lifetime um access to a platform instead of a monthly
• 36:30 - 37:00 recurring SAS cost you just pay like upfront $69 for a certain um you know lead aggregator or whatever and then in this way you just get to arbitrage you get to like pay now and then save for the rest of your AI and automation career. I personally don't use AppSumo a ton but you know you can also get a bunch of deals and stuff like that here. Not affiliated with AppSumo whatsoever. I just wanted to point that out because I see a lot of people using it. The way that I set up my AN automation business actually was I created an American company using a service called Stripe Atlas which normally costs um $500. Now
• 37:00 - 37:30 I then redeemed a join secret credit for $250. So if you think about it, I also had to spend an additional I think it was $125 at the time. So I spent $125, then I spent $500 to set up my business and then I saved $250. If we do the math on that, that's 625 divided by 250. Uh why can't I do that in my head? It's 375. There we go. After I did the $375, I redeemed $500 worth of Stripe credits. So, I basically made $500 in all the money that I made later. After that, I also redeemed I think it was something like $5,000 in various platforms that I
• 37:30 - 38:00 would have had to sign up. And then on top of that, I even signed up to a partner bank for Stripe Atlas. It's called Mercury. And then they ended up giving me an additional $500 after I deposited 10,000. So, okay, I don't I really don't think I'm going to be able to do the math now. This is 375 minus 6,000. So, you can kind of think of me as being in the black by $5,625, I think. Yeah. So, I was in the black $5,625 before I even got started with my business. How cool is that? So, yeah. Just wanted to show you guys that this
• 38:00 - 38:30 is like what I would do if I could start again. I didn't get to take advantage of all of these, and I really, in hindsight, wish I had set up all my affiliates earlier, but this is the very first thing I would do if I wanted to get up and running with one of these businesses. You guys can get links to a lot of the stuff in the description, so feel free to check that out. But okay, I'm assuming that you've actually gone through all of this rigomearroll and you've actually signed up and you've got yourself this optimized thing which you know is saving money for people that are complete beginners as I've mentioned and now you guys are ready to actually go out and like do something with the automation knowledge. We have the big trampoline. We're basically just waiting for that that double bounce. So uh how do you actually do it? Well, what I do
• 38:30 - 39:00 is I build a minimum viable business. You know how everybody talks about MVPs? It's like minimum viable product. Well, I call this my minimum viable business MV. So this is the MVB Chad right over here. Okay? And this is everybody else that does all this market research and all this analysis and they spend five years getting a business plan together before they actually go and acquire their first customer. In this video, I'm going to run you through literally my entire minimum viable business strategy for A and automation. I'll even walk through the specific steps that you guys need in order to get out there and scale
• 39:00 - 39:30 up your business. This is working today. This is what people are doing today. This is what I teach today. This is what I talk about all day. So let's get through it together. The very first thing I do if I'm setting up a minimum viable business, in our case, AI and automation, is I will define a niche. Okay? If you do everything for everybody, you technically do nothing for nobody. I believe that was Alex Herozy's famous quote a couple years ago, and it's true. If you are just a general services provider, you will never really get very far. People want to work with companies that understand
• 39:30 - 40:00 specific and highly nuanced needs. And if you brand yourself as an AI automation agency that does everything, then the likelihood is you will not be perceived as such. So you can make a ton of progress right off the bat simply by defining a niche. But you have to make sure you define a niche right. A lot of people, they'll pick a niche that kind of sucks, okay? Like a really, really crappy niche. And then they'll waste, you know, 90 days or so of their life. I don't know why that's blue. They waste 90 days or so of their life just kind of muddling around in mediocrity because their niche itself is bad. I'll run you through some rules for a good niche. First, the way that I actually go about
• 40:00 - 40:30 defining my niche is I actually have a niche discovery exercise essentially where I just walk through a ton of different example niches, example service lines, and then I I concatenate them together to make example positioning statements. So, what I've done is I've literally just had uh what is this like a list of 42 or 41 different niches or something? I guess 37 in total. And these are all niches that work. They're not the best niches in the whole wide world, but if you combine them with various service lines, so let's say you sell sales systems to website developers, well then your positioning statement, your actual niche is very narrow. You know, there are a lot of AI and automation agencies, but
• 40:30 - 41:00 there are very few people selling sales systems specifically to website developers. Okay, there are very few people selling finance systems for IT consultants or product development systems for mobile app developers or CRO systems for cyber security people. Okay, if you pick three niches instead of just one, you also get the ability to try and test multiple of these simultaneously with basically no additional sunk cost because when you start one of these niches, you build all the infrastructure to do it. All you need to do to do it to other niches is usually just need to duplicate the process a little bit. Okay, so anyway, I define my niche and
• 41:00 - 41:30 really instead of just one niche here, I should have said define three niches. That will make things a lot simpler. So after this, you're going to have three niches, okay? You're going to have niche A, you're going to have niche B, you're going to have niche C. Everything that you're going to do in the program, it's just going to set up one of these niches, okay? But you don't need to do three times the work in order to set it up for B and C. In reality, what it is is it's kind of like 1.5 times the work because you've already done all the hard work setting up the email systems, setting up your profiles, and doing all the
• 41:30 - 42:00 outreach and stuff for niche A. In order to replicate that across B and C, you just need to like do a tiny bit more. So 50% more work for three times the result is definitely free money. I'm I'm always going to take free money when it's offered to me. And this is a really good example of doing so. So, what I would do in your shoes is I would go through this niche discovery exercise top to bottom. Add in a bunch of other niches that you think may work based off of principles that I've talked about in previous videos. They tend to be digital first. They tend to have high ticket projects and they tend to be low regulation. So, if you guys find niches or industries that satisfy those constraints, then
• 42:00 - 42:30 fantastic. Pick three of them and then all you do is you commit to them for at least a three-month period and promise yourself you're not going to change this niche before you've explored it fully. Okay, so that is literally step one. This is what I teach people all the time. This is exactly what I would do if I were at the start line of my business again. I pick three niches, check. We are now done with that. Second thing I do is I determine a business name. Now a lot of people make this out to be way more difficult than it really is. I actually set a fiveminut timer and I pick as many business names as I can in a 5minute period. I'll use
• 42:30 - 43:00 simple tools like namelics for instance where I will basically put in a couple of terms and then I will have this service combine them in eight quadrillion different ways as a free service at least as of the time of this recording I've used this for years I just get a bunch of business names agile fusion stream pipelines headway code reduction influence process drive transform hub flow ship some of these sound incredible right what I would do is I would pick 10 that I like okay just 10 you don't need to do any more than that and then pump these into some sort
• 43:00 - 43:30 of domain name finder, something like pork bun or namecheep or something along those lines. I'll show you what that looks like in a second. From there, you can verify whether or not the.com is available and then you can proceed with the next step. But yeah, I literally set a 5minute timer, find a business name, whatever your business name is does not really matter. There's like a 00001% of business names will matter and then 99% of business names won't matter. Then like 1% of business names will just be terrible and you never want your business to be named that. But odds are you're going to be in the 99%. Don't sweat it too much. It's not that important of a decision. Okay. All
• 43:30 - 44:00 right. After this, you need to find five pieces of social proof or five case studies. Now, if you don't know what I mean by this, I mean you need pieces of your history, of your corporate experience, of your past that demonstrate that you have done something valuable for somebody at some point in your life. If you don't have this, it's going to be very difficult to get up and running with all the cold email, um, the Upwork, and then the community posting and just the general setting up of all the profiles I'm going to talk about after this. So my recommendation for you is literally itemize your entire
• 44:00 - 44:30 corporate history. A lot of you guys have worked with various jobs. Some of you guys have worked with very big companies. A lot of you guys have freelance experience. Go through every single one of those. Like I'm talking month by month. Open up your email, okay? And just search what did I send back in January 2022? How about February 2022? What was I talking about? Who was I talking to? And essentially just itemize a giant list of all of the biggest hell yeah look at me that you can find. Okay, I did this for myself just earlier and I came up with a list of five. I decided I wasn't going to use
• 44:30 - 45:00 my YouTube well, you know, aside from tangentially the 70,000. I'm not going to use like any monetary things relating to myself. This is what mine looks like. I scaled my own content marketing agency to 92k using AI. I've worked with global names like HP and then I put in brackets the market cap, which is 36 billion, and Fujitsu, 38 billion. I run a a YouTube channel on Make.com with 70,000 subscribers. That's obviously very big. I've written for insert really big company names over here, which are obviously big. that have been featured in some high-profile publications like Popular Mechanics and Apple News. Now, you're probably looking at this and you're like, "Well, Nick, I'm a beginner. I thought that was the whole
• 45:00 - 45:30 point. I don't really have great experience like this." And that's fine. Odds are you guys are going to have some sort of experience. It's not going to be as what's not going to get me banned on YouTube. Ah, screw it. You're not going to have really big dick experience if you're just right off the bat. And that's totally okay. Don't worry too much about that. Just find some experience. Find some value that you've driven for some company. You guys were a salesperson at a business and throughout the year that you were there, you sold $25,000 worth of products. Whether or not that's good compared to all the other sales people in the industry, that doesn't matter. You've actually
• 45:30 - 46:00 demonstrated $25,000 worth of revenue value, and you should be citing it and saying it wherever possible. So, I generated $25,000 in revenue for a B2B manufacturing company. That's fantastic case study. That's a fantastic piece of experience. If you've gone through your whole corporate list and you have nothing, okay, you've just squeezed yourself dry. And to be honest, if you think you have, you probably haven't actually gone through your whole corporate experience. So, pause the video again, go through top to bottom. I guarantee you'll have at least one thing that's somewhat valuable. Unless you're like 12 years
• 46:00 - 46:30 old and you're just starting on the internet. Now, if you've gone through your entire thing, you don't have anything, then what you can do is you can actually go through my videos, all of my Make.com videos. I have a Make.com playlist called Make for People That Want to Make Real Money. I also have an NADN playlist called NADN for everyone. Go through both of these and then get all of the system blueprints that you can check out my Gumroad. Download them all. Okay? Make a couple of minor changes to them, minor adjustments. Maybe you swap a module here or there. You change one thing from GPT to a
• 46:30 - 47:00 claude. Instead of generating Instagram posts, you generate LinkedIn post, something like that. Okay? Convince yourself that you have now materially improved or added on the system and made it yours. Okay? Convince yourself of that. And now when you write your case studies now you could say stuff like I built an AI podcast repurposing engine that produces 10 pieces of content uh in I don't know 30 seconds. Okay. Then in brackets you could say estimated savings per piece. You do a little bit of quick math and you say I don't know 200 bucks or something like that. Even this is
• 47:00 - 47:30 enough to let you go on with that next step. It doesn't have to be perfect. But the point I'm making is basically everybody here that is at this point in the video, you guys have something. Okay? Whether you have a really big dick uh accomplishment like you've worked with Microsoft and you're a four ex Google or exfang software engineer or something or something kind of midterm like me. I scaled my own content marketing agency to $92,000 a month with AI. Or you have something a little bit smaller. I generated some revenue for a company back when I worked with them a few years ago. Or if you have nothing at all, you have at least some sort of
• 47:30 - 48:00 example of automation work that you've done like I built a system that does X. I created a system that streamlines Y. Okay. Once you're at this point and you have this, just open up a Google doc and put this somewhere. You are now ready to proceed with the main outreach step, which is you need to buy a main domain and then you need to buy however many sending domains that you want. So for me to disambiguate here, a main domain is something like let's say my business was called Cirly. Okay? And maybe it is. Who knows, man? Maybe circles that is way too bright. Circley is really taking
• 48:00 - 48:30 over the world. I would do something and you know the the term circley is not available. I would get something like circleyworkflows.com. Okay, I would spend I don't know. I think this is like $11 or something like that, right? Let's check circlyworkflows. I would spend $11 a year on this. Okay, this is going to be your main domain. After you get your main domain, what you want is you also want a bunch of secondaries or sending domains. Okay, there are variety of ways to do this. It's very difficult for me to create a video that is comprehensive and exhaustive and actually covers all
• 48:30 - 49:00 the different ways to get up and running with mailboxes because there's there's probably like 20 or 30 as of the time of this recording. I'm just going to mention a couple. Okay. One thing that you can do is you could prepend, which means add text to the left of the domain, or postpend, which means add text to the right of it. You could prepend and postpend words like sendworkflows.com. Okay. Get circleyworkflows.com. Circleyworkflows kit. Cirly workflows today. Go circle workflows. List uh anywhere between two
• 49:00 - 49:30 to maybe five of these if you guys are complete beginners and then buy those domains too. What this will allow you to do is it'll allow you to have a main domain which is where your brand will live where you know your your company will be basically which you'll use when you build your website later, your little online business card. Then it'll also allow you to have a bunch of subsidiaries or sending domains that you could send email from without negatively impacting the domain health or deliverability of your main domain. And this is really important and not a lot of people talk about this, but if you just start sending email straight from
• 49:30 - 50:00 your main domain, uh, we're going to be sending a lot of email over the course of the rest of this video or at least talking about it, you're going to trash all of that. And then the likelihood that you're actually going to be able to land in somebody's mailbox is very low. And also, who wants to send a bunch of proposals only for them to land in spam later, right? Definitely not me. So that's the distinction there. Now, this isn't the only way to do things. There are a bunch of these third-party platforms now like zapmail.ai, inboxology.com, cheap inboxes, uh, premium inboxes. There there there's so many of these. Okay. What these do is
• 50:00 - 50:30 they'll actually go through the rigomearroll on the process of setting up all of the cold email infrastructure for you, usually at a slightly lower cost than if you do a lot of the stuff yourself. But keep in mind that when you do this, you are trusting an additional third party to, you know, deal with your email inboxes and stuff like that. And you also sort of lose out on learning what the process of doing all this stuff is on your own. Inside of Maker School, I personally recommend people still set them up at least once so that they know how to do the setup. And you also just learn a little bit about like, you know, DNS. You learn a little bit about how to like verify domains and whatnot. It just
• 50:30 - 51:00 adds to your tool stack. Um, because there are a lot of things that rely on these other things. And knowing a little bit of that is usually good. But check out those platforms. cost compare if you guys are um on a budget and find one that works for you. Okay, after you are done with that step, what we do is we create or publish a website and I have three tools here. When I first initially came up with my programs, I was only using web flow to make my websites, but now you can use lovable, you could use card, you could use bolt.dev. There are variety of other platforms that allow you to do this stuff. To be honest, a lot easier than my initial pick. And
• 51:00 - 51:30 this is just how technology works, right? Things get easier over time. So, what's an example of a website? Well, just head over to mine. and it's leftclick.ai. Feel free to scroll through it and see how I positioned myself and branded myself. But some key rules of thumb, I do a lot of roasts of these sorts of websites in makerschool and makemoneywithmake.com. General rules of thumb are you want less text, not more. Okay? You want the text that you do have to mean something. You want to minimize images on the page that don't actually add to the value of what you are talking about. You want all of the buttons on your website to go to the same place. So, you don't want to have a
• 51:30 - 52:00 contact us form and a calendar and an email and a phone number and a snail mail address on your website. That doesn't really help people that are interested in contacting you contact you through their preferred route. That just kind of confuses people. They don't really know what to do. Okay. You generally want some sort of social proof right off the bat. So, in my case, remember how I said I was uh featured in a couple of big publications? So, I just stick these right over here. After that, you want some sort of case study or some sort of like, you know, slap it on the table and just show people what you're made of. So, in my case, I've generated
• 52:00 - 52:30 millions for B2B companies like yours with automation and AI. And then, you know, most of you guys at the beginning, the start line will not have case studies, but you're going to want to have some case studies in there eventually. After that, you're going to want to have some quote unquote reviews or testimonials or something. Uh, and then finally, at the end and bottom of your business, then you can start talking services. The number one problem that I see people make is they start with the services. But to be honest, nobody cares about the services you provide. If it says on the header of your website, or at least implies that you do AI and automation, most people at this point, they kind of understand what
• 52:30 - 53:00 automation is. They understand what automation does, right? They understand that it's typically involving a no code tool. And you also have to ask yourself, okay, how did they get to my website in the first place? Most of them are finding it on Google. Most of them are on the website because they saw an email that you sent saying, "Hey, I'm here to sell you AI and automation services." Or they got got sent to it through Upwork or maybe something like that, right? So, it's kind of like know your audience, right? The most important thing that people are going to be asking themselves right off the bat is who is this person? Why does it matter? And then you know how can I get in touch? The services and whatnot you always stick at the end. And then usually, and this is something that
• 53:00 - 53:30 I do, but usually I will have pricing on the website. I don't actually recommend having pricing on your website if you're a total beginner just because you don't really know how to price. You also don't really know how to like demonstrate your value and it's kind of risky to have a button that somebody can just click and then pay you money for, right? I personally wouldn't recommend it. I recommend just having some sort of funnel that goes to a call or whatnot. So that's it. I always just do onepage websites for this sort of stuff because the way that I see websites nowadays is these are uh business cards, right? These are literally business cards. There is nothing really of value on your
• 53:30 - 54:00 website except that it is just a a quick showcase of who you are. It implies that you have enough money and enough resources to put something cool together. I guess it's a way to showcase your personality, but for our industry, to be blunt, unless you're running some crazy inbound funnel, which most people aren't, that's all it is. It's not like something that's actively making you money. It's just like a check mark. this person has this requirement of being a business owner. When I used to go door to door way back in the day and I was going 50 to 80 doors per day with my business partner, we were knocking, pitching people, and getting rejected left, right, and center. One of the most
• 54:00 - 54:30 common questions I got from people was, "Do you have a business card?" "Hey, where's your business card?" "Hey, that sounds awesome. I'd love to see your business card." Did they actually give a about my business card? Basically, none of them did. The only thing is the only thing they wanted to see was that I had spent the requisite amount of time and the requisite amount of money to actually go and purchase some business cards. And that was seen as like a way to prove my legitimacy. Okay. If I didn't have a business card, people would just like really you don't have a business card and you're coming door to door to sell some services? That's pretty crazy, man. You know, you're just
• 54:30 - 55:00 seen a lot less legitimately. Websites are basically the same thing. If you have a website, you just kind of tick that box and then the prospect can move on with their consideration of your offer. All right. Next up, we need to set up the platforms that we signed up affiliates for. So, now that we have all the infrastructure to do cold email, which is by far the lowest cost per acquisition mechanism of acquiring clients these days, you set up instantly smart lead. You do some scraping and then you start sending. So, I have created several tutorials that show people how to do this. If you go through my YouTube videos, I show you how to get up and running instantly and and and you
• 55:00 - 55:30 know, scrape various data sources. So, I'm not going to rehash all that. That'll probably take me three or four hours. To make a long story short, this is instantly that cold email platform that I showed you the affiliate for. What you do is you take these mailboxes, okay? Um, you take the domains, you set up a bunch of mailboxes on Google Workspace and whatnot. You connect them to instantly. If you used one of those platforms that I was showing you guys earlier, it'll actually usually just automatically do it for you and and then do all of the math and the rigomearroll in order to get you up and running. Let's say Zab Mail or Inboxology. After
• 55:30 - 56:00 that, you need to scrape a bunch of leads. The current number one source that everybody's using to get this stuff is Apollo, which in and of itself is just a scraper that scraped LinkedIn a few years ago. The reason everybody goes to Apollo is just because it's way cheaper than LinkedIn. And you can also get like structure data like email addresses and phone numbers and stuff like that. But Apollo itself is too expensive these days for most people. So a bunch of solutions have come up on the internet that allow you to scrape Apollo, which again just scraped LinkedIn. And uh that's what I would recommend for this purpose. There a couple of Aify Apollo scrapers. Uh this
• 56:00 - 56:30 one over here, scrape up to 50k leads is pretty good. It's one that we've been recommending throughout the program. It's a $120 per thousand leads. So if you get 800 email addresses, 700 email addresses out of those thousand leads, how much you're really spending per email address? It's like4 cents or.3 cents or something like that. The math works out pretty good in your favor. So I'll leave that for another one of my videos. Next up, I would create an Upwork profile. A lot of people sleep on freelance platforms like Upwork, but this is the straightest line path to getting customer number one. The value with a freelance platform like Upwork, if you're unfamiliar, is essentially
• 56:30 - 57:00 through all other sales methods, you need to know what the customer problem is. Then you need to know what the solution that they're looking for is. And then you also need to somehow prove that you are the best person for the job. Now, if you're a beginner and you don't even know where to start, right? You've only just added a niche to your niche discovery checklist and you've only just started creating all of this stuff. You've only just started learning what businesses struggle with and the various problems they're in. The odds that you're going to be able to solve those first two problems, the problem, the solution, very low. Very, very low. So what Upwork does is it basically for a small fee just gives you a bunch of
• 57:00 - 57:30 leads that are looking to have their problem solved with specific solutions. Then the only thing that you need to do is you just need to prove why you're the best fit for the job. So it basically if you think about it mathematically it takes this job of yours as a saleserson which previously was problem solution and then why you and then just eliminates 2/3 of the problem. So this is the only problem to solve. is the only thing you need to answer and that is a much easier job than going through everything top to bottom learning the
• 57:30 - 58:00 pain points and problems of the niche and then coming up with a variety of ways to pitch your solution. Okay, so I would highly recommend everybody here get on Upwork. I know a lot of people sleep on it and a lot of people have various opinions about Upwork. It's funny because you know a couple years ago when I started talking about this the public opinion on this was just like no way Upwork's so crap. I can't believe you guys are doing this. That's not a real business. You can't start a real business selling to leads on Upwork. over that time period, I can almost confidently say I make more money than 99.999% of them. And it's all thanks to this. So, as long as you can get up and
• 58:00 - 58:30 running quickly, you can worry about the legitimacy of your business model, uh, uh, you know, how scalable it is and all the rest of that stuff later. The first thing you need to do is just get a couple customers under your belt. Don't let you know, opinions or some random crappy comments you've seen on the internet or somebody's judgmental attitude towards a platform stop you from doing so. Okay. All right. So, I have a bunch of um other steps here, but we're rounding it out. Um next up, find communities related to your niches and join. So, another big thing that not a
• 58:30 - 59:00 lot of people talk about is that there are variety of ways to source customers that don't actually involve cold email and that don't actually involve Upwork or any sort of paid platform. As of the time of this recording, a really cool way to do so is on school. Okay, school is a community platform. It's where I host my own community, maker school and makemoneywithmake.com. Now, they have this cool discovery page. What you do is you pump in the niche that you just, you know, one of the three niches that you just found. So, let's say videographer. Okay, you pump this in and
• 59:00 - 59:30 then you just join a bunch of free communities. The value of this is what you're doing when you join a bunch of videography communities, assuming that's one of your niches, is you are essentially going directly to a place where your target audience just about their problems all day. So you get to see exactly what the problems that people are suffering from that are in your niche are right now which helps you solve that issue that I was talking about earlier that Upwork also solves. And then two, you also basically have a captive audience of people that suffer from problems that you can pitch to. Now the key in doing this intelligently is
• 59:30 - 60:00 you have to not make your pitch seem like a pitch. Okay? You need to come into these communities and there are many there are hundreds of these communities just for you know cinema and videography alone. But you need to come in these communities. You need to not create a TV ad. Okay. What you need to do is you need to build some authority. You need to build some reputation in the community by helping people and answering their questions, not asking for anything in return. You need to establish yourself as just somebody in the community by replying to posts, engaging with people, sending DMs. You do this for 15, 20 minutes a day for several weeks. And then finally, you
• 60:00 - 60:30 start helping people solve concrete problems, then doing things like DM them afterwards, asking, "Hey, how's it going? Can I help you out anymore with this?" Oh, hey guys. Uh, I just came up with this really cool solution which solves this problem that I found somebody posting about last week. Actually, you just drag and drop a few modules in make.com. Here's a quick tutorial. If anybody uh wants the blueprint, just send me over a DM. I'll give it to you guys for free. Um, and you know, if anybody has any follow-up questions, just let me know. When you start getting in the habit of doing this and you're consistent enough that you can build uh, you know, some sort of reputation and then some sort of memorability, um, communities can end up
• 60:30 - 61:00 being a really profitable lead generation channel as well. It's just it's not as direct. It's not a straight line of path as Upwork and cold email. So that's kind of step number god where are we at now? Eight or nine? Yeah, I think that's step number eight. Step number nine is okay. So if you think about what we've done now is we've set up the minimum viable most of the minimum viable business. We've set up our marketing and lead genen channels. Well, what happens when we actually get somebody that's interested
• 61:00 - 61:30 in our service? Obviously, we have to pitch them, right? So what we do next is we have to set up our sales stuff. Okay, so this is this is kind of like where we're at right here actually. So that's where something like a proposal template comes into play. The way that this business model works is basically you will uh talk to somebody, you will market, you will generate a lead. When you get a sufficient amount of interest, you will get them on a call of some kind, which is usually called a discovery call. Sometimes you may have a second call later on called a closing call where you actually do like the closing and the pitching of the service.
• 61:30 - 62:00 Most of the time, in my case, I just do one. And then at the end of the call, you know, the person's on board, they really like what you have to say. You say something along the lines of, "Hey, I'll send you over a proposal with all this information and a little signature spot at the bottom, which you can pay on immediately upon signing. Does that sound good? Okay, great." And then you go and you actually do it. This is how it works. This is how like money changes hands. In order to do that, we obviously need a proposal template of some kind, right? So, I have a variety of proposal templates in um Maker School over here. Maker School obviously being that automation community. If we jump on over to um classroom and then we go to month
• 62:00 - 62:30 one, then scroll down to day number five and module number three, there are a bunch of uh well, first of all, I I give like a step-by-step walkthrough of how to set up a proposal template in a platform called PandaOC. I guide you guys through more or less everything. Essentially, I'll just give you guys a quick look through. We start with a title page. Then you usually have a problem. You have a solution statement of some kind. You then have some sort of scope of work. Then you round it out with a timeline. Then finally, you have some sort of pricing where you usually
• 62:30 - 63:00 have a pitch, usually like a signature line or something like that. Okay, so you need to set up some sort of proposal template. I usually do this in Panda just cuz I've used Panda for a while and I'm very comfortable with it, but there are a variety of other great platforms out there that you guys could use too. Better proposals is one. I'm not a fan of DocYign, but Hello Sign is uh is pretty neat as well. And basically, you just need something that you can add a bunch of variables into when you have somebody that's interested, then send it within the hour. Okay, then almost last but not least, we need to set up Stripe, PayPal, or some other processor, right? So, now that we're done with the sales,
• 63:00 - 63:30 it's like, okay, how do we actually like make money with this? Well, that's where we're at right now. So, we need to actually set up Stripe, PayPal, or some other mechanism by which we can receive funds when somebody does actually want to pay us. And my recommendation is Stripe. And I know Stripe isn't available everywhere. Not everybody can use Stripe. The trade-off with Stripe is it's something like I think 3% um processing fee, which you know, if you think about it, I mean, in my case, I made what, $170,000 last month. Uh the vast majority of that was processed through Stripe or a service using Stripe. So, I paid I
• 63:30 - 64:00 think is my math that bad? I think it really is that bad. Hold on. I paid I think $5,100 um last month to Stripe. That that seems about right to me. So, you might be thinking, man, that's a ton of money. But if you think about the amount of time and energy that Stripe saves people like me and people soon to be like you on actually doing the service, it's crazy. Well, there's some additional fees you have to pay for all this stuff. But they do things like automated tax compliance. They do things like um automated invoice follow-ups. They're also just like the cleanest and the simplest and the best user experience. And they're very integrable. So, I recommend them. I love them. I'm
• 64:00 - 64:30 very happy to spend a couple percentage points in my business if it means I can make 500% later on because I'm faster. But you can also use, you know, PayPal. Okay, PayPal is very popular. A lot of people use PayPal. Um, I know that a lot of places in Asia use Payaneer. Okay. I really don't like Payaneer because every time somebody sends me an invoice with Payaneer, I have to go and like validate all this stuff and I've made all these accounts and just still doesn't believe it doesn't believe who I am for some weird reason. But use Payaneer. You can do that as well. Um, if you're operating through Upwork, Upwork actually includes
• 64:30 - 65:00 built-in payment processing, which is one of the reasons why I like it so much. So, you know, you don't actually have to like do this if you get an Upwork client, although I would recommend you have it set up in advance. And I'm sure you guys could tell there are like 500 other payment processors. Just Google payment processor and then insert like the name of your country or local. Okay. All right. Once you're done with that, we have literally everything we need to get going. The one thing that I'd recommend from here on out is you set some sort of daily minimum. So daily number of emails sent, daily number of Upwork apps sent, daily number of community posts made. Now, I created a
• 65:00 - 65:30 little template just to show you guys what that looks like. Um, you could literally have a Google Sheets activity tracker with four columns, one for date, the other for cold email, one for Upwork applications, one for community posts. Then if you have other lead generation mechanisms, well then you can just add them over here on the right and track them once a day. It really doesn't have to be any more complicated than that. I use Google Sheets tracker systems like that all the time and I make $170,000 a month as of the time of this recording. You do not have to make it any more complex. The one thing that you do have to do is you just have to be consistent.
• 65:30 - 66:00 If you're going to do this thing, go back to the Google sheet at the end of the day and just fill it in. What you'll do is the next day you'll come on and you'll say, "Wow, yesterday I hit seven. Today I'm going to try and hit eight." And it functions as an inbuilt accountability mechanism. Another really cool thing that you can do with Google Sheets, so you actually just share these with three or four of your friends. If you guys have people that are in your group that are starting similar sorts of businesses, well, now you can all have activity trackers that are accountability mechanisms and you could just have everybody go through everybody's at the end of the day and just give everybody a thumbs up or something like that if they did it or just rag on your buddy if they failed to
• 66:00 - 66:30 hit their 10 Upwork apps for the day. Okay, very simple, straightforward. Feel free to build it out like this if you want or build a better structure, but I guess my point is keep it simple. You know, whatever you're going to do. And last but not least, you now have everything basically set up for you to actually go and acquire customers. Okay, all of these are sort of unscalable if you think about it, right? I mean like the number of Upwork applications you send a day scales with your time directly. Number of community posts you make per day does scale with your time directly. A lot of the cold emails and looms and custom DMs that you're going to send if you do any sort of outreach, these things will scale with your time
• 66:30 - 67:00 directly. But they're also the most important part of the business and they're the things that you should be spending all your time on. So if you do this enough, and when I say enough, I mean we have a ton of people in Maker School that make uh thousands of dollars in their first couple of months. I mean, this uh guy Cooper was at day 28 when he closed what looks to be over a $30,000 deal plus some equity. Um Barb, I think closed it in a few weeks. We have a variety of wins which you guys could check out here. If you do this sort of consistent daily outreach and daily compounding, you will eventually get on
• 67:00 - 67:30 a sales call with a customer. And when you get on a sales call with a customer, all you need to do is some variation of what I'm calling the simplest sales call SOP currently out there. So, you will build some rapport. You'll you'll make some little joke. I always do one about how I am in Calgary, so I rode a polar bear to work today because I'm Canadian and they usually chuckle. You ask them why they're on the call with you. So, you literally just say, "Hey, listen. You get tons of cold emails a day. I can almost guarantee you that. So, what made mine stand out?" Okay, this will tell you literally exactly how to sell them,
• 67:30 - 68:00 what they liked about you, what you can expand on. Then you ask them what their problems are. So, what would you say is the main problem right now? Why you haven't solved it yet? So, what stopped you from solving it yet? How much is it currently costing you? So, let's do a little bit of math here. This is preventing you from getting one customer a week, you're saying? Okay. And how much money is that customer usually ordering if this problem didn't exist? $5,000 worth of product. Okay. So, is it fair to say this is about $20,000 a month liability right now? All right. Awesome. And then finally, how quickly
• 68:00 - 68:30 do you want it solved? Well, I think I have everything that I need. I guess my last question is just how quickly do you want this solved? You know, is this a a let's do it today thing? Let's do it next month sort of thing. fill me in. From here on out, you cover your experience in brief. So, you just give them a quick 30- secondond summary of who you are and why it matters. Then you screen share and you show them an example of a solution that fixes their problem, which you can either build live in front of them or if you have some, you know, templates or something that fit the specific problem. Uh maybe templates that you've gotten from my
• 68:30 - 69:00 YouTube channel or my Gumroad or my communities, then you can do so then. And you just ask them, does this seem like something that would solve your problem? If their answer is yes, fantastic. You can either pitch them directly. Okay, this will be $2,895. I could send over an invoice right now. Or you could send a proposal with costs, etc. within 60 minutes. Great. That sounds awesome. Let me whip together a proposal for you, and I'll send it to you within the hour. It'll contain everything you need, plus a little signature field and even a place for you to pay an invoice um should you get to that point. Sound good? Great.
• 69:00 - 69:30 Simplest sales call SOP. Anybody can do this. Um I'm going to include this in the description so you guys could take it and run with it. Obviously, I go into a lot more detail in my programs about what the ideal sales call looks like, but I think that's a highle enough view that that should let everybody here get started and make some meaningful progress. All right. Finally, the last and I want to say most important part is we need to iterate. So, you yes you if you do this, you will definitely get your first customer. I mean, it's just a
• 69:30 - 70:00 matter of time. Everything that I've talked about here is not it's not complex. It's very very simple. It's difficult to do consistently. And if you're the sort of person that can build habits and the consistency and accountability to do this for a very long period of time, you will inevitably be one of the big players on the internet today. Uh but it's not, you know, it's not easy. So if you could do it all day, um doing it all day is not enough. What you need to do is you need to iterate. So you need to make it better. What I mean by this is um you need to go through the following steps. And this is just my recommendation. This
• 70:00 - 70:30 is me just doing a bird's- eye view look at how most of the people in my program can succeed. and I just, you know, tried to tailor all my recommendations to them. But essentially what happens is you will acquire your first client, you do a great job, then all you do is increase prices and service quality by 30%. And then you repeat. Okay? Then along the way, you perform what's called a retrospective, which I'm going to get into in a moment. And then you do this to acquire client number two, then client number three, then client number four, and so on and so on and so forth.
• 70:30 - 71:00 every route around the wheel. You basically just charge a little bit more and then you get better at doing the service itself, which is why you're charging a little bit more. Okay, so this is the circle of life and this is the circle of an AI automation agency and this is what I would recommend everybody get in the habit of doing. One of the main uh problems that I see in my communities is, you know, Nick, I'm charging $500 to $1,000 per project and I've been doing this for the better part of last month. How do I get out of it? Well, literally just you just you just increase your prices. You just increase them by 30 40%. You throw them at the
• 71:00 - 71:30 wallet. You see what sticks, okay? Eventually, you get good enough that you can pitch much much higher costs. Eventually, you understand the the client problems and needs and stuff like that to the point where that's not a big deal for you. Okay? But what is this step right over here? What is this retrospective? Let me cover it. Basically, there are three retros that I like to get people to do if you want to get in the chain of continuous improvement and then have your agency or service or whatever you're really doing blow up. I focus these on the lead generation because this tends to be the biggest problem area for most people. And then I focus on the actual client fulfillment as well a little bit. So
• 71:30 - 72:00 there are three retrospectives that I recommend you guys get in the habit of doing every time you get a client. Okay? First is every time that you send out a bunch of cold emails and that somehow lands in some sort of business opportunity. What you do is you determine the stats. So you count up all the emails you sent, count up all the emails that have been opened, you count up all the replies to those emails, you count up all the positive replies, then you count up the calls that resulted, and then you ultimately count up the deals. So, you are going to have a spreadsheet that actually looks like, you know, sent, opened, replied, positive replies, calls, then finally deals. Okay? And you'll do this every
• 72:00 - 72:30 time you do a retrospective. And usually it'll do something, I don't know, you might send, let's say, a I'm just going to be very easy here. A,000 and then 800 people will open. Open tracking isn't really big these days. It's kind of buggy, but I'm putting this in here just for um I guess posterity sake. Maybe you'll have, you know, 50 people reply. That's a reply rate of 50%, sorry, of 5%. Then maybe of these you'll have 25 of these be positive replies. From these 25 positive replies, maybe you'll get 15 calls. Then maybe out of these you'll get three deals. Okay? So you have a spreadsheet that looks just like this.
• 72:30 - 73:00 Then what you do now that you have all those numbers is you will go through all of your copy. You'll open up your instantly campaigns, your smart lead campaigns, everything that you need. You actually split test the short copy versus long copy. You'll split test little parts of copy. Like you'll you'll throw in the word I instead of we. You'll um experiment with being very blunt but also being more laid-back. You'll experiment with including assets in your uh flow. You'll experiment with including ice breakers in your flow versus maybe templating it out. You'll experiment with copying templates off the internet, templates you've seen with me and weaving that into your flows.
• 73:00 - 73:30 You'll experiment with taking a template and then making it very different and then you know seeing whether or not that works better. So I guess what I'm trying to say is you'll just do a bunch of split testing the actual campaign parameters itself. Okay? Then you'll go through your communications. You'll split test different sequences. So when I say sequences, I mean, you know, when somebody rep responds to you positively, what do you normally say? How do you handle that? How quickly do you respond to that? Do you respond quick enough? Is it an hour later? Is it 2 hours later? Is it 24 hours later? Ideally, you should be responding to positive inquiries within like a minute or two.
• 73:30 - 74:00 You should be beling notifications to your phone that cut through any silence blockers and literally just like respond right now. It's an urgent critical opportunity. You should have templates ready to go that do most of it for you that allow you to make little changes. Okay. And finally, one thing that I didn't mention uh actually right over here, which I'll just add to them, is um you also test your audiences. Okay, finally, once you're done with that, you say, "Okay, great. I have a list of learnings now. I'm going to make those changes." And then you just keep on going. And you don't, you know, allow yourself to get so beat up
• 74:00 - 74:30 that your campaign didn't perform very well or that, you know, you're not doing as good as you could. All you do is you just proceed through this loop over and over and over again every time you get a new client or I don't know every two weeks or so, however often you really feel is necessary. I just caution people against doing this too quickly. Um, you know, don't do this daily for instance. It does not make you better. There's like a sweet spot and that sweet spot tends to be every week or two. Assuming you're doing the steps that I lay out in my programs, um, you're probably going to be getting a client every week or two, which is why I just say do it every time you get a client. Okay. Same thing with Upwork. You determine your stats. So, you'll have a spreadsheet. It'll say sent. Then it'll say number of proposals
• 74:30 - 75:00 viewed. It'll say number of replies or responses. It'll say the number of calls you've done. And then it'll ultimately say the number of deals. So maybe you send a 100 proposals, excuse me, maybe 40 of these proposals actually get viewed. Maybe 20 people actually reply to you. Maybe you have 10 calls. And then maybe you close with three deals. Okay. From here, you'll go through the profiles. You'll test pictures. You'll test above the folds. You'll test videos. You'll test proposal CVs. You'll test literally everything that you can
• 75:00 - 75:30 on the profile. You'll test changing all this stuff up. You'll test changing that up. You'll test changing the background color. Doing the online for messages bubble, changing the title, changing the specialized profiles here, showing your earnings versus hiding your earnings. Okay. You'll do uh your portfolio. You will I can't believe I still have that on. I've made just about $500,000 with upper cuts. You change your video. You'll change your uh portfolio blog posts and the writing and the the summary of your work history and the hours per week that you're available and all that stuff. Okay? You'll go through this and you'll basically just try a
• 75:30 - 76:00 bunch of stuff and see what works. Feedback is always better than planning because feedback involves you interfacing with the real market and that's what we're going for. Then again, go through your comm split test different sequences and just see what sort of communication methods are ultimately responsible and you getting the client what you can do better. And then finally, ran it out with fulfillment retrospectives. So you have a couple of stats here that not a lot of people are aware of. Um but the big ones that I find important are sorry I said
• 76:00 - 76:30 number of calls. I believe what I meant to say was number of projects. Uh so uh you know you'll have a spreadsheet that looks something like this. Projects you'll have cycle time. Cycle time is how long it took for your project to enter your queue your your your desk basically and then leave and then be done. Okay. You will get number of revisions. You will get the cost of the project, you know, cost of goods sold. And you'll just have this little spreadsheet. Maybe you got three projects this month. Maybe on average your cycle time was 3.5
• 76:30 - 77:00 weeks. That's pretty long, not going to lie. Maybe on average clients wanted four revisions. Well, that's a lot of revisions. Maybe on average your internal cost per project was, I don't know, $500 or um let's say your average project was $3,000, you know, maybe about 16%. These are all pretty high, right? These then give you everything you need to make them better the next generation essentially. Okay. Then go through all of your client comms. Go through every message sent, every call you've done, every email, etc. Then
• 77:00 - 77:30 identify ways to improve. Some very low hanging fruit that I frequently see, people aren't contacting their clients enough. People will usually get a deal and then they'll just disappear for a week. Clients really like it when you give them updates every couple of days. One of the simplest and straightest ways that I basically doubled my bottom line was literally just setting a daily period where a client could reach me anytime that they wanted than using that daily period to give them updates. It was took it took me like 5 minutes per day, not even. And I made vastly more money and a vastly lower turn as a result of doing it. Okay. Schedule
• 77:30 - 78:00 something in your calendar daily client update. Just go through top to bottom. You know, what have I done for this person? What have I done for that person? What have I done that person? What have I done for that person? When you um also schedule an update, when you actually have things to share with the client, it shows that you haven't forgotten about them, which is a big thing that they care about. Is this person just writing me for free and not actually doing any work? So, do tons of updates, give them deliverables, give them visuals, and then I don't know, maybe experiment with uh ways of getting everything up front for AI automation. Usually, that's stuff like 2FA, stuff like codes, stuff like credentials, stuff like API access, and stuff like
• 78:00 - 78:30 that. A lot of people actually leave this till the end and they got to call the client 5 million times over the course of the next 3 weeks to drip out access. Now that you guys have your business infrastructure set up and now that you understand what niches are worth targeting, it's time to see all this stuff in action. You've learned the theory. So, let me show you exactly how it works in the real world by getting up and running with the campaign. The next section we're going to talk about is totally different from everything we covered so far. So, instead of teaching concepts, I'm actually going to start an AI automation service from scratch. My goal is I don't just want to talk about stuff. I actually want to show you and then I'm going to build everything live. So, I'll do the niche selection live.
• 78:30 - 79:00 Then I'll do the lead scraping infrastructure. I'll do the copyrightiting. I'll do the outreach campaigns. and I'm actually going to generate real interested prospects. So, this is not theory. This is not a hypothetical. You are literally about to watch the entire process unfold in real time. I'm going to give you guys a complete copy paste playbook you can follow to get your first paying clients in AI and in automation. By the end of the section, you guys will see exactly how accessible this business model really is. Let's get into it. In a nutshell, this is what we are going to do today. We're going to start by finding and choosing a high demand AI service the clients are pretty desperate for right now. I'm then going to set up
• 79:00 - 79:30 my lead scraping and outreach infrastructure in just a few minutes. Then I'm going to create an irresistible offer that practically sells itself. I'm going to generate qualified leads using two proven methods that cost very little in the grand scheme of things. And then finally, I'm going to generate my very first interested leads using these methods. So, doesn't need to be scary, doesn't need to be intimidating. I'm going to give you guys everything you need. Let's get started and make some freaking money. Okay, this is going to be the document I'll do everything off of. And this is the road map. I'm going to start by picking three niches and I'm going to determine two high demand AI
• 79:30 - 80:00 services per niche to solve real client problems in them. I'll even show you how I do a little bit of research. After that, we're going to set up lead scraping and outreach infrastructure. This is a painoint for a lot of people that are watching this video, so I'm looking forward to solving that. Then, we're going to create an irresistible offer using a simple copyrighting formula that I've talked about, but I don't think a lot of people have seen. Then, we're going to actually generate real qualified leads. Then, we'll chat in next steps how to actually, you know, like send a proposal and and close the deal and so on and so forth. Okay. So, you're going to see everything in this video from start to finish. I've named this watch me start and sell an ASA
• 80:00 - 80:30 service in just X hours. I don't know what the X is yet because I decided to record it before I did all the stuff, which I think is the best way to do it. So, let's get up and running with just the very first step, which is picking three niches. So, I'm going to be relying on some of the templates in Maker School, which is my automation community, which basically just covers how to do all this stuff. So, the very first thing I'm going to do is go over to month one, and then I'm just going to find some niches. Okay. So, what I do in day two is um I have a little document over here called the niche discovery spreadsheet. And what this document is is it's literally just a bunch of
• 80:30 - 81:00 possible niches that you could pick for this business model. Then a bunch of different service lines that I could pick for this business model. Then I literally just mash them together to give you a ton of different positioning statements. And a positioning statement is just what I call something of the form I build X for Y. So X is the thing that we build and then Y is the business type that we are approaching. Okay. So I don't actually know what niches I'm going to pick yet. The reason why I haven't thought about this is because I wanted to put myself in as similar a position to as many of you as possible. So, I'm just going to do a little bit of brainstorming out loud and maybe we'll cut it so it's not just me staring off
• 81:00 - 81:30 into the void. When I'm thinking niches, I'm thinking digital businesses that I can source leads for very easily using automated methods. I'm also looking for businesses that have pain points that I'm pretty good at solving. And so, historically, one of the main strengths that I have is like marketing, lead genen, growth for the most part. So, I'm probably looking for businesses that I can realistically help with their growth. So, there are a variety of different business types here that I think that I might have some prior experience with. I might have some sort of unique understanding of. And what I'll do here is I'll just I'll just pick a bunch. Hello to the anonymous panda
• 81:30 - 82:00 that is currently on this page with me. So, like I think website developers are okay. I'm also looking for niches that have money to spend, right? So, I could do some sort of like website development agency. One niche that I've tackled before and I've had reasonable success with is the creative agency. And some creative agencies do website development. So, why don't I bold this? I can do sales with uh website developers actually, which is nice. Let me scroll through here and see more. H IT consultants, e-learning consultants. H just trying to get some ideas here. You know, maybe I'll do video editing agencies as well cuz I've actually worked in video editing. So, I sort of have like some unique understanding of
• 82:00 - 82:30 the problems that they face. And then h let's see here. I want to keep this pretty easy and pretty fast. I don't really want to spend too much time thinking about the niches. I just want to get the 8020 in front of me and then I'll move forward. Probably do some content writing firms as Uh, no. I I don't think I want to do content writing firms cuz then I'd have two that I've run before. I've run a video editing agency and a content writing agency before. I don't want anybody to accuse me or I I want to beat the allegations that I'm just doing businesses that I've already operated. So, let me think what else we got. Why don't we do real estate agents? A lot of people chatting about real estate agents now. That looks pretty good. Okay, so website
• 82:30 - 83:00 development. I'll do video editing and then I'll do real estate. Okay, so I'm going to head back over here. I'm going to have my three niches laid out. We are going to do website agencies. So, I might just do creative to be honest. A creative agency might be a better way to conceptualize this, but we'll see. I'm just going to put this down for now and then we'll figure it out later. Then we're going to do video I'll just say video editors for now plus real estate. Okay, that seems pretty easy to me. We got three niches. We can actually already move on to the next step. And the next step is us going to be
• 83:00 - 83:30 determining two high demand AI services per niche that solve real client problems. Okay, so this is another step where a lot of people get kind of caught up. they don't really know how to go about actually determining what services to sell to people and that's totally okay. I don't have any like built-in resources for this. But what I'm going to do is just show you a simple framework that I always use when you know trying to figure this stuff out. So assuming that I had no knowledge of website agencies and video editing and real estate, how would I go about actually getting it? Well, I would probably first turn to communities or Reddit threads or basically areas on the internet where a bunch of the people in
• 83:30 - 84:00 these three niches congregate. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to find some communities where I've seen website agencies go in. maybe like a website developer community or something like that. I'm going to join a bunch and then I'm just going to read top to bottom and see what some of the problems that they face are. So, I'm going to head over to school.com/discovery. School is just the main community platform right now. So, I'm just going to go here and then I'll type in website and let's see. Looks like getting tons of ads. So, I think the term website is probably not the term that I want to use. I imagine website is just like a general purpose term that like everybody has somewhere on their page and the search feature here is just pulling them up. So, I'll
• 84:00 - 84:30 go website developer maybe. Okay. Software developer academy, Dev Builder Club. There's the AI automation agency hub. That's actually uh basically what we're talking about. So, I'm not going to do that. Web agency accelerator. You see this? This looks perfect. This is exactly the sort of stuff that we want. Awesome. What else? Web designers collective. That's perfect. Exactly what we're looking for. Cyber Value. No. Real estate developer. Not yet. Software engineering accelerator. Next level web design. Oh, this looks good. I'm looking for stuff that has to do with business, right?
• 84:30 - 85:00 Like I don't just want a bunch of people building websites or whatnot. kind of want people selling stuff so that I could see what their problems are. Okay, but anyway, what do we got? So, it looks like one of these communities actually just allows us to read through all the posts without actually being part of it. So, what I'm going to do here is I'm just going to read through this and then I'll make my determinations afterwards. So, what am I looking for first and foremost? Well, first of all, actually, I am looking for wins post. So, it looks like there's a category called wins where this guy Tyler just sent 900 cold DMs in the last two days, closed two deals. That's pretty sweet. So, I like that. Looks like he's also using automation which is very cool. Nice. There's a lot of questions about prices. What sort of price should I charge?
• 85:00 - 85:30 Right. What platforms am I using? So, what I'm looking for really to be honest is I'm looking for I'm looking for questions. So, I see that there's a questions category. I'm just going to pump through here and I'm looking for questions because I want to see what sort of questions that like the average website developer has. And this is just going to teach me more about the niche. I'm going to learn more about how to come up with a service that might effectively answer some of these problems. So, what's a big question I see? How do I find clients? Obviously, how to get clients, obviously. How to get hired? Obviously, agency versus freelancing. That's interesting. What sorts of clients should I pick? National, international, different
• 85:30 - 86:00 platforms. How did you get your first client? So that's big. How to acquire new clients. So hopefully you guys are seeing that you know one of the main issues here is acquiring your new clients. And so like a big problem statement first of all and this honestly you know really got to be a rocket the scientist to figure this out. But like some real client problems are basically all these niche are more clients. Okay. So actually let's frame this as a problem. Not enough clients. You know we want more clients. That's problem number one across basically every niche. So that's a good problem that we could solve with a couple systems already that are coming to mind. But I'm not going to
• 86:00 - 86:30 stop there. Let me do a little bit more research. Outsourcing got too many clients. Doesn't seem like a very common issue to me. Legal registration. Go highle website. People asking about specific design stuff. Very cool. To niche down or not. SEO. SEO is cool. We could do like an SEO system. We could do some sort of like add-on for website developers. It's like, hey, you know, after you design a or build a website, you could also just like generate 100 blog posts for them completely free of charge or something like that. That's kind of cool. I like that. I like that idea a I think that could have some
• 86:30 - 87:00 merit, you know, like content generation for clients, right? Clients saying SEO. Yeah, really glad I found that. I was not expecting this at all. Let's just do website devs first and then I'll do the other ones. Okay, so obviously a little bit of business knowledge helps you do this faster. Kind of understand the main problems that customers are suffering from. But I'll be honest, a lot of people have tried to automate this step. I think that automating the steps is probably the silliest thing that you could do. Like you actually understanding a customer problem is directly correlated with your success as a business owner. Like if I think about just the number one skill or handful of
• 87:00 - 87:30 maybe top three skills that have made me a successful business owner. The biggest one is probably just understanding customer problems like reading through people bitching and moaning about their customer problems and stuff like that. So this is not something that I would automate. Like sure maybe I'd ask chat GPT what are some problems businesses face but I you know I wouldn't just take all that at face value. I'd actually go really deep. I'd actually like try and drink directly from the faucet if that makes sense as opposed to take some opinion or whatnot. Go and actually find problems that people are facing. So anyway, I found two, right? We found um not enough clients content generation for clients SEO or whatever. That's good
• 87:30 - 88:00 enough. I'm going to move on to the next niche, which is video editors. I'm just going to type in video. This is interesting. We'll open up that one. Scale with video. That's interesting. Educate with video. H get started with video. Maybe. Maybe we'll go editing. Editing lab. Editing layer. [Music] Editology. Short form training. Could I type in videography? How about that? That's cool. Wedding filmmaker. I guess you got to pay a thousand bucks for that. So, I think I'll leave that out for now. Wealthy filmmaker is cool. That
• 88:00 - 88:30 sounds good. All right, let me just see how many of these I have direct access to right off the top. Looks like I only have one. Art FX. The rest of these I got to click a join button. So, just for the purposes of brevity, I'll just go through here and we'll start. So, everybody's talking about cold outreach again. That's cool. Looks like most of this community is this person Arthur just posting. So, this is not seeming like a very good community to start if I'm honest. Usually, you'll find that like some of these are just people's business models. They're like building a funnel. Okay, so some people are actually asking for videographers in specific areas. Okay, people are asking some pretty basic questions. People are advertising. I got fired from working
• 88:30 - 89:00 with Gary Vee at Vayner Media. Wow, that's interesting. Okay, so color grading presets. That sounds like a pretty interesting problem. So, a lot of people want templates, out of the box templates and stuff, right? Hm. I wonder if I could solve that with automation. What are the simplest templates to get or whatnot? Hey, I'm a automation agency. They work specifically with video editors and I wanted to give you a big list of all the best LUTs and templates and stuff right out of the box. That might work. I'm not entirely sure. People are posting their videos. I'm not seeing too many problems here. Okay, so I'm not seeing much success here. I'm just going to go to Reddit
• 89:00 - 89:30 video editor subreddit. Let's try that. See, there's video editing here. There's editors. There's video editors. Video editing requests. Let me just jump through this really quickly. See what we got. I'm really outing my uh myself here. Leblanc [Laughter] mains. Yep. Been crushing some League. I'm just going to go to top really quickly. Just see top post for today. Alt tab all these. People are looking for specific help. This looks more technical. Probably not what I'm going for. Let's move on. This looks more like almost
• 89:30 - 90:00 political. Ah, here we go. Video editors. This is like a smaller community about video editing. Longtime editors struggling to find freelance clients. Let's um open up this thread. Read a little bit. Think I'm doing so much wrong. Cool. Let's see what this person's worried about. Obviously, there are a few people that are just talking shop and how do you make a living? That's that's a great question. Cool. We should be able to get some juice here. Help with my portfolio. Okay. H full-time position. Finding clients
• 90:00 - 90:30 has never been my forte. It's a wrap. This person's just talking about how tough it is. That's actually pretty good though because when you have really negative nancies like this, it a lot of the time like shows the fears that the niche is facing. Even TV, it's over because of automation. Well, that's unnecessary. I make a living with this. Yep. No jobs right now. Okay. Well, that one is obviously not enough clients. That's the main one. What you'll see is they're all kind of together, right? I mean, I already know that this is a major problem for real estate, so I'll just write not enough clients as well. Just insanely clear.
• 90:30 - 91:00 All right. Well, yeah, that's all I got for video editing. If you joined all of these communities, kind of went really deep into them. I'm sure you'd find significantly more concrete problems. Let's now do real estate. Your real estate agents, global real estate agents. That looks great. Real est99 a month. Probably not going to work for me. Let's um just filter this. So, for English, I don't think we can filter by free, can we? No. Okay. Another issue I'm seeing is busy work. When I say busy work here, I mean kind of mundane things like following up. A lot of the time, real estate agents, they make their
• 91:00 - 91:30 money just by being in front of people enough like at the right times that when somebody or somebody that they know is interested in buying or selling a property or something, it's like, "Oh, you know, I just remember hearing about XYZ person 2 days ago. Let me send them a message." So, I think following up is probably a big problem point and just basic busy work and whatnot. I could probably come up with some systems to solve that. All right. So, as you guys can see, uh, am I like a rocket surgeon here, you know, niching super hard down into the specific issues that these guys are facing right off the get- go? No. I don't need to have the best problems right off the bat. What I'm going to do is I'm going to start talking to
• 91:30 - 92:00 customers. I'll worry about figuring out like the nuanced natures of all these problems afterwards. Okay, we're just going to frontload the actual conversations with the business owners. We'll worry about everything after we're already up and running. So, this is sufficient for me. Okay. Now, after this, I'm going to have to come up with some high demand AI services. Now, you know, I have the problems. So, why don't I just list some services at the top of my head that I think could solve things. Okay. So, we'll have three categories. And I'm just going to aim for two services each. And they don't necessarily have to solve these problems. is one for one. We'll just come up with two each for three. So like let's just do website
• 92:00 - 92:30 devs/creative agencies. All right. So the first major problem as we saw was not enough clients, right? So the not enough clients is the main problem. Well, what's the solution to not enough clients? Well, one of the simplest things that I sell all the time is cold outreach system. There are variety of different cold outreach systems you could sell. But I don't even know what the shape of this is going to look like. I'm just going to get some cold outreach systems in front of my customers and I'll worry about exactly how to do it afterwards. Okay. But yeah, cold outreach systems are really big. When I say cold outreach systems, I just mean
• 92:30 - 93:00 like scraping systems, email systems, systems that allow us to pump things into like a cold email platform. Basically the same system I'm going to be building to get myself clients and then pitching that to other people. So very meta, very much like using cold outreach to sell cold outreach for people, but it works really well. Next one is content generation for clients. And so I could absolutely see, you know, some instant content generation system for the websites that you just make for a client. Like think about this, how cool it would be if it's like you already make websites as part of your whole thing. Imagine if you just had a single form or like a button that you could press or something that just immediately generated you 100 blog
• 93:00 - 93:30 posts. And then you just took that added that to your client website and you said, "Hey, by the way, I already loaded this up with 100 blog posts for you, right? To simulate activity or whatnot." Very simple and easy add-on, which I think would uh probably be pretty cool and I'm interested in seeing how I how I might solve that. So these look sufficient for me. I'm not going to think too hard on it. What we need to do after this is transform this into like an offer for cold email, but that's okay. Let's do the second niche now, which is videography. This might take me a little bit more time. But let's say right off the bat, I'm just going to sell cold outreach systems to these as well because we just saw how do we get clients? How do we get clients? We can't get clients. Clients don't exist. Uh,
• 93:30 - 94:00 you know, this whole business model is dead. So, I probably sell some cold outreach systems to them, too. These cold outreach systems in particular will take a different approach than website devs, though. It's going to look a little bit different. I think we could probably do like a search intent system, which is like a job scraper, basically. So, you know, we'll scrape a bunch of jobs for people that are looking for videographer to become in in-house and then we're just going to add them to some system and then we'll send them out to people that are hiring for that role. We're basically going to say, "Hey, I know you're looking for somebody to hire for XY andZ role." I thought it'd be a little proactive, so I'm actually just going to send you a bunch of value right up front. I'm happy to do like a sample edit for you or something like that. 100% free. Just send me over source
• 94:00 - 94:30 material what you want and I'll whip it up for you within 24 hours. This would be a really good cold outreach system. I've seen a lot of people do something so it's actually how one of my video editors sold me. Okay, so what else are we going to do? Hm. Videography. Videography. videography. We could probably sell clipping. So, I see a lot of long- form videos coming in. What we could do is we could offer videographers a way to very quickly and easily clip. Or maybe they upload the transcript of the video to my service and then my service automatically identifies timestamps. What else do video editors usually do? Hm. Exports. That's a big
• 94:30 - 95:00 chunk of their workflow. Templates and whatnot, that's a big issue. I really like the idea of a clipping service for long form. Let's say a video editor is working with somebody for long form. You could very quickly and easily repurpose all that and make social media posts for them. So we'll either do clipping service. A clipping service is literally just something like opus clip or ve or goldcast. What these are are you basically chunk in like a long video and then it just generates a bunch of short form ones. Same thing with V. Pump in a long video generates a bunch of short forms ones. Same thing with Opus, right?
• 95:00 - 95:30 Pump in a long one makes a bunch of clips like this automatically. So that's pretty cool. Um there's obviously a lot of value there. So I think we should probably do something like that. clipping service and or let's do like a content generation or maybe we make a bunch of Instagram posts or something about it. Okay, and now let's do real estate. And what did we have? We had not enough clients. So, we could totally do some sort of email scaleup system. This is going to depend. Real estate's a little nuanced, right? There's like the buy side, there's the sell side. So, I might be selling a buy side system, but then that'll have like a fundamentally different meaning or purpose than a sellside system. If you think about it,
• 95:30 - 96:00 a sellside system is basically like how do we get listings in front of as many people as possible. So, we could build a system that like, I don't know, automatically post it on a bunch of real estate agency websites or whatnot. Uh, that seems kind of lame to me, and I don't really think I could realistically do that in a short period of time. So, we could look for people to sell homes. Maybe what we do is we set up a pipeline for real estate agents that are looking to work with people on the sell side, and then all they do is they just supply the leads, and then this system, you know, has really high response rates, and everything's like super high quality. I I think probably some sort of like email BTOC system would make sense.
• 96:00 - 96:30 I don't know about sourcing the leads, but sending them out. And then I think we could probably do some sort of automated follow-up/reactivation system for them. Again, I'm just these are all off the top of my head. We're going to see how these evolve. But as a first pass, that looks pretty good to me. Do I know exactly how all this stuff's going to end up? Nope. I'm just pulling some stuff out of my ass. I'm like pretty certain. I'm like 50 to 70% certain. Yeah, I think this might have some value for some people. That's enough for me. I'm just going to put it on the page, put together some offers, send it out to a bunch of people, and I'm going to hear their feedback first before I try and
• 96:30 - 97:00 plan uh for every eventuality. Okay. All right. So, now that we have a bunch of these systems, what I'm going to do is I'm going to set up lead scraping and outreach infrastructure that I'm going to use to source people in all of these audiences. Then once I've done this, I'm actually going to go and I'm going to copyright and then start sending out or blasting out outreach. So, we're actually getting pretty far already and I think it's only been what, like 25 or 30 minutes or something. Pretty simple, pretty straightforward. So, setting up lead scraping and outreach infrastructure. Well, there are variety of different ways to do this. Here's what I'm thinking of doing. Okay, just going to go all the way down here to make it a lot easier. What I'm thinking of doing is any sort of lead scraping or sourcing system is first we have to
• 97:00 - 97:30 source leads. Then we have to scrape the leads. And then nowadays what we need to do is we also need to enrich the leads with some sort of personalization. Okay? So it's sort of like a three-step process. So what I'm going to do since I'm doing cold outbound is I'm going to start by sourcing leads. And there are variety of different ways to source. Easiest one is definitely Apollo right now. And I don't know how long Apollo is going to work. So I'm just going to hop on that for sure. You could also do like sales nav which is LinkedIn sales navigator. You could also do like job posts. That's pretty big. A lot of people doing job posts. After that, you scrape using a service usually like Amplify or some custom scraper you
• 97:30 - 98:00 built. By the way, you could also do like a directory or something. If you find a specific directory of people, maybe a directory website. You could build your own custom scraper, scrape them, and your lead list would be way higher. But we're going to scrape these using Appify. And then at the end, I'm just going to enrich these. The way I'm going to enrich them is I'll probably like AI personalize, but I'm not going to AI personalize all of them. I'm actually going to just like try getting by with, you know, procedural variables and then AI personalization after. And then kind of the fourth step is we need to pump them into like infrastructure. We actually need to send, right? So, the main sender that I'm going to be using today is called Instantly. Instantly is just a very quick and easy way to get up
• 98:00 - 98:30 and running with mailbox infrastructure. What I'm going to do is I'm going to source a bunch of leads, scrape them, and then enrich them first. That's kind of like, you know, what we're going to do now. Then in a few minutes, um, after I'm done with that, I'm going to start uploading them to a platform instantly. And then after I'm done with that, I'll actually queue them up and we'll start sending the emails. Okay. All right. So, very first thing I'm going to do is I need to start sourcing leads. I see there are variety of ways to do so. I'm probably just going to do Apollo cuz that seems pretty easy to me. Maybe I'll do job post, too. We'll see. But how would I go about this? I would actually just go Apollo.io. I'm just going to create uh three audiences here. First
• 98:30 - 99:00 are going to be website development agencies or creative agencies. The second are going to be videographers and the third are going to be real estate agencies. You can see, you know, I work with creative agencies a lot, which is why I literally pumped in the search term. This is from the last time I ran a similar search. So, creative agencies sound pretty good to me. Um maybe what we should do is we should have creative agency and then we could also add a term website here. Yeah, I could probably do that. I wonder if I type in creative agency and website. H maybe like website developer. Wonder if that would work. Maybe website agency cuz that's only 51 people. Let's see. That's 54 people.
• 99:00 - 99:30 Hm. Anything else that's limiting my search? How am I going to do this? I just type in website. We have 581, which is pretty cool. But as you see, a lot of these search results are like music website, outsource website, website factory. If I type in agency, what happens? If I type in agency, we have 24,200. Connective agency, MI6 agency, labeled agency. I wonder if we could add an additional filter. No, I don't want to generate an
• 99:30 - 100:00 output for each record. Let me see here exactly what I would do. Keywords I would use website. So now I should be scraping agencies or co-founders, partners at agencies that include the term website. And so now I have multiple levels here. Now, what I'm going to do just to determine that this is pretty good, and we're never going to get a perfect scrape or a perfect data source. What I'm going to do to make sure it's pretty good is I'm just going to open up this page. Notice how many results here. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12. So, let me
• 100:00 - 100:30 just zoom in a bit. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10. Okay, so there are 10 results here. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to like do this two or three times. I'm going to go through the 10 results and I'm just going to see how many of these companies are actually companies I might want to work with. with my search terms. I'm aiming for like 80% plus. So, let's open up all these and just see off the top of my head, you know, is this search good enough that 80% of the leads I'm going to generate are probably companies I'm looking for. B TOC digital marketing agency whose name is inspired. Okay, we do state
• 100:30 - 101:00 websites. We built a bunch of websites. Okay, great. Dig Vortex is good. So, we're one out of 10. This is Sydney website design agency. Good. We're two out of 10. H full service marketing agency. Okay, I think we could probably pitch that. That's three out of 10. Web design agency four out of 10. H I don't know if these people do websites specifically. It looks like they're more of a creative agency. They do storytelling. H I'm not entirely sure to be completely honest, but I think you know I think they're probably sufficient. Let me check their websites and see. Wow, this is very clean. Oh, they're in Calgary too. That's uh where
• 101:00 - 101:30 I live right now. Web site. Hm. Can I see maybe some of their work that they've done? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm seeing media production, business development. Okay. Branding. You know, branding probably has a lot to do with the website. Okay. They made a new website. Okay. So, these guys do websites as well. Perfect. That's five out of 10. Okay. This is like a brand agency tomorrow. I don't know if this is sufficient. But I'm just going to type in
• 101:30 - 102:00 website. Oh, very clean. Very clean. Looking for the term website because I want to make sure that they make websites. they don't make websites. This would not make any sense. Unfortunately, one thing that uh on a metal level, a lot of um website design agencies are doing is they're branding themselves as not website design agencies now. They're like, "We're multi-disiplinary creators. We're branding experts. We're architects of your vision, right? It's not like actual website." When I see stuff like rebuild our core business, though, odds are that's probably a website. So, I'm
• 102:00 - 102:30 going to say yes to that one. Full service marketing agency. Uh, okay. Labeled agency. I feel like I I might have just doubled up on this and got two of these links, but I said that they were good. This is a website agency, web agency. Okay. So, realistically, I'm thinking like nine out of 10 of my first search is fine. 90% is pretty solid to me. I could go through more of this, but just off the top of my head, this is probably enough. So, I know that this lead list here, this source is probably sufficient. Okay, so very first thing I'm going to do, let me just make sure I'm nice and organized here. I'm going
• 102:30 - 103:00 to go right over here. Then I will paste this in. This is just going to be my little scratch pad here. This is going to be my website agencies URL. Okay, so the way you do this with Apollo is you just get the URLs. All right, now that we have the number one done, why don't we go number two? And this is good. We have 4,294 leads. I generally want like more than a couple thousand to run a test on. And we can get way more leads than this if we're smart. Uh, let me see. Let me see. Let me see what else are we going to do. So we need videography, right? I wonder if I could just run the exact same hack here with the term videography instead. Now, odds
• 103:00 - 103:30 are if we do this, probably going to get some duplicate records cuz some of these website agencies are also going to do videography. Yes, I already see the tadpole agency. We already saw that labeled. So, already 20% of these are already the same agency, right? So, we're going to have some overlap. But videography is not the best term. Let me actually select this everywhere. So, h we do video. If I just do video, odds are they're going to do some videography, right? Okay. So, 4,188. And yeah, the labeled agency's with us as well. That's one
• 103:30 - 104:00 duplicate. Tadpoles. That's another duplicate. But that's among 30. I think this is probably going to be fine. So, honestly, I'm just going to open up a bunch of these again. Four, five. Uh, yeah, labeled 6 7 8 9 10. Double check. Animated explainer videos. This one is not in English. Videos. Okay. Videos. Videos. Cool. Yeah, these guys are the Calgary ones. I don't know about agency 360 video. Hm. Storytelling with video. Okay, that's good.
• 104:00 - 104:30 Reasonable video. Cool. These guys do video, too. Video. Cool. They do video as well. Video. I'm not seeing anything here. So, let me just jump in. Double check that this is actually something that's produced. Man, what a clean website. I love these guys. Video. H. I'm not seeing any video here. If I type in portfolio, I see they have a show reel. They probably do videos. Yeah. I mean, if you Yeah. Motion graphics. Looks like it. Okay, good. Miracle Video Agency. Again, this is in Italy. I'm not really targeting Americans here. I just wanted
• 104:30 - 105:00 to keep this reasonably broad. Um, but yeah, video. Cool. Cool. Cool. So, this is another audience I'm going to pump in. We'll worry about the specifics of this later. So, I've mentioned we will now just do a videographers videography agencies. Let's do that. Slasheditors. All right. And now we just have one more, which is real estate agents. So, let me just copy this, paste this down here cuz I want nice sizing. And then I'll just call this real estate agents. I don't want agencies.
• 105:00 - 105:30 Agencies are big. So we'll just go real estate agent. I'm going to remove video here. And let's see how many of these are real estate agents. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10. Life improvement platform. Nope. Nope. Okay. No, this doesn't really look like good search. This is an example of one that is not good. And it's probably because the job title, right? So, I'm thinking we're probably going to have to add like agent or maybe real estate agent. We could do like real estate
• 105:30 - 106:00 broker or something like that. Well, real estate broker is not exactly the same, but should be sufficient. Okay, so as you see, we're getting way too many here. We're getting like 258,000. This is uh Greg W at Wallace Real Estate. This is a good sign for me because it's, you know, the sort of person we're going for, like solo or or head owner of real estate brokerage. But yeah, we are getting way too many results to really do anything with this. So, why don't I go to number of employees? Why don't we just look for people in the 1 to 10 range and then maybe 11 to 20 range. This this will keep the companies pretty small. Um, let me think. Are there other
• 106:00 - 106:30 signals that we could use? Industry and keywords obviously need to be real estate, right? 41,000. Um, we could chunk this down substantially further. Why don't I go location? We'll go United States because they tend to have more money and because we could just get this 41,000 down to like 20 something,000. Okay. And yeah, still too many. So, we're going to need fewer. Okay. Okay, I ended up filtering this down to about 16,000. This is still a little too many for me. And some of these work with like big corporations like Remax and so on and so forth. They actually have limited control and
• 106:30 - 107:00 autonomy over the money that they could spend for marketing. Still, I don't really see this getting much better than that. So, I'm just going to call it here and put in my little real estate URL. Okay. All right. So, now we have three Apollo URLs. These all look pretty reasonable. What do we need to do with these? Well, we need to actually scrape these, right? It's one thing to have a URL, another thing to actually scrape these URLs. So, I'm going to pump all of these into Appify now. And I'm just going to run three manual runs. The one that I use is called Apollo code_cfter just because it's like a$120 per thousand leads. And uh when I say a$120 per thousand leads, I don't actually
• 107:00 - 107:30 mean that we are generating 1,000 leads here with email addresses. We realistically generate like 2/3 of those. Okay. So let me see. Uh looks like we can only run this once at a time. So I'm just going to run this three separate times simultaneously. And I'm going to look for 2,000 leads first. Okay. So 2,000 for each. So just jumped on Appify, make an account. I'm at like a pretty high usage tier, but I think you can get by with substantially less than this. And then it's just $120 per thousand. So, not really breaking the bank here. That's the first run. This going to be my videographer run. Let's go here and then save and start. Then
• 107:30 - 108:00 I'm going to go to my real estate agents and then I'm just going to open up a new instance of this and then run it. Save and start. And now what we should have, if I go back to my actors, we should have three runs running simultaneously. Okay, so we have one here, one here, one here. Now we just need to wait until these finish basically because they're 2000s. Probably going to take us like 5 minutes or so. Okay. And these are now just getting to completed. This one is 600. This one is 1,300. So I'm just going to set everything up for the first 2,000 run. And then as I'm doing it, the rest will finish. If I go to output here, I'm going to export all 2000 results. There are a lot of fields.
• 108:00 - 108:30 Okay. Tons of different fields um realistically. And you guys are going to see that when I import all these fields, it's going to be crazy. There's going to be like a million in one. Uh ideally, we wouldn't have that many, but um it is what it is. I'm just going to download all these, show you guys what I mean. Uh what I'm going to do is I'm going to have three. First of all, I don't actually remember what that specific export is. So, I'm going to export it now. Let's see. Gonna append to current sheet import. I'm just using Google Sheets. It's the easiest way to do it. And we're going to start by doing all this manually. So, uh, what is this? Yeah.
• 108:30 - 109:00 Okay. So, this is the real estate. So, I'm just going to have one sheet. I'll call it actually I guess I could just do all this in one, right? Leads. I'll just call this leads. In fact, let's just go here for my own organizational purposes. Just go watch me start and sell. There you go. That'd be good. Here we'll go real estate. I'm just not going to use spaces. It'll make my life easier. And then what I want is I just want to get rid of all the fields that don't really mean anything to me. Okay. So, first of all, just I want to count up the number of emails. There's a thousand in this list. So, we actually only ended up about 50%. Second of all, I want to
• 109:00 - 109:30 delete all the fields that don't really mean anything to me. So, realistically, what fields don't mean anything to me? Well, do you see how much space there is here? All these columns. Most of them are freaking empty as hell. What we want is we want to get rid of the vast majority of them. So, I'm thinking there's two big swaths that I'm going to get rid of. Okay. The first is I'm going to get rid of everything after from AC all the way over
• 109:30 - 110:00 to WH. Okay? And I'm going to do that for all three. And then I'm also going to prune a couple others. This way it'll just be a lot more easy and manageable for us. And you guys will see what I mean. If I'm to pump this into some sort of email enrichment service, I just kind of have to do this. So, what was it? AC to WH. Just going to copy and then delete. So, 500 columns are being deleted. Okay, this is a lot smaller now, a lot more manageable, right? Still pretty big, but it's a lot more manageable. Next thing I'm going to do is I'll go to personal emails. So, B I go to CE. There you go. So, I think it
• 110:00 - 110:30 was A C to WH and then BI to CE. Is that right? Hopefully that's right. Anyway, at the end of it, we want um like sheets that just all look the same because we're going to pump this into an icebreaker generator. We're basically going to have AI tell us a little bit about each person and then we'll use that to improve the the strength of the outreach. Okay, so this one is now done as well. Looks like it finished with 2002. So, I'm now going to download this same energy CSV. Go over here to sheet 2. Then I'm going to import, go upload.
• 110:30 - 111:00 There's a million and one ways to do this, by the way. Uh this is just how I personally like doing it. Then I'm going to append. That way it just goes into this one. And then there are a lot of leads here and a lot of fields. So might take a second. Okay. So it was so AC all the way to WH. It's going to be pretty far. This one has way more actually. Check this out. This one has a ton more. I think the reason why it works out like this is because basically LinkedIn where
• 111:00 - 111:30 these guys get all their data from just stores all of the employment fields that you have. So yeah, this one actually isn't. We need to go even further than this. So never mind. You can't just copy the same uh things. I think you got to go all the way to here. So this one goes to ZS. Annoying. Anyway, um that's that. And then let me just go back to my pol scraper. Grab my last run, which is this one here. Go output. I'll export all these. Download these. And uh sorry, which one was this? Art director. Is this videography? I think
• 111:30 - 112:00 this might be videography. Yeah, video agency. So, we'll just go video agency. Then this last one will be website agency and import upload. Okay. Now, I'm just going to do a little bit of reorganizing because I just want my fields arrayed linearly. I'm going to want the first name, then I'm going to want the last name, then I'm going to want like the company name, then I'm going to want a couple of other pieces of information. So, I'm just going to reset these so these all basically have the same information, the
• 112:00 - 112:30 same columns. This is necessary for me to run the automation. I'll show you guys in a second. Okay, I have all these set up. Just for my own sanity, just going to make all of these fields about the same width. A boot. That's my Canadian coming out. This looks good. So, as you can see, we have first name, last name, headline, employment industry, industry, city, employment history, industry, city, country, email. Right? So, we have all of the fields that we will realistically need. And what I'm going to do now is I'm just going to pump all of this into a service. Well, my own
• 112:30 - 113:00 service I'm going to whip up in a second to generate an icebreaker. So I'm just going to take all this information and I'm going to use it to generate you know some AI icebreaker for final confirmation check. How many emails do we have? We have about 1,100 for each. This is 1,026. Other was,233. This other one's whatever. So I'm just actually just going to run a,000 across all three of these. So 1,000 for real estate,000 for video agencies, for website agencies and we're going to see where we land. Of note, I'm not verifying or validating my domains. So I'm not just using the verified ones here. You can, and I think in many cases you should, but I find
• 113:00 - 113:30 that as a first go, right off the top, I just like to bust out as many emails as possible, not make any assumptions as to the quality of my data, and then after I run at least that first campaign, if something is like severely underperforming or if I do have high bounce rate or really piss poor deliverability, then I make my little changes afterwards. But for a first bet, I'm not even going to worry about that yet because I want this to be simple and nowhere near as complicated as I think most other people make it out to be. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to add an additional column here called icebreaker. We'll just do column I for
• 113:30 - 114:00 all of these. Okay, ice breaker. Then one more icebreaker. And I'm going to have AI go through and then generate ice breakers for all these. What I'll be using to make my life really simple is I'm going to use make.com which is a service that is basically no code. One of the foundational noode platforms similar to NAND, similar to Zapier and all these other ones. Realistically, if you're getting into AI and automation, you have no idea where to start. I recommend that you start with this. It's much easier and faster way of going about things. What we're going to want is we're going to want the sorry search rows. Go search rows to start. Then I'm
• 114:00 - 114:30 just going to select the right account. I'm going to have to make this accessible to that account. So I'll go nick at leftclick.ai. Going to give myself editor access. No need to notify me. And the sheet I'm going to be looking for is watch me start and sell an AI service in just x hours. Right. So I'm going to go down to search method. Um using the wrong account here. One sec. And I'm going to grab the ID up here at the top. Paste that in. It's saying that it's empty. I think just because of a bug. So, let me retry this. The first one is going to be real
• 114:30 - 115:00 state. Okay. Not entirely sure why I keep on getting empty for this. H might be a bug. For now, I'm just going to return five because I just want to make sure this actually works. So, let me run this module. Get five. Cool. So, it got the data. Basically, what I've done is I've just confirmed I can get the data from my real estate sheet here, uh, then pump it into make.com, which is good. After we've searched through it, we'll just call this icebreaker generation. Um, after we've searched through it, uh, we
• 115:00 - 115:30 can now build out the rest of this flow, which is going to be pretty simple and pretty straightforward. We're basically just going to take all of the information in. Then we're going to, um, send a message over to GBT. Probably use 40 for this one just for cost purposes. Then I'm going to have it generate ice breakers for all of these. So, let's go GPT4. Uh, let me just see actually what's the model prices. Open. Let's see the cheapest one right now. These are good, but they're quite expensive. This is 2 million. This is 40 cents. This is one. Okay. Oh, wow.
• 115:30 - 116:00 That's crazy. So, this one is affordable model balancing speed and intelligence. I'll probably use this one. GBT 4.1 mini, I think. Right. 2 million 1 million input tokens. I I don't know. We'll try it. one mini right over here. And then here is where I'm going to go and I'm going to uh design my prompt. So you're a helpful intelligent writing assistant. I always like to have a developer assistant prompt first. Then here is where I'm actually going to your
• 116:00 - 116:30 task is to take as input a bunch of personal information about a prospect and then design a customized oneline icebreaker to begin the conversation. You'll return this icebreaker in JSON using this format. I'm going to say icebreaker and then rules write in a Spartan. How do you pronounce this lanic?
• 116:30 - 117:00 Laconic. Oh, interesting. Renpartic lanic laconic tone of voice. Um, weave in uh context wherever possible. Here is a bunch of information about me, but you can make these ice breakers more personalized. Then I'm just going to list a bunch of stuff about me. And then down here, weave in context with my own
• 117:00 - 117:30 personal information wherever possible. Keep things very short and follow the format. Hey, name we'll go new line. New line. Really respect X and love that you're doing Y. Thought I'd connect. Wanted to run something by you. That should be a good one. Okay. Keep things very short and follow the provided format. Leave in contact with
• 117:30 - 118:00 me on personal information wherever possible. deniability possible. Try and imply that I like do believe. Oh. Oh no. Did I just delete the whole thing? That's brutal. Okay, I'm going to write the whole thing again. It's not going to be the same. That sucks. Be careful with the escape commands, ladies and gentlemen. That is tough. Do not want to escape. take as input a bunch of
• 118:00 - 118:30 information about a prospect and then generate a customized oneline icebreaker to imply rest of my communicate is personalized. You'll return your ice breakers JSON format icebreaker and then here I'm going to say hey name love thing also a fan of other thing wanted to run something by you cool rolls right in a Spartan oh be very careful with that
• 118:30 - 119:00 that's why keep things short and punchy things short let's say imply familiarity wherever possible If you see an opportunity, i.e. if you see an opportunity to imply that I like the same things, believe the same things, or want the same things as they do. Go for it. Sure, that should probably be okay. Let me save this this time. Learn my lesson. And I'm going to show advanced settings.
• 119:00 - 119:30 And what I'm going to do next is I'm just going to do a bunch of examples for it. So, we're going to go JSON object parse JSON response. Next up, I will do user. I'm going to provide some um personalized information about the prospect. So, uh what am I going to do? We'll just we'll just spam it all like in this one, two, three. This we'll do this. We'll do this. Okay. So, we're just going to add all this information in. And then next, the assistant's going to have some personalized stuff. But, uh
• 119:30 - 120:00 we don't want this to be the la the we actually want this to be the last message before this. We actually want a couple other examples. So I actually just generate one. We are going to have an example of this exact format. Put it right here. I'll fill this in with some actual information. And then we'll have the icebreaker here. Then we'll just do this like twice. And then in this way we're going to have a model of what we're saying. So the value here is you're actually just reaching out to people as if you were doing totally custom outreach. So let me see. Is there any other information we can get about the Now that I'm thinking about it, I don't actually have too much information
• 120:00 - 120:30 about the company, right? It's like a company oneliner or something. Otherwise, we're really going to be riding the plausible deniability train here. No organization description, huh? O, brutal. Yeah, you don't really get too much information. Oh, we got some personal emails, too. Interesting. Interesting. Huh. Well, actually, I didn't even realize we're getting so many personal emails. So, instead of just using this email column, we should probably concatenate the two. I bet you if I did this, um, if I merge these two, might even get more. It's been a while since I've used the personal field here, but like I don't know if Apollo's gotten a little bit better at this over the course of the last little while or what, but that's crazy. Look at that. That's
• 120:30 - 121:00 juicy. That is a very juicy column. I'm actually going to go back here now to where it says email. paste this in. Like check this. Oh man, there's a ton of emails here. Tons of emails. Okay. Well, I gotta say most of these are looking pretty good. If I go down to the very bottom of this uh 2000 list, if I go all the way up here now, we actually got 1500 emails instead of just and some of these are like hot mails and Gmails. Now, some of these aren't verified, so I'm probably going to have like much higher bounce rates, but I feel like I should probably concatenate these two now that I'm thinking about it into just
• 121:00 - 121:30 one email column, right? Basically, if they double up, then we won't put the same info. Or maybe we will. Who knows? Okay, let's add one more column. We'll go emails. Okay, so I'm just going to filter this. Just sort A to Z. Should have all the emails now sorted. I don't like how this looks, so let me just do some spreadsheet magic here. Um, I'm then going to cut this. Paste this in here. Then we can actually just resort this based off a toz. Now we should have
• 121:30 - 122:00 all of the emails, right? Yes, we should have some more emails here. Okay, cool. I'm going to do the same for all the rest of these just to get some of those um those bonus emails that I might have missed. I think that's important. Okay, so yeah, we just leveled up and got a few more email addresses, which is nice. Now that we have all that stuff done, we should be able to do our icebreaker. Um, so why don't I just start with some leads here? I'll just do some manual ones. Let's see. Let's do H. So, a couple things. I'm seeing some duplicates here. So, we got to pre-process our thing. Uh, actually, no, we don't. Sorry. instantly
• 122:00 - 122:30 will automatically do this for us. But now that I'm sorting these manually like this, I could tell there's a fair number of duplicates in here. The reason why might be because we have different emails. So, let me just double check this. No, no, we can um dduplicate this. So, columns to analyze. The only one that I really want is H email. Just remove all instances of duplicates under H.
• 122:30 - 123:00 So, looks like we had some duplicates. Might have just been because of how I processed that. Let me just double check. Same thing here. Okay, let's now replace this just with some false or sorry, real data here. Then we'll copy over the headline. Then we'll do the employment
• 123:00 - 123:30 history. Then we'll do the industry. Then we'll do the city. Then we'll also do the country. Okay. So basically I'm going to feed in this. And then I want some personalized snippet as a result of this. So I wanted to say something like hey the reason this is valuable is you can then make abbreviations as to the company. So instead of Maki agency we could just say Maki which makes it seem as if it's like custom written. We can also play around with like the capitalization and stuff. I'm not going to do that, but I'll say hey Anna. I'll add two new lines here so it jumps down.
• 123:30 - 124:00 And I'll say love what you're doing at Maki. Also doing some outsourcing offshoring right now. Wanted to run something by you. Cool. That looks pretty good to me. What are we getting from here? We're getting it uh perceivably blunt with the love what you're doing at Maki. We're also getting, you know, if somebody were to scrape this, they would say something. I love what you're doing at insert company name here, but it's just maki. It seems a little bit more personalized. And then these this is like an exact variable outsourcing
• 124:00 - 124:30 offshoring. So I don't know if I should really do this. So maybe I'll just say also doing some outsourcing right now. Wanted to run something by that looks pretty good to me. Okay. So we have one example right now. So what I'm going to do now, keeping in mind this is an exact duplicate of some data that's already in here. So, I'm just going to run this on three and then I'm going to see how good it is on three of my What is this? Is this real estate or what did I do? Websites or Just double check real estate. Okay, let's run three and let's see how this goes. All right, we just finished three
• 124:30 - 125:00 icebreaker generations. Notice Blue Edge in Boon Beach. Been around South Florida real estate, too. Wanted to run something bad. That seems pretty realistic. Uh, it's not the worst. Okay, I don't really like that one. Okay. All right. Well, I mean like for the most part this is good, but it's not sticking to our formula. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go down reduce the temperature drastically. Just have it try and stick to the exact formula that I am doing here. Okay. Use the the above format when constructing your ice
• 125:00 - 125:30 breakers. Let's run this again. Let's see if this is a little bit better. Location isn't super important. just want the okay this is perceivable like I'm not selling real estate but this is perceivably there's like a lot of heavy on the implication here I'm working in real estate around here right it's like well I'm not actually selling also a fan of finding the right fit okay well that kind of sucks if I got this I'd be like h I mean real estate's a grind yeah know I don't
• 125:30 - 126:00 like this going to have to give it a couple more examples unfortunate but it is what it is so I'm going to go over here uh Uh, let me just adjust the prompt a little bit. Maybe I'll just say make sure to use the above format. Let's tweak this one more time. Let's see if that is sufficient to get us a three out of three on the score. If so, I'll scale it up. Do 10, and then I'll check. Okay. Okay. No, no, no. One more thing.
• 126:00 - 126:30 If you see the ability to make an acronym, if you see an opportunity to shorten the company name, say instead of XYZ agency, do so wherever possible. Say things like love AMS instead of love AMS professional services. More examples.
• 126:30 - 127:00 Okay, that looks pretty good. And now let's just add one more example. So we're going to add two, right? One's going to be user with the example. The other one's going to be assistant. I'm going to map the user back up here. Assistant, I'm going to map over here. Going to copy the assistant prompt. And now I'm just going to add one more user
• 127:00 - 127:30 thing. Let's do this one here. This doesn't really give me too much information. So, let's maybe do this. Uh, let me just make sure the data is formatted right. Visionary agency leader. Oo, fancy. Wow. Okay. I found that stuff funny. That's all. Okay. Uh, information technology and services. Then we had the location. Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Cool. And we'll say, "Hey, Adam, the
• 127:30 - 128:00 human tech agency." So, I should go, "Hey, Adam, what you doing?" The human tech agency. The human tech. Let me just see if there's some No, this is Dubai, right? Let's take a peek at this. Oh, guys. Okay. Well, this guy's actually pretty
• 128:00 - 128:30 huge. I was uh kind of crapping all over it because visionary. Yeah. Wow. No, for sure. The human tech agency branding in particular is
• 128:30 - 129:00 Let's see. Just getting an agency off the ground. Wanted to run something by you. Cool. That's plausible. Now, let's give this a go on the top three hits. Okay, first result was much better. Hey, Aaron. Love Blue Edge. Also in real estate down here. I want to run something by you. That's super cool. We've now finished the other two. Don't like that it says elevation real estate. Also found of the San Fran
• 129:00 - 129:30 market. Wanted to run something by Yeah, that's not ideal, but it's honestly it's not the worst. So, what we're going to do is we're just going to force it to make acronyms or not acronyms, shorten the names a lot more. We'll say shorten the company name wherever possible. Say XYZ agency. XYZ
• 129:30 - 130:00 agency. Do the same with locations. San Fran instead of San Francisco, BC instead of British Columbia etc. Cool. All right. Now that I've done this, what we need is we need one more to update a row. And then what we're going to do is we're just going to go down this and then add icebreaker right over here. Okay. We're going to do this for real estate first. Then we'll do this for websites and then we'll do this for that other um yeah. So let me add the ID of this sheet right over here. Going to call
• 130:00 - 130:30 this real_ate. The row number I'm going to grab from this. Then the column range we're just going to go A to Z. Okay. What do we want to update? Column I. The only thing we want to update with column I is the result icebreaker. Okay, so now I have these three. I'm going to give it one more test to see if it updates the column correctly. Cool. Looks fantastic. Now that this is done, I'm just going to add one more step here, which is a filter. I'm going to filter to make sure that
• 130:30 - 131:00 the icebreaker column is empty. So, um, only return rows where the icebreaker does not exist. Then I'm now going to go I don't know how many we realistically want to do. Well, I guess we just do all of them, right? So, I'm just going to go back here and then yeah, we're just going to run it. Um, so we're just going to try and go through all the way from the top to bottom of this whole sheet, which is going to be about a thousand records, which should take us realistically like I don't know, a few minutes. Just returned. Now, we're pumping through one, two, three, might
• 131:00 - 131:30 take us a little bit longer than that actually. Thousand rows, maybe about 1 second per row. Might take us uh yeah, about like 15 minutes or so. So, while this is running, what I can actually do is I could just copy this and run this three times. So I could just do it all simultaneously. Now I'm doing this manually. You really you do not have to be doing this manually. You can absolutely just automate this by pulling some system that um just does it all kind of sheet by sheet. You know, iterate all the sheets and then run it one row at a time. But I'm just on something of a time crunch today. So
• 131:30 - 132:00 obviously I want to do this quickly. I'm just going to create three scenarios. One for each of these. One will be icebreaker videography. Another one will be website design or website agency. Then I'm just going to copy these three and I'm actually going to run them all. Now I can do this simply because I have a lot of token rate limit. I have a very high rate limit. Not a lot of other people can because their rate limits aren't as high as mine, but I can actually like feasibly run three of these. So one simultaneously with the other two. Then I can just go through all of them generating the ice breakers.
• 132:00 - 132:30 So let's just double check that that looks good. Then we'll just go over here, double check that that looks good. Cool. And then I'm just going to make sure that all of these columns are good. Icebreaker. Icebreaker. Icebreaker. Nice. We should now just be able to send it. So, I'm going to do one. I'll do another. I'll do another one. And let's see how we're doing. Yep, these are all now running simultaneously. So, I should be able to do all 3,000 if you think about it. Um, in about 15 minutes or so instead. All right, just grabbed a cup of coffee. I'm ready to go. While these
• 132:30 - 133:00 are generating the rest of the ice breakers, which by the way, we could see if we just go to any one of these sheets. You can see these are filling in as we go along. I'm doing the alphabetical order, which is why it's Dennis, Dennis, Derek, Tzita, so on and so forth. While all this stuff is happening, let's head over to Instantly and make these campaigns. I'm just going to call this one the title of this video. That looks good. Click continue. Now, we have the Instantly campaign up and running. Instantly is the service we're using to send the cold emails just to make sure everybody's on the same page. Very quick and easy to get up and running with this. If I just show you
• 133:00 - 133:30 guys the email accounts, you'll see that I purchased a bunch of pre-warmed email accounts using their pre-warmed inbox feature. The benefit to this is it just takes me zero time to get up and running. So instead of me having to spend two or three weeks warming up emails. I just clicked one button, spent a little bit of additional money, and then got myself these pre-warmed ones. They sell out of these pretty quick. So if you guys want them, definitely just head over here, select one of them, and then uh you know, buy both the domain and then also get the email addresses here. We're seeing a trend where female names perform better than male names,
• 133:30 - 134:00 which is why there's so many females like Britney, Kimberly, Allison, Caroline, Hazel, so on and so forth. So, if you see any of that and you're wondering, you know what the hell I want a guy name, then don't sweat it. The way that you work with these, it's a different name, right? It's Audrey, it's Britney, it's Brooke, it's Carly, it's Elizabeth. The reason why it's all these different names is because instantly had to purchase the email inboxes ahead of time and warm them all up for us, right? So, a big issue that a lot of beginners think is, well, like, dude, this isn't me. This is Britney. This says Carly. That's all right. You have total plausible deniability when you send out the outreach. The important thing is not necessarily what the first name and last
• 134:00 - 134:30 name on the email address is. The important thing is like in practice, you will send outreach, people will be interested in wanting to work with you and then you get them on a call and then you'll show up on the call and they'll just assume that it's either like a misspelling of your name or it's somebody else in the organization or whatever. So you guys don't actually have to worry about that if you end up doing the pre-warm mailbox route like I did. But you know, you also don't have to do the pre-warm mailbox route. You could do something else. Anyway, let's actually spin this up. So I'm going to go to sequences now. Sort of have like a four-step copyrightiting, you know, structure for this and I'll run you guys through it all line by line. But I also
• 134:30 - 135:00 want you guys to know that I'm going to pull some of the templates directly from Maker School and then I'm just going to make some slight edits to them because the way that I like to do things is I like to just operate off of templates wherever possible. Like I've already built the wheel a bunch of times. No need for me to rebuild the wheel. Just same thing with you. If templates exist that do 90% of what you want to do, just start with those templates and then you just 10x your leverage, right? You got to go from 90 to 100% as opposed to zero to 100. So, you know, now that we've set up our lead generation infrastructure, let's just do this and not knock over my cup of coffee. Time to create an irresistible offer using my copyrighting
• 135:00 - 135:30 formula. Hell to the yeah. Let us go to Maker School. I'm go down to my classroom and then I think the templates I'm looking for a month four. Yeah, here we go. There's a bunch of instantly templates. These are the exact templates that I've used on a number of campaigns. You'll see that my uh my rates weren't tremendous on these. Like, you know, this one at a 4.8% reply rate still made me tons of money. This one down here was a little bit better, 11.6, but this wasn't directly as monetary, so it made me about the same. This one maybe 6.1% reply rate. This one is um probably what
• 135:30 - 136:00 I'm going to use for a couple of these. But what I'm going to do to start is I'm just going to copy over one of these campaigns. And then I'm going to worry about, you know, touching it up and making it look really sexy after. Okay, this is going to be one. And actually, I should probably create one campaign for each, right? So, I need to rename the campaign. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to duplicate this one more time. This one will be real estate. Okay. This other one here, videography. Then this last one here is going to be website. Okay, now I have three
• 136:00 - 136:30 different campaigns. This is valuable because we're going to have three different audiences, right? And once I have that, now I can go through and actually I'll open up three tabs. One, two, three. Then I'm just going to copy this over. I'm going to go to sequences, paste, sequences, paste, sequences, paste. Cool. So now I have like a starter sequence. This is real estate. This one's videography. This one's website agency. So now I just need to, you know, change the language and whatnot. And I'm also just going to do a little bit of copyrightiting. So, when I designed this template, it was before ice breakers and personalization were a thing, which is why um we're seeing, you
• 136:30 - 137:00 know, I found you on LinkedIn. I thought I'd reach out. So, realistically, this section over here, this is going to be replaced with the icebreaker. Back in the day, you didn't actually have the ability to do this, right? Or if you did, it was like very minimal or not very good. So, you used to have to imply a bunch of things. Nowadays, you don't actually have to imply as much. You could um get away with like some sort of AI personalization to make it seem like you've done some research on them, which they like. Anyway, in terms of the four-step copyrightiting process, the the very first thing that I like to do is I like to answer the question, um, is this spam? So, the quickest and easiest
• 137:00 - 137:30 way to answer the question, is this spam? Is you just give them some personalization up front? That's what this first section is going to be. Okay. The second question is going to be like, okay, so who are you? If it's not spam, it's like, all right, we verified that. So, who the hell are you? And that's what this section over here answers. And this is just sort of putting yourself in the the mindset of the prospect, right? The third one is why does it matter to me? Okay, and why it matters is because well I'm not just some random guy. Okay, it matters because I made people a ton of money with this before. Then the fourth one is okay well then what
• 137:30 - 138:00 next? Right? Like now that we verified all this, what do we what do we do after this? Well, uh what we do after this is we have some sort of offer or call to action. Offer and call to action. Okay, simple four-step copyrighting formula. Don't feel like you have to copy my exact wording here or anything. As long as you just follow the structure, show them that it's not spam by personalizing it. Answer the who are you question and make it seem like it's you talking to them, not a faceless company talking to them. Justify why you're reaching out by basically saying, "Well, I made all this money for other people or I've added all
• 138:00 - 138:30 this value to other companies." Then finally, what next? Down at the bottom. As long as you do this, you have four steps, you're you're pretty good, I would say, in most cases. So now I'm just going to go through and I'm just going to make some adjustments to it. I'm going to throw in some of my own little spin and magic. And then after that, I'm going to split test this with another one of myh sequences. Okay. Okay. So my real estate system is some sort of B2C system. So I just need an offer for a B TOC system with some sort of deliverable. So what I'll probably say is let's just make sure the icebreaker is good. So something like this. Hey Dennis Lrada also work in real
• 138:30 - 139:00 estate in St. George. Wanted to run something by you. Okay. Implication is I'm working in real estate. So it could be that I'm selling to real estate agents. It could be that I am a real estate agent myself. Whatever I'm doing, I'm just getting the click and that's all that matters. Now that we've gotten the click, I need to identify myself. So if I had something like this, what would my copy be really? wanted to run something by you. I'm just getting up and running. Okay, I'm just going to play around with it and we'll figure something out. Okay, first campaign looks good. Hey, name love whatever. Also working in whatever and whatever. Wanted to run some bio. I'm new to the buy side. Put something interesting
• 139:00 - 139:30 together a few months ago that works well. To make a long story short, this outreach system that uses AI to generate buyer leads around 30 per month on average cost just a few cents to run. I ran it for similar position agent in SD. I'm leaving this um intentionally vague and we made 125K in a little over a week. This is real. I know this is completely out of left field, but I'm fairly confident we could do something similar. Just want to see if there's interest. You're one of the first agents I found looking into it. Would this be of value to it all? Wouldn't cost you anything. I'd pay for it all myself up front. If you're open, we could work out some sort of deal, but up to you. Let me know your thoughts when you have a sec. Thanks. Sending account name. So, yeah, a couple things. I mean, I don't know if
• 139:30 - 140:00 this is going to work. We're going to try to I think it'll work. I've ran some campaigns like this before and it's worked. But, uh, the key in my humble opinion is to just make it seem like you are writing directly to the other person. You're not like putting them in a sequence. You wanted to make it seem very informal and like plausibly deniable and hey, I was just looking into your stuff and I wanted to run something by you, see if there might be interest, right? That's basically the vibe. Obviously, it helps when you have some social proof. So, I have social proof. I've run a very similar sort of campaign once for buyer agent and SD. So, that's pretty cool. Made a ton of
• 140:00 - 140:30 money very very quickly for them, not for me. I way underpriced. But yeah, you know, if you don't have something like this, then obviously that's one of the reasons why at the beginning when I said pick a niche, you know, do you have niches that you guys have some sort of experience and some sort of accomplishment, some sort of unique advantage. So yeah, I'm just going to copy this over and I'm going to do a very similar campaign for the other two. One of the reasons why I always recommend picking three niches is because once you've done the work for one, you just multiply the effort for the other two. So let me do something similar now for videography for a product and then I'll finally do one for website agencies as well. Okay, similar vibes. I actually used to run a videography company in Vancouver, BC,
• 140:30 - 141:00 and I scaled it to about 10,000 bucks a month. Now, I didn't use this system to get all of that revenue. In fact, I I experimented with a similar system, but obviously it wasn't the same system. So, we're going heavy on the implication here. But, you know, again, we're using the plausible deniability. Hey, I put something interesting together a few months ago that works well. To make a long story short, it is blank, right? It's an outreach system uses and I find people hiring videographers agencies and then pitches them. Cost just a few cents to run. All of this is true. Obviously, when they work with me, it's not going to cost them a few cents cuz they're going to pay me for it. But the actual system costs a few cents. And then, you know, I'm kind of leveraging the listen,
• 141:00 - 141:30 I know this is totally wild, but right, which I find some self-deprecation is pretty valuable. You know, it just makes things seem realer when you can insert like a sliver of almost doubt, right? Kind of clean. So, that's the videography one. That one took me like, you know, 30 extra seconds to put together. This is going to be the website agency. So, this is going to be really similar system, I think. Man, I've done the exact same thing for all of these niches, haven't I? Good god, I've worked in a lot of niches. I used to run a website design agency. is like your classic digital marketing agency, but we did websites. So, I can I can get away with saying that, you know, I've
• 141:30 - 142:00 run similar systems for myself, too. That's pretty funny. You know, I got to be honest, after you've worked with one agency, you've worked with a lot of them. You've worked with a lot of them. Very similar. Okay. Anyway, so please bear with me, but I put something interesting a few months ago that works well. To make a long story short, it's an outreach system that uses AI to find people hiring website devs, then pitches them around 30, then pitches them
• 142:00 - 142:30 customized templates actually makes them the demo website run high converting. I ran something similar for myself back when I ran a site agency. This was in Vancouver, BC around 5 years ago and it got to the point where we're making well this is well over 10,000 bucks per month. No, this is completely out of left field but I'm fairly confident we could do something similar. Just wanted to see if
• 142:30 - 143:00 there's interest. You're one of the first people I found when looking into it. Would this be a value at all? Wouldn't cost anything blah blah blah blah. Cool. That's sweet. Awesome. So, that's some campaign variant number one. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to add an additional variant. Okay. And this additional variant is now going to pitch like a fundamentally different thing, fundamentally different offer. And I'm just going to run all these side by side. So, what am I going to do for this one? I think I'm going to use this one here, which is this longshot creative agency campaign. I really like this one. This one was really neat. And then I think for this one, I'm going to
• 143:00 - 143:30 weave in um my own social proof, my own like YouTube channel, cuz uh you know, it's obviously very big dick if you could say I have a YouTube channel which has several tens of thousands of subscribers. People really like that. Okay. Follow-up reactivation system. That looks pretty cool. This is going to be the real estate one. So, we'll have some personalization, which uh in this case is going to be an icebreaker. Let me just make sure that's right. Checking in on my system here. We've actually now finished and wrapped up all of them. I think this one is just hanging. That might be a bug, but that's good. Let's now put some stuff in there.
• 143:30 - 144:00 Okay. Personalization. It is a long shot, but I work specifically with real estate agencies. Basically, I make custom follow-up systems, AI follow-up systems that nurture old leads on both the buy side, sell side. I I run an Instagram channel that just hit 100,000. We're talking about stuff like this. I know this is a long shot, but I work specifically with real estate agencies. Basically, I make custom AF follow-up systems that nurture old leads on both the buy side, sell side. I run an IG channel that just hit
• 144:00 - 144:30 100K followers talking about stuff like this. There are a lot of agents picking this up right now. This will be my social proof right now and I've personally helped a few scale their monthly sales. Oh, I don't know any off the top of my head. It's going to be tough. I'm probably going to have to find that out later. Like go through maker school or make money with make and see what sort of numbers have helped people. But I imagine it's probably at least five figures. Anyway, am fully aware we haven't talked prior
• 144:30 - 145:00 to this. I think you'll probably think this is called outreach I looked into. I think I'll borrow a section from the previous one. Outreach I looked into. To be frank, you were one of the first agents I found when looking into it and into it, but I think you'd be a good fit. Also, in my experience, client reactivation is super easy to implement.
• 145:00 - 145:30 do this for you totally upfront at no cost. Does that make sense for you? If so, do you want me to just go ahead show you an example or would you rather chat first? Kind of awkward over the phone. We can chat if you're game get on a call. Okay, cool. All right, I think this is plausible. I don't think this is going to be as good as the initial one, but what are you going to do, right? Let's just use first name Q is my question. We'll call it there. I don't think I could use PS if you're not sure who I am or a skeptical. Okay. Anyway, okay. Let's
• 145:30 - 146:00 just make sure I remember to fix that up later. Videography. Uh oh, what the hell am I going to do for videographers again? Let me think. Uh clipping. Oh, right. Clipping. Clipping. Yeah. Yeah, that's good. Basically, Basically, I build systems that automatically build AI systems that automatic long- form videos like
• 146:00 - 146:30 interviews, etc. to short clips for social media. I did this in my own agency once in copy revenue to 9K a month at around 50 submergence. Oh, that's true actually. content like video interviews to short clips for social media costs sense to run that actually, you know, I could actually totally use my own case study here because I'm specifying long form content, right? Does cost sense to run and I did do a similar system in one
• 146:30 - 147:00 second copy. That's pretty neat. similar service business although obviously all about copyrightiting also is my own company so I had a lot of latitude but I want to see if I could build a similar thing for you is I think your vertical is one where you could easily do more than 2k if you had a good pipeline also in my experience this is a really easy win to offer clients clients takes no extra work and you can add few hundred bucks in
• 147:00 - 147:30 perceived value for free. Cool, cool, cool, cool. All right, we'll also go sending account name. Very sweet. And then over here, let me think. Um, this website agency stuff, content generation systems for websites. I really like that angle. I really, really do. How can I make this? I mean, like I know I'm meta stuff here. These are pretty long. I normally
• 147:30 - 148:00 don't make campaigns this long, but um at the beginning, I just like split testing a variety of approaches. So, some I like to be really long and intense. Other ones I like to be really short and punchy after I run the first last, you know, like where I actually run this on 100 emails a day probably or something like that per vertical. I tend to iterate pretty quickly after the first week and then I tend to just like test the next bout with like I'll literally grab an email, I'll cut it in half, and then I'll just make it super punchy and I'll see if that one works better or not. So, I think what a lot of people are thinking is like, man, this is super long. How the heck is this going to work? Well, my tip for you is
• 148:00 - 148:30 that once you understand the patterns, you can break the patterns a little bit, but you do have to understand what the patterns are. And that's sort of what I'm doing with the second pitch. Okay, so Q. And then this one here is going to be just like first name Q. Okay, so where the heck was I? Oh, and this is icebreaker, not personalization. I'm just forgetting all my variable names. Okay, so what do I do? I work specifically agencies. So wanted to run something by you. I know this a long shop, but I work specifically with website design agencies. Basically, I built a system
• 148:30 - 149:00 that lets you that upon creating a website for a client in whatever framework platform lets you generate around 100 blog posts for that client for free. I ran a similar system my own agency, Skilled Revenue 90K, though obviously all about copyrightiting also has my own company latitude, but I wanted to see if I could build out you since in my experience is a really easy win to offer clients. takes no extra working to add a few hundred bucks in perceived value for free. Like you're going to deliver a website anyway. Website anyway. How much
• 149:00 - 149:30 nicer would it look if it came preloaded with a bunch of blog posts? Anyway, um that looks pretty good to me. Cool. Just going to run it. And honestly, yeah, no idea how good these are. No clue. I'm just going to give it a go and we're going to see where we land. Let me just make sure that all these variables are right and then we can upload the leads to the campaign and start gunning it. Okay. Icebreaker. Icebreaker. And now this has to be icebreaker. Icebreaker. Cool. Okay. So,
• 149:30 - 150:00 now that I have all this, I think I'm going to have to change some of these variables. Actually, now what I have to do is I have to add follow-ups. That's annoying. Um, okay. Probably grab follow-ups from an old campaign that I've already written. Uh, let's see this one here. Okay. Let's do this. TLDDR. Know this is a long shot but agents agencies think I can add a fair amount of value. See previous email. This isn't ideal. Ideally you'd restate your whole pitch but um to be honest my back is
• 150:00 - 150:30 sort of hurting and I just want to get something up and running. So I'm probably just going to copy this. Use the previous subject and we'll just run one follow-up from now on. The value in a single follow-up is obviously you send more emails that way. There looks to be a new line here. So I'm going to add a new line here. Instead of re re agents, it's going to be videographers, editing agencies. We'll say website creative agencies. Okay. Then because we're using the previous step subject, it should come nested with the previous one up.
• 150:30 - 151:00 Then why don't we just do two days in between each. Okay. We'll do 1 2 3. Okay. And now we'll just go to my inboxes here. So I think I have 15 mailboxes. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15. Yeah, we do. So I'm going to do five each. 1 2 3 4 5 this one. Uh, well, what am I talking about? Actually, let's just run all of them. Doesn't really matter, right? Yeah, we're just going to do all of them. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8. Looks good. And then we'll do all of them here as well. All right. Now, let's see what these settings are going to be. Are we
• 151:00 - 151:30 going to do open tracking? Uh, no. I'm not going to. Delivery optimization. Yes, please. Send first emails text only. Yes, please. We always send the first emails text only. Daily limit. Uh, well, I have 15 mailboxes times about 30 a day is 450 daily limit. So, how many am I actually going to send per campaign? Let's divide that by three. We'll do 150. Send 150 here, 150 there, 150 there. Easy. Show advanced options. Show advanced options. So, advanced options. Let's see what do we got. CRM,
• 151:30 - 152:00 time gaps. Okay. Okay. Auto optimize. Yeah, we'll do reply rate. We'll do provider matching as well. So, provider matching and then reply rate. Then down here, I'll do the same thing. We'll do provider matching and then reply rate. And that looks pretty good to me. I think I'm just going to gun it. Yeah. So, now um we need leads, right? So, I don't actually have any leads in here. So, I'm just going to save all
• 152:00 - 152:30 these first. I'm going to go um upload all the leads. And then I'm just going to double check before I make everything live. And then, um yeah, we should be good to go. So, let me just verify that we have all the ice breakers. Yep, looks like we do on that page, real estate. Let's go down to video agencies now. Verify we have all the ice breakers here, too. No, not seeing any ones. Why not? So, do we get a bug or something? Okay. Well, how about the website? Oh, no. Oh, I ran them all. I just wasted
• 152:30 - 153:00 like 3,000 ops. That sucks. I updated the same sheet. All right. Well, we'll just run them all again. No big deal. No problem at all. Sometimes you make mistakes and when you do, they cost you $6. And I just made myself a $6 mistake. Video agency and then website agency. Rough stuff. But what are you going to do? Huh? Website agency. Don't do what I did. All right.
• 153:00 - 153:30 Okay. All right. Let's run this again. So, I'm gonna have to remove all of the old ice breakers because there's no Yeah, I think the reason we got that is because we didn't pass in a row number, right? There's no row number. Okay. So, let's run this again. Okay. Okay. Now, let's verify that looks good. It does. Sad. This one. How we looking? No, I don't seem to be filling that
• 153:30 - 154:00 in. Am I doubling up again? I'm probably doubling up again. We're pulling from video agency. We're dumping in video agency. We're doing the row number. We're getting the Icebreaker. Oh. Oh, sorry. That's two icebreaker. Yeah. Yep. We got a lot of mistakes over here. This is also two icebreaker. So, Oh, in fact, it's even more. We'll go icebreaker there.
• 154:00 - 154:30 And we just got to verify that this looks good. It does. Cool. All right. Now, let's make sure that everything's good. Website agency filling up. Yeah, website agency is filling up. How about this one? This one looks like it's filling up. Cool, cool, cool. And then how about this one? Yeah, looks good. All right, guys. So, do not waste 3,000 operations like me.
• 154:30 - 155:00 You do not want to be wasting the operations. I wonder how many we've wasted now. Yeah, you can see my daily ops usage before like 500. Now it's at like 7,000. So, how many more I got? Okay, I have enough. I can run it all. Rough. I should note that you could build systems that optimize the hell out of this. Right now, we're sending 80 Google Sheets calls. Then, we're also doing 80 OpenAI network requests. You could actually batch all this to one. And you can make this one, well, you shouldn't do one. You should do two or three. usually like one every batch request for 500 or so rows. But yeah, we
• 155:00 - 155:30 could realistically like do this whole thing in like 10 ops, but I decided that I would rather go speedy and still show you guys how to get up and running as quickly as possible rather than worry too much about making it super perfect and then spending a bunch of time on that really doesn't matter. You could spend money for time and that's exactly what we're doing here. All right, just reran the icebreaker generator and now we have everything all good to go for all three groups. I'm now going to just download this as a CSV. So, we're going to do just the real estate one first. And then I'm going to go to my real estate campaign, which would be this one here. And then just
• 155:30 - 156:00 going to upload the leads. So, head over to leads, add leads. Notice I'm doing this manually for now, but obviously we could automate the hell of it later. What we need to do now is we need to match the column. So, first name, last name, headline. Nope. Nope. Nope. We don't need any of this stuff. Nope. Not location. No, no, no. Email though, icebreaker. That's what we need. So, we'll go custom variable there. The rest of the stuff I don't really need either. Obviously, you can import as much of these as you want. I just didn't import many of them. That's a lot of fields, right? So, I do not do the verification. I am going to check for duplicates
• 156:00 - 156:30 across campaigns list and the rest of the workspace because I don't want to be sending people to different campaigns. Usually, we end up with like a few people dduped. So, that's that. Then I'll do the same thing for the second campaign which was my video agency. So, let me go download as a CSV. Going to add some leads. CSV. Just drag and drop this puppy. Same energy, right? So, what we are going to upload is the icebreaker. The rest of the stuff is a no. We have a lot of columns here. This should be good. We We've got the first name, I think, which is what matters. We
• 156:30 - 157:00 may have some crossover there. While that's uploading, I'll do the last one. So, website agency. I'm going to download this CSV. I'm going to go to leads and then add leads. CSV. Drag and drop. Same energy here. Just want to upgrade or import the icebreaker. Go all the way down to the bottom and then add all of these contacts. Okay. All right. So, now that we've done this, what we have to do is we have to double or triple check that the campaign is good to go basically. So, the way that I do it is with preview. So, just
• 157:00 - 157:30 making sure that all of the data here is filled in. There is no thank there's nothing under thanks. That's a problem. So, why is there nothing under thanks? Sometimes there is no sending account name variable. So, I go to variables here. I'm not seeing anything. Instantly sending account name. Let me just see if we could add some variables here. I always change the name a bit. Okay, here we go. Sending account first name. This should
• 157:30 - 158:00 be good. I'm going to go back here. Go sending account first name. Oh, we have one extra variable over here. One sec. Okay, that looks good. That looks good. Awesome. So, I'm going to just copy this over because I would have screwed up otherwise. I'm going to save and then delete any additional ones I have. I got to do it all over, unfortunately. kind of sucks, but it is what it is. Let's just make sure that everything's good. Okay. And then I'll do the same thing here. Also do the same thing down here. That and then I should Oh, uh, do I do
• 158:00 - 158:30 that? Oh, actually, you know what? Looks like I already had it on the the follow-up. Okay. So, what am I going to do now? I'm literally going to preview this for all of them. That looks good. I'm now going to go here. Preview. That looks good. I'm going to go over here. Preview. That looks good. Going to go back here. Preview. Uh, thanks again. I don't know why we didn't get the sending account first name. Okay. Yeah, that looks good. Save this. Preview. Cool. Looks good. This one here is preview. Cool. That looks good. Let's now go over here. Preview. This is very
• 158:30 - 159:00 important. Got a preview. For whatever reason, we didn't have the sending account first name. So, I'm going to save then preview. Okay, we got it. Going to preview this. Okay, we got it. This actually, I didn't really fully preview this. Let me not cheat. Okay, cool. All right. Now that we verified literally everything here, we can actually get up and running with this campaign. After this, I'm going to take a little break. Usually, it takes a day or so to start receiving replies. Also worth noting that it's technically uh Easter right now, so I'm probably not going to get a lot of people responding to this in the near term. Oh, sorry. There's one more thing I have to verify first. Schedule. So, I always like doing
• 159:00 - 159:30 Monday to Saturday. I like doing 7:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. ET. So, what I'm going to do here is go 7 6. Okay. I'm going to do Monday, Friday all the way to Saturday. Then I'll go 7 7 and then I'm just going to copy this and then paste it in two tabs. Okay. So, now I have everything here. 7 to six should be good. I've double and quadruple and six tupal checked. Now I'm going to resume this campaign. I'm going to go back here. Now I have three campaigns that are up and running. Okay. So I'm going
• 159:30 - 160:00 to go sign off for the day and then I'll check back in a couple and we'll see how the responses to this email campaign have gone. This is exactly what I would do. Starting a whole sequence from scratch. So we see here we've now checked that last create an irresistible offer. So we just have two things remaining. Okay. So, I woke up at the crack of dawn this morning cuz I was very excited to see all of these email replies roll in. Uh, I got a couple of notifications over the course of the night. I decided I wasn't going to respond to anything just cuz I wanted to be able to review them all with you. But, yeah, great news. In the last, I think 13 or 14 hours, we received a
• 160:00 - 160:30 total of 11 replies. Seven of them were positive. So, this is one here. And you see, even the maybe not the most positive of replies are still okay, right? So, Elizabeth, thank you for reaching out. I will pass, but appreciate you reaching out. Thank you. This fell says, "Natalie, thanks for reaching out. We currently subscribe to a platform that does what you're describing. It's called Y Lopo. I wish you all the best in this venture. Thanks. This person says, "No, thank you. I don't buy leads of any kind, and if I did, I wouldn't go after buyers." What's interesting is immediately after that, we just had a swarm of yeses. So, right after that, hey Samantha, thanks
• 160:30 - 161:00 for reaching out. I'm open to work on something if you could provide us leads for sure. Yes, I'd be interested. Let's meet. Let me know what time works for you. So, this person actually explicitly is like, "Hey, let's get going. Let's actually sit down. Let's actually jump on a call." Obviously, something in my pitch, which in this case looks like it was the videographer pitch, uh was very um compelling to them. This person says, "Let's talk more." We also now have their phone number. We have all of their personal information. We give them a ring immediately if we wanted to. Um this person says, "Yes, I'd be interested. Send me more info." We're going to get a lot of like, "Send me more info uh replies to this sort of campaign just because the way that I put it together, right? I said, "Would this
• 161:00 - 161:30 be a value of you? You know, let me know your thoughts and then I could put it in front of you." There's more of like a value campaign. And when you have a value campaign, we're a bit lighter on like the let's book a sales call immediately. Obviously, we are asking, but not everybody will take us up on it. We got an I'm not interested from this person. We got a please send more details from this person. We got a thanks for reaching out. I'd love to test things out. I'm looking to expand my acquisition channels to the company as well. Mostly for your info. I'd like to get a bit more background on the process you have. So, I know we could work something out. Let me know if you can send a quick loom, but that's too much. Would love to just get a bit more
• 161:30 - 162:00 info. This person here says, "Uh, hey, Elizabeth or Nick." So, I think the reason for that is because I said that I scaled one second copy. Yes. Saw the redirect to Nick Thrive's personal brand. Is this a project under his umbrella? I'd love to see what it can do. Can you send me over a preview or a sample? I'm not going to say this is the best campaign ever. If we look at the stats, okay, we could already pull some numbers from it. The website agency campaign responded. We got five replies from it and every single one of those replies were positive. Okay. The videography campaign we got two replies from so far and 66% of the replies so
• 162:00 - 162:30 far are positive. But we can already start making some determinations about like um where we go next and it's really only been a day which is pretty crazy. The real estate campaign has had three replies. Okay, so fewer replies than the website campaign by far and then we've had zero opportunities. So, we haven't really sent enough emails to be able to fully say whether or not this approach is going to work right now. But, I've run enough of these to know that when there's a a divide that's this big between a successful campaign, which basically has a 2% positive reply rate over here, then a campaign that has a 0% positive reply rate over here with, you
• 162:30 - 163:00 know, 510 emails sent collectively across the two of them. You know, I have a feeling this real estate campaign probably just ain't it, dog. So, you know, a couple of minor optimizations we could do already if we wanted to significantly increase the number of positive replies we get. Like keep in mind that I I sent all this stuff on Easter Monday, right? So not most people aren't working on Easter Monday. I imagine the results would probably would have been a little bit better if I'd sent them during a weekday or work day or something. But a couple things that we could have done to make this even better. Uh a couple things we can do. If we cut this off, okay, then in an equivalent time period, so in I don't
• 163:00 - 163:30 know 13 hours or however long it's been since I started this, then we would be able to take those 255 and we'd be able to disperse them across these two. So we would have been able to get another 125 here, another 125 here. And given the reply rates, we probably would have received another three positive replies here, maybe like another one or two positive replies here. So mathematically, like we could already be in the neighborhood of generating 10 positive replies a day. As you see, a couple of those are legitimately like, "Hey, let's get on the phone right now. Hey, let's meet." If you can get them on a call, realistic rate is something like 60 to 75% positive reply to a call,
• 163:30 - 164:00 assuming that you have a pitch like mine. If you have a much more direct pitch, um, if you're like, "Let's talk. Let me put something in front of you. I'm going to charge you money for this. Here's my crazy superdetailed offer." and you just give them all the information up front. Obviously, you'll have a higher conversion rate on the back end to a meeting, but you'll have a lower kind of positive reply rate initially. So, we kind of play with those numbers. You know, there are a lot of other things that we could do. You know, if I go back to this Unibox here, we can blend together the booking a meeting side of things with just direct calls. This is something I'm seeing a lot of people do. So, you know how um one of these people back here had their phone numbers, right? And their phone
• 164:00 - 164:30 number was like fully listed out. We actually have a lot of their phone numbers as well. Yeah, this person here just listed out their whole phone number. Um oops. I don't actually want to open FaceTime. No, thank you. That'd be fun. Hey, what's going on, man? Yeah, just recording a video right now for several tens of thousands of people. How you doing? Uh, that might actually be pretty enjoyable that I'm thinking about. But, uh, this person just has their phone number, right? So, what you can do is instead of just cold calling a massive audience of people right off the top, like a lot of people think that they have to do. And I understand why you want to cold call. Cold calling's it's it's fun. It's nerve-wracking. It's
• 164:30 - 165:00 enjoyable. It's like an adventure, right? But ultimately, in 2025, it's not very effective. Okay? So, instead of just cold calling totally cold audiences, what you could do is you could run a pre-qualify campaign like this, blast it out to, you know, as many people as humanly possible, get a 2% positive reply rate, send 10,000 emails, get 200 people saying, "Yeah, you know, I might I might actually want to do this." Then just call all of them. You know, the next time that you run a call campaign, every single one of those people will be warm and you'll be able to say, you'll not have to say, "Hey, you know, I've never talked to you before." It's like, "Hey, how's it going? You know, we just chatted over
• 165:00 - 165:30 email. You just got back to me a few moments ago about um you know, wanted to put a demo together. Just wanted to touch base. I think you guys are really cool." and yeah, I just want to put myself out there. Like you can actually do those sorts of campaigns and you can do them really well. You know, when you've done enough lead genen, then you start to see patterns with this stuff. And a big pattern in cold calling just for the people that are watching this video for your benefit is just most of the time when you call somebody, you're like instantly disqualified unless you have some previous connection. Quick and easy way to cut through all that noise. Some other things that I'd experiment with moving forward on these campaigns, uh, if I go back to this website one here, I would now experiment with
• 165:30 - 166:00 cutting the campaign length pretty dramatically. So you could do this in the same campaign or you could do this by duplicating the campaign and then like comparing the stats one for one. Personally I just like doing all the stuff in the same campaign cuz with the analytics tab what we can do is we could actually see specifically which thing most people responded to. And it looks like so far basically everybody's responded to variant A. They haven't responded to variant B. So here you could actually just like add 10 different steps. Although keep in mind it'll split the volume across all of them. You could add 10 different steps and then you could see you know which which step is the best. And maybe one of them is just like a quarter of the length. Maybe one of them is just like a
• 166:00 - 166:30 quick little message. And maybe you could experiment with things like asset based outreach as well, which is a very big uh trend right now that usually generates you significantly higher positive reply rates with the drawback being, you know, you have to like generate an asset. So you can send fewer emails a day usually because you have less data by which you could generate an asset. Then it usually also costs you like a scent or something per lead that you send out because you have to, you know, run the token cost to generate the PDF that's customized or something like that, right? So yeah, a lot of stuff that you could do here. Hopefully you guys are seeing where I'm coming from in terms of next steps. responding to these
• 166:30 - 167:00 particular leads. What I would recommend everybody here do is when they get to this point with their own email campaigns or whatever sort of outreach, have some templates that do 8020. So have some templates that like get you 80% of the way there that answer basic responses like for instance, let's see this one here, okay, where the person says, "Let's talk more." Have a template that says, you know, "Hey, name thanks so much for getting back to me. Really enjoyed reading through whatever website they have or digital property they have." And sure, like, let's get something on the books right now. Do you have a calendar that you could send
• 167:00 - 167:30 over? Would you like me to do it? If not, I have three times available, XYZ. Just send me over the closest one and I can give you a ring directly at this number or we could set up like a Google Meet. The point I'm making is try and minimize the amount of back and forth. If you want to make a campaign like this work really, really well. What you do is you actually just like add the times directly in the outgoing email and you say like, "Hey, I can meet 7:00 a.m. on whatever date, 9:00 a.m. on whatever date, or 11:00 a.m. on whatever date." And then usually, you know, you'll get a lower positive reply rate, but you're going to have people give you the exact times that they want you to call them, and then you can actually just like do it without any back and forth. Um, but
• 167:30 - 168:00 yeah, so what I would do is I'd make these templates, right? Once you have a couple of templates set up, so I don't know, like a positive reply template, maybe you have a template that's uh like, you know, please send me over more info. You have a template that explains something really briefly, hook up the Unibox to your phone. Instantly has like a Unibox mobile app and so you can actually see the responses come in live during the day. do whatever you need to do on your phone to prioritize those notifications and then have the template set up so that the second that an email comes in, you have like an internal rule. If it's between 7 a.m. to like 9:00 p.m. or something, your internal
• 168:00 - 168:30 rule is I will respond to this email within 5 minutes. If you guys get leads like this, you need to treat them like gold. Okay? So, don't do what I did and wait, you know, so you could batch them all and have something nice and impressive to show on a YouTube video. The second you get a lead, that's when you you sit down and you message them back cuz leads are basically the closest thing you have to actual money at this point. And so you need to treat them with a respect and reverence they deserve. Also keeping in mind that it's cold outreach. You never really contacted a person. If you're not constantly on top of them, there's no reason for them really to get back to you. They have a bunch of other people in their email inbox trying to do the
• 168:30 - 169:00 same thing. I'll be hopefully much worse than you are. Okay, great. Hopefully I've shown you guys how you could whip up an AI service completely from scratch and get it to the selling stage. We're now at the point where we're validating the idea. We already have people that are interested in the loose thoughts that I put in front of them. What I'm going to do in subsequent videos is I'm actually going to work through building these services. So, building services for the campaigns that people respond positively to and showing you guys how to put together a specific templated or productized automation that you could then sell to audiences like this. This is the way you do business today. You
• 169:00 - 169:30 don't build and then hope that people will come. What you do is you have some minimum viable product idea. Okay? You don't even have to put the product together. What you do is you start selling all the possible products you could put together. people respond positively to a few of them and then once you validated them then you actually built the thing. Awesome. You guys have just watched me build an entire AI service from scratch. Hopefully you guys could see how to generate interested prospects in real time. You've also seen the lead generation steps in action. But now comes the crucial step, right? Which is where you convert these interested prospects into paying clients. So how the hell do you do that? Because you can generate all the leads in the world, but
• 169:30 - 170:00 if you guys can't effectively sell to those leads, you guys can't actually turn them from people that are interested into people that have actually transformed into clients, you'll never make consistent money. I find most technical people hate this part, but if you master your sales process, that's what transforms AI from a hobby into a profitable company. So, that's what this next section is going to do. We're going to break down the complete sales systems from lead to signed contract. I'm going to cover the exact process that I use to consistently close high value automation deals, including how to structure your sales call, handle objections, and then I'll ultimately get clients excited to work with you. Okay, so what I got here is a
• 170:00 - 170:30 quick little whimsical board. It's just a graphic workflow design tool. And what I've done is I've mapped out the simplest most standard flow that you can use for any agency essentially, but that's particularly helpful or useful when you're selling automation services or automation projects. This is not a new business model. If you're thinking about, you know, like the agency, the agency is a very standard old business idea. I mean, this sort of service model has been around for well over 70 years.
• 170:30 - 171:00 And essentially for the last 70 years, people have slowly evolved it and figured out like the best most standardized way to proceed forward with closing deals of more or less any size. And this is it. You're looking at it right now. I didn't come up with this. I didn't really have to think super hard about this. This is more or less just what every agency does. So if you don't have a sales process, don't rebuild the wheel and try and come up with something new, something from scratch, something completely different that's going to be amazing and better than what we have. Because your job, if you're starting an
• 171:00 - 171:30 agency, let's be real, it's not to change the world. Your job is to build a machine that's efficient and capable at producing revenue and in particular converting that revenue into a relatively high profit margin consistently. You're not going to be, you know, launching a rocket to Mars or the moon anytime soon, right? There are different business models for that sort of thing that require a lot more R&D. So, what I'm going to do over the course of the next few minutes is just run you through this and then I'm going to duplicate this model and then I'm going to show you another variant that you could use specifically for automation agencies that I think is probably a little bit higher yield than most people. But feel free to use whatever
• 171:30 - 172:00 model that you want as long as you have a model and understand the basics that I'm going to be explaining. So, first things first, I don't like over complicating things. There are dozens of these sorts of system graphs with a million different boxes and there's way more complexity there and the errors feed in, you know, 50 million times, cycles, loops, all that I think that that's sort of silly. I think that at the core, the reason why people are successful in business is usually their ability to strip away the complexity. So, I'm going really simple here. I know that a lot of people are probably going to be like, you're missing all this stuff, but it's fine. We're just
• 172:00 - 172:30 focusing on the fundamentals. First and foremost, sales is very different from marketing. And so, you see there's some boxes around sales, and then there's another box around the section called marketing. and I've used different colors to disambiguate them. Marketing is everything that leads up to at least in an agency model, you having a conversation with the prospect. Literally everything until you physically either get on a call with them or if you're doing some other type of business model, you're sending them voice DMs or whatever, then that in our case, I'm going to standardize it and say meeting booked. Everything before meeting booked is marketing. Everything after meeting booked is sales. So, just
• 172:30 - 173:00 to be complete in marketing, if you're running an agency, especially a digital one, there are a variety of ways that you can obviously get people onto a meeting. You can go through cold email, which is something that I talk about a lot that has recently been gaining a ton of popularity because of a personalization or whatnot. This involves you finding lists of people that might be interested in your service, doing research on them or maybe getting ahead to do it, and then reaching out and presumably having some type of email conversation where you will funnel them into a meeting book. You're doing PPC ads. You might be creating some type of campaign. Maybe you're selling a lead magnet. Maybe
• 173:00 - 173:30 you're just talking about, you know, hey, do you need marketing services for your thing? Click this button. But the purpose of that whole exercise is to get them to click the button and then scroll down the page and then book a meeting with you, right? So then voila, you now have a meeting booked. If you're doing SEO, same sort of deal as PPC ads is just organic. Social media, you know, you're branding yourself, you're building your reputation, similar to what I'm doing now. A lot of people want to talk to you, obviously. So what's the way that you funnel that into some type of next step or next outcome? You book a meeting with them. Referrals, what do you naturally do when somebody's like, "Hey man, I really liked working with you. I got a guy who's fantastic and he
• 173:30 - 174:00 wants the system." You say, "Awesome." you know, what's your calendar link? Let's get on a call. And the communities, obviously, in order to take that to the next step, when you're having a conversation with somebody, they might be interested in what you have to say, sort of like organic networking style, you need to book a meeting. So, it doesn't matter what method you have here. The methods themselves are just black boxes. The only thing that matters is that this helps you generate a meeting. And the second that you transition from the marketing step over here to a meeting booked, this is when the actual sales process begins. And this is when you know you start essentially the decisions
• 174:00 - 174:30 that you make here start having a disproportionate impact on your ability to close. So you need a sales system first and foremost. This sales system has what seven different little modules. Your sales system might have 500. I've seen sales systems that work extremely well with two. The most important thing isn't so far that you have like the best sales system in the world. It's that you just have a sales system. I used to sell door to door. I sold door to door for a year and a half. So this is B2B door to door. I'd walk into businesses and then I'd try and pitch them on local marketing services. I got thrown out more times than you could count. But the main reason why I was unable to grow my
• 174:30 - 175:00 business more than about $100 to $150,000 in the calendar year that I was working at the time was because I didn't have a standardized sales process. Every single time I'd walk into the door, I didn't really like scripts. So every single time I walked in the door, I would say something different. Naturally, the prospect would respond differently. Naturally, if the prospect responded differently, then I would say something different. Every single interaction was inconsistent and non-standardized. And it meant that as a result, the client always had just a different experience with me. If they always have different and inconsistent
• 175:00 - 175:30 experiences, then you're unable to optimize every individual part of the experience. You're unable to systematize and make it better. So, the most important thing isn't that you have the best system in the world. It's just that you have a system that you can start with, start using consistently, and then start thinking, hm, where are people dropping off in my system? Are they dropping off at the beginning with the first sales call? Are they dropping off with my email follow-ups? Are they dropping off here? Are they dropping off there? And then at least you have a point where you can start to make it better. So, this is one sales system, not all of them, but it's the one that I would probably recommend most people start with. First things first is you have a lead and the meeting is now
• 175:30 - 176:00 booked. Well, the meeting is booked, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're going to show up to the meeting, right? If somebody books a meeting with you, there's probably maybe like a 60% chance that they'll show, but on average, you know, 40% of the time they'll flake. So, we need to make allowances for that. Let's say you book a meeting for next Friday and then next Friday shows up. You're sitting on the call, nobody's there except for you. We consider that a no-show. Obviously, in meeting parlance, and so we need to do something with that no-show. What we do is we have some type of follow-up cycle. This is a very simple and straightforward part of any system that converts and makes a lot of
• 176:00 - 176:30 money. You need to be following up with the people that have fallen out of your funnel, so to say, or leaked through the holes in it. And with a follow-up cycle, that might take the place of like phone calls in your CRM. You might like schedule three or four calls to follow up and make sure the person gets rebooked. You might do some type of follow-up email sequence. You might just ping them once, get their SMS, something like that. Whatever the form of that is, you just need to make sure you have some type of follow-up system in place or follow-up cycle in place that ensures that the people that don't make it to the meetings are at least still being nurtured in some way. What happens when
• 176:30 - 177:00 they get nurtured and they want to rebook? You know, they're like, "I'm so sorry, my cat died and I had to, you know, flake on our our scheduled meeting." Uh, well, then they rebook and then we go right back to square one where the meeting is booked. This process here can occur five, six, maybe even seven times. I think I've had one extremely annoying prospect that flaked on me over a dozen times. We ended up actually getting together and the call ended up not being a fit, which is a huge pain in my ass. But the great news is we at least we got on the call. At least I figured that out. So yeah, it's sort of the sequence between meeting booked and follow-up cycle. Right now,
• 177:00 - 177:30 the more likely thing and probably the thing that we care most about is if they show. So what happens if they show? Well, if they show, then you have a sales meeting. And this is beyond the scope of this particular video, but I'm going to record more videos in the future about my specific sales process, how to optimize your like actual sales meeting. Um, just like I'm building out a system here for the actual flow of a lead. You can build out a system for the actual progression of every call. You could have step one, I say that, step two, I say that, step three, I say that. And then again, you can use that as a starting ground to leap off of and then optimize and iterate from there. But anyh who, the sales meeting is going to
• 177:30 - 178:00 occur. If you think about it logically, there are a few outcomes that happen when a sales meeting is concluded. At the end of the call, the client might like what you have to say and then they want to move forward. They might hate what you have to say and never want to talk to you again. Or they might think that this is something that I may potentially do in the future, but I'm not really interested right now. So, we're going to go through all three of these together. The first thing is this is not a fit right now. And if this is not a fit right now, then think about it logically. They're saying it's not a fit right now. So, it may be a fit in the
• 178:00 - 178:30 future. And if this occurs, then what do we do? Well, in this specific sales process's case, we're waiting 30 days. And then we are pushing them back into a follow-up cycle to rebook. And so now instead of the loop being from meeting book to follow-up cycle like this, now the loop is this. And sometimes clients or prospects will run through this three or four times before you sell. But by having a system like this, it ensures that at least you're capturing the people that otherwise would have just dripped through and leaked. Right? So that's number one. This maybe happens 20% of the time in my experience. The other outcome is that it's not a fit
• 178:30 - 179:00 ever. So it's not just not a fit right now. It's like, hey, no, we're not we're not a good uh mix. You know, the services that you want are not the services I could provide. I really don't like who you are as a person. I think that you'd be a nightmare to work with. You're incapable of paying whatever price I might be pitching you, yada yada. The point that I'm making is that person is never going to be a fit. And what do you do in that case? You opt out. They are good to leave your sales system. You never need to talk to them again. Amazing. The third outcome is that the sales meeting occurs and there's some type of positive outcome. So, they say, you know, man, this this sounds really great. I really love your
• 179:00 - 179:30 agency. I love everything that it stands for. I'd love to work with you guys. This is a very positive outlook. Maybe they ask what's next. Maybe you explain to them what's next and I'll show you what's next in a sec. But essentially, this is outcome number three and it's the best one is the one that we're shooting for where they want to move forward. So in this way, by having multiple outcomes essentially to represent all of the various things that could happen, we're capturing the vast majority of these leads regardless of where they're falling through the cycle and then we're pushing them back through our standardized funnel. Um, you know, the standardized funnel is just everything in blue here that goes
• 179:30 - 180:00 straight from from top to bottom. Everything in green is sort of like the recovery. Um, anyway, so yeah, they want to move forward. So, what do we do when they want to move forward? Well, usually in the agency space, you don't need this. And I actually don't really like sending out super complicated agreements or proposals or anything like that. I like keeping it very straight, very simple, and very to the point. And a lot of the time, I don't even like write a contract with somebody that I like and respect. The like and respect stands in for the legal ease. Some people may disagree with me and say that that's going to burn me. Hasn't burned me yet. I've made a fair amount of money. So, you know, take that with a grain of
• 180:00 - 180:30 salt. Do your own due diligence, but that's my recommendation. Anywh who, uh, most agencies in order to formalize the interest of the client, they need to send some type of detailed proposal or some type of scope of work. So, the scope of work might be a list of deliverables that the client is going to get for whatever you are offering. It might be a list of monthly obligations for a retainer. It might be, you know, some type of like annual obligation to deliver X, Y, and Z or they get their money back with some refund guarantee. As long as it's just an itemized breakdown of what it is that you are
• 180:30 - 181:00 providing, that's usually good enough. You can bundle in a contract with us. You can bundle in, you know, a big showy proposal or whatnot, that's totally fine if you want to do that. But as long as you just have some type of like itemized breakdown, you're basically good to go. Now, if you think about it, this send detail proposal scope of work also has a few different steps that people could take at this point. they could not sign it. Maybe, I don't know, you have some process in your system and instead of not signed, we say not signed after 7 days. So, they haven't signed it after 7 days. We need to do something, right? What we do then is we add them to the follow-up cycle. We have another
• 181:00 - 181:30 follow-up cycle specifically for the contracts as opposed to just the meetings booked. And now, this follow-up cycle is basically like, "Hey, how's everything going with the contract?" Or, "How's everything going with the proposal? Let me know if I can help. I'd love to check in. You know, you discussed X, Y, and Z. I think we might be the right fit for this. What's going on?" You might, you know, have a system in your CRM that schedules a bunch of calls for you to book, right? So now you're you're jumping on a call with them instead of just sending them an email. This might be a fully automated system, right? There's just so many options here. But the point is you just need to be following up with them again if they drop off at the proposal part. Another interesting tidbit is if you consider the value of a lead at every
• 181:30 - 182:00 individual step, the value of a lead here before they've really become a lead of yours, like before they they've gone through your funnel is pretty low, right? And so if you think about like your ad revenues that you spend um buying media or like the money that you're spending on SEO and if you divide that by all the people that are seeing it, like the cost that you're spending per lead, super low, not really that big of a deal. But the second that they go into meeting booked, there's now like a a value that's quite high that's assigned to every lead. Like let's say you charge $10,000 on average and then
• 182:00 - 182:30 on average it takes you 10 leads to turn into one client. That means that the value of every lead as they get a meeting booked is $1,000. So, you actually should be willing to invest in infrastructure, systems, and people to try and squeeze as much value out of those $1,000 leads as possible. You know, if this meeting booked is $1,000, then if the sales meeting occurs, the value of that lead might now be $3,000 on average. If the detailed proposal scope of work step happens, well, now the value of that lead might be $5,000, right? Like at every point through the process, the value of the lead is higher. And so, you can actually spend more time, energy, infrastructure, resources, and people to try and, you
• 182:30 - 183:00 know, squeeze the value out of them as much as you can. So, you know, as you proceed, maybe this follow-ups are more aggressive in nature. Maybe they're in your city. And so, I've seen um direct mail campaigns where you will send like a funny picture or something like that with some type of gift card inside and then, you know, you'll mail it to their address if they haven't signed the proposal within like a week or two. It's just something essentially to illustrate the value that lead to at that particular point in time. And you should be willing to invest resources at every step because of how much more disproportionately valuable somebody is
• 183:00 - 183:30 at the end than at the beginning. Anywh who, if you think about it, they cannot sign and if they don't sign, then they're part of the follow-up cycle and then we resend, not sign, resend. We can do this all day. But obviously, the more important and the outcome that we want is for them to sign and for them to ultimately pay. And what I see so many people making a mistake at here is notice how it says signed plus paid. If somebody hasn't signed and paid or I don't know, at least paid you, right? Like as I mentioned, I don't really like proposals or contracts or whatnot, so the signatures aren't as important to me. But if somebody hasn't at least paid you for the services that you are telling them that you are going to
• 183:30 - 184:00 provide them, then you can't start the project, right? And if you think about this like super old school agency model that's been around for 70 years, they understood this a long time ago. If you have a system, it's better than having no system and then starting to work for people before money has changed hands or starting to do something before you've actually locked down that you have enough capital expense to make it through this project. So, you know, just never start the project until you actually have some type of payment coming through. And you know, if you're sending a detailed proposal, maybe that includes a signature line or something. This right here is the standardized
• 184:00 - 184:30 agency template that I guarantee you like probably more than 50% of all digital agencies are using. It may vary in small places. Like instead of sending the detailed proposal or scope of work in a separate step, they actually just show them in the sales step and then by doing so, they get like a yes or no close decision right there on the call. That can make things pretty quick, but obviously that's at odds with like the comfort of the client. And if it's like a bigger institutional sort of enterprise business, then a lot of the time that takes multiple steps. So this is the base template as I mentioned
• 184:30 - 185:00 earlier. Why don't we now duplicate this and then show you like a couple of different ones that we can build. And I'm just going to delete this other marketing funnel that I had here cuz it's ugly and I hate it. Okay, so I'm going to do one on the left and then I'm also going to do one on the right. Okay, and then I realized I didn't copy the section as well. We're going to call this our base sales system. Maybe we'll call this our standardized sales system. And
• 185:00 - 185:30 then over here on the left, I'm going to show you a one call close system. Over on the right, I'm going to show you a two call close system. And then maybe standardize isn't the right word. Maybe we'll just say like traditional agency sales system. And I think a lot of people take traditional to mean bad. It's not bad. Traditional is totally fine. I used this when I started my operations business. It served me quite well. All right. So, in the one call close system, you know how earlier I mentioned that some people like to eliminate the detailed proposal or scope work. They just stick it in the sales
• 185:30 - 186:00 meeting. That's essentially how this works. You know, I mentioned earlier that like the real key in running a successful agency is your ability to simplify, not necessarily make things more complex. And so, if you think about it, like this sales system has 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 boxes. We can eliminate a couple of these boxes right now by turning this from its sales meeting and then send the detailed proposal to just bundling it all together. So, how would you do that? Well, I'm just going to make this a little taller. Essentially, what we do is, and this is frustrating, but we can't get those perfectly straight lines, so I guess we will we will not,
• 186:00 - 186:30 is instead of having two different steps here, think about it on the sales call, you actually have a ton of leverage because you're there with the prospecting person. And so instead of sending a proposal afterwards, which you know a lot of people do, especially people that are new to sales because they don't really like jumping on the call and then selling the person hard or that sort of dumb, you can also just sell the person right there. They say, you know, this sounds really interesting and you're like, okay, great. Well, we'll have the agreement right here. I'd love it if we could take a look at it together. Or, all right, awesome. Well, I have some resources here. I'd love it if we could take a look at it together
• 186:30 - 187:00 and then wrap up payments. If you think about it, we've now taken a step that was previously eight boxes and we've turned it into just six. So we've eliminated two and this is substantially simpler and substantially less complex. What this means in practice is that you know usually the sales relationships are a little bit different because you know the client has been hard sold as opposed to you know having the time and energy to make that decision presumably for themselves. Obviously there are tons of different sales tweaks and quirks that you could use to still build a fair amount of comfort on the call, not have them hate you and and that sort of thing. But just keep in mind that if you do a system like this, uh you'll usually
• 187:00 - 187:30 see higher refund rates, you'll usually see higher dissatisfaction rates, but you know, you will you will usually close more and you'll usually make a fair bit more money, which is quite nice. The other benefit to this is it reduces the spending of resources on items that are not directly associated with closing the deal. Like by eliminating those follow-up steps that we had previously and then the proposal step in a separate module, uh we're just bundling everything into the sales call. And so you can usually like structure your sales teams really really easily. Usually just have like a closer and that
• 187:30 - 188:00 closer is very talented and you pay them a commission on the deal with maybe some like reasonably high flat base. I don't know. A lot of closers these days are just commission only cuz they're that confident in their ability to close. But you know makes staffing really easy. You don't really need to build any sales resources aside from what the closer has. And uh yeah just sort of sort of a one call close. The whole idea is if you don't get a yes in the one call then you just don't really need to worry about them. Obviously in this case is not a fit right now but there are also tons of businesses that just do this. you know, it's either signed and paid or it's not a fit ever. And that's an even simpler system that's only five steps, but any that's the patented one call close
• 188:00 - 188:30 system that I totally just came up with completely on my own. Um, the other step, and this might be better for people that have a little less experience with scoping and automation projects in general. And this is the system I was referring to at the beginning when I said this might be like an automation specific one. Um is the two call close system where there's an initial discovery call it's called where you're feeling the the prospect out trying to figure out whether or not they're right fit and then getting all the information you need to scope the project and then you actually scope because sometimes these automation projects can be quite complex as you as you know. And then after the scoping
• 188:30 - 189:00 step, you will have another follow-up call with the prospect where you will then actually try and sell them or close them. So if we wanted to convert this into a two call close system, we would have to do a couple of steps here. If you think about it, first and foremost, we're gonna have to scope the project. And that's really what happens after the discovery meeting. So, if we do a discovery meeting and then we say we want to move this forward, then what we do is we would scope the project. And maybe you're sending that to a team that does the scoping or maybe you're just doing it yourself. After you've scoped the project, you need to make sure that this is something we can do. I'm just going to say we can do this. Then we have to do a closing call.
• 189:00 - 189:30 So, we have to say closing call booked. And then after the closing call, we also have to ensure that they show up. So now, you know, the closing call has to occur. I'm sure you could see right off the top of your head, but there's so many more steps in a two call close system. That said, you know, a lot of the time when you're working with bigger businesses that want much more complex projects and that sort of thing, you sort of have to do the two call close. So depends on the size of your audience and that sort of deal. And then just
• 189:30 - 190:00 like we had before a bunch of outcomes where you know, you do your sales meeting, there are three outcomes. You can either move forward, you can either wait or whatnot. We have the same thing over here. So if they show the closing call can occur and then uh the closing call might be where you present the contract or whatnot. If it's not a fit right now, then you add them back to some follow-up cycle and then this time instead of um booking that initial meeting, you can just do the scoping uh project instead. And so you can go directly from the
• 190:00 - 190:30 closing call not being a fit right now to waiting let's say a certain amount of time and then instead of you having to book that initial discovery call again you could just um basically offer to rescope the project which is a lot more straightforward than having to like you know actually jump back on a call. So it looks something like this and then if it's a no-show then we opt out just like we did before. If we want to move forward as I mentioned before there are a couple different options that you could do here after your closing call. who could do a detailed proposal in scope of work. And this is what I would recommend if you're doing like a
• 190:30 - 191:00 two-step system because odds are the prospect has already waited a fair amount. Like, you know, you trying to hard sell them now on the second call. Probably not the smartest move. You know, if you're added to a call close system, the project's probably pretty complex. It's not feasible to like get them to sign a deal right then and there. They probably have multiple steps of approval. So, you know, you'll probably send a detailed proposal and scope of work with all stakeholders involved. This is like a $50,000 project or something. You know, then you'll do follow-ups if they haven't signed it. And then at the end, you'll finally start the project. And so this is what I'd consider a, you know, um, pretty realistic look at a two call close
• 191:00 - 191:30 system. But notice how many more modules are involved. This system over here on the left has 1 2 3 4 5. So there are five steps in total. Five opportunities for things to go wrong. This traditional agency cell system in the middle is a little bit more complex, but obviously it's like the safe choice. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8. But if you look at this two call close system, you know, enterprise larger projects or just people that are a little bit less confident of their ability to close, there are 1 2 I have to do this. Just realized not a fit
• 191:30 - 192:00 right now. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 steps. And the reason why it makes sense to minimize steps is because every time you have a step, there's the opportunity for a lead to disappear at that step, right? So the fewer steps, the fewer opportunities for leads to disappear. The more steps, the leakier your sales system is. And you know, the more effort and time and energy you have to spend in basically just constantly upkeeping leads and making sure that you know, they don't really fall through those cracks. Now, the really cool part
• 192:00 - 192:30 about running an automation agency is obviously if you run an automation agency, you probably have the skills available to automate a large portion of this process. So, what I'm going to do now is I'm just going to run through the traditional agency sales system from top to bottom and just show you the things that you could automate. First and foremost, all marketing you can completely automate. So you could completely automate cold email, completely automate PPC ads, completely automate SEO, completely automate social media, completely automate referrals, and maybe maybe communities is the one thing that you can automate because that depends on your personal reputation. So maybe maybe I'll take that out. But uh
• 192:30 - 193:00 the point that I'm making is you can automate all of the booking that occurs as a result of efforts in each of these. So you know, in cold email, you would just attach a meeting link. PBCP ads, it would just be a one click to a website landing page with a meeting link. SEO, same deal. social media might be a YouTube video with in the description there's like a meeting link referrals um you might have like an auto draft template that you use to copy and paste every time you get a referral it just swaps out their name and communities maybe even have like a specific sequence that you guide people through although I find this is usually a lot less standard so you can automate all of that how about the sales cycle you can automate
• 193:00 - 193:30 the follow-ups completely so uh what I've done before is in my CRM of choice which I was using ClickUp you can use whatever CRM you want I had a bunch of uh triggers that would occur after a certain number of days where the prospect hasn't had any action or response, you can hook up an email watcher to a ClickUp setup. And you can do this in most CRM where when you send an email to the prospect, it'll be logged in ClickUp. When you receive an email from the prospect, it'll be logged in ClickUp. And essentially, if the meeting occurred, but then I mark the meeting as a no-show. Then immediately
• 193:30 - 194:00 after I marked as a no-show, they would receive a quick email being, like, "Hey, how's it going? I noticed that you didn't show up to the call. I'd love to, you know, touch base with you and maybe book another meeting. Could you use this link?" If after 3 days they still hadn't responded, then I'd send them another follow-up. After 7 days, this is on respond. I'd send another follow-up. In this way, this follow-up cycle was completely automated, and I didn't actually require any like human effort here, which is quite nice. Um, the sales meeting occurs. You can't really automate the sales meeting, at least not yet, until we have like super crazy killer Terminator style robots. Um, so you can't really automate that, but you can automate this part, right? So, you
• 194:00 - 194:30 could do the wait 30 days. If you have a form or something after you do every sales call and you mark this one as not a fit right now, well, that's a simple automation. You simply add somebody to a table and then every day just check if 30 days has passed and then on the 30th day when 30 days has passed add them back to that follow-up cycle that I mentioned earlier and now this whole thing's automatic. It's not a fit ever. You know, just set up an automation where maybe you'll fill out a form that says this meeting sucked. This is not a fit and it just deletes them from your database. Detail proposal and scope of work. You can automate this for sure. Same sort of deal. You might have a form that when you mark it as, you know, this
• 194:30 - 195:00 is great. They want to move forward. They want a proposal. It just automatically generates the proposal for you and sends it. I've recorded a pretty good video on this that I think a lot of people have found valuable. You don't have to automate it to that degree. You can automate it like 90% of the way there. Draft up your scope of work with templated bits and that sort of thing and then, you know, add a couple of lines for customization. Uh but you can template the vast majority of that. And then this system right over here with the follow-ups, you can also completely automate that. Signatures and payments, you can automate that, right? You can have um an automatic link in the panadoc that you send over or whatever proposal or scope of work software that you have
• 195:00 - 195:30 that prompts them to pay. if they don't pay by a certain amount of time, you can do automatic follow-ups and reminders and that sort of deal and then you know the project starts. So the good news is like if I were to show you guys the the points that actually require human intervention or like a human in a fully automated system, it's this right here. So you need to hire for this. Yeah, that's about it. You just start the project down here. Um so you know only two steps where you actually require humanity humans. Uh and then the other what's that like six steps that are completely robotic process automated. Same thing here. I'm not going to beat a
• 195:30 - 196:00 dead horse cuz I think at this point it's pretty clear what you can automate. But yeah, you can automate basically everything um except for the actual calls themselves which is quite nice. And this is, you know, an edge that an automation agency will have over most other agencies cuz most other agencies require humans to do all of this. Most other agency's biggest problems are their follow-ups. They don't do anywhere near as many follow-ups as they should be. And so if anybody doesn't show, okay, like 40% of all calls that ever happen, their sales system is just instantly only 60% as effective as it'll ever be. So that's 60% starting from here and then uh down over here, you know, maybe like another 50% fall off.
• 196:00 - 196:30 So they're actually only like running at 30% capacity, right? You as an automation or an automator or an integrator watching this video, you could probably bump that up to like 70 80%. Essentially, you could duplicate or double the value of a sales system uh versus a traditional agency that doesn't understand the value or the ability to automate stuff. So that's pretty cool. Yeah, that's more or less it. I would just make sure that whatever you do, you have a system. You don't need the system at the beginning, but you do need a system. And you need to make sure that at every point clients just go through your system. You're not going through
• 196:30 - 197:00 theirs. You know, like when you're starting out and you're pretty small, a lot of the time, the inclination is the client will set the agenda. You'll jump on the call, the client will tell you what you're talking about. You'll send them an email, the client will tell you when you're chatting and who you're chatting with. And I understand that it can be pretty intimidating when you're working with like a bigger company or trying to offer a bigger service and maybe you don't have any experience under your belt, but just no matter what you do, make sure that you are guiding them through the process because the second that you standardize it and you make sure that every client that you have or every prospect that you has goes through the same flow, you start being
• 197:00 - 197:30 able to point out the areas that are weak in your sales process and then every prospect that you have makes you 1% better. And by the end of the month, year or decade or whatnot, you will have like a very bulletproof iron and extremely profitable sales system. Cool. So, you now have a proven sales process that converts prospects into clients. But here's where the vast majority of automation entrepreneurs leave a ton of money on the table. They have no idea how to price their services properly. Now, pricing isn't just about covering your costs and adding some cute markup at the end. It's actually a strategic tool that can position you as either a premium expert or a cheap commodity in
• 197:30 - 198:00 many cases. If you get it wrong, you'll either price yourself out of deals or you are severely undervaluing the quality of your work. The next section reveals the exact pricing strategies that I personally use to scale past seven figures. We're going to cover eight different pricing methods, when to use each one, and how to position your services so clients are happy to pay premium rates for your automation solutions. Let's dive in. I hope you guys got a pen and paper because we are breaking out the spreadsheet for this one. Uh, as per always, just a little preamble. This is my own process and my own thinking. It got me to $72,000 a month with my own automation agency. But
• 198:00 - 198:30 I'm not trying to say that this is the only way that you can do things. If I were you, I would take what works, leave the rest. Another little disclaimer is naturally that there are many ways to price. One thing that I will let you guys know right off the bat is that no pricing methods are perfect. Like there is no pricing method that is perfect in every way, shape, or form. All of them actually have drawbacks and not a lot of people that are talking about this are going to tell you. The reality is some are better than others for different circumstances, different offers, and different services that you're selling. So, I'm going to try and get pretty nuanced with it. I don't want to just give you guys a simple price this way,
• 198:30 - 199:00 that way, and that way answer because I don't really feel like that's fair to the concept of pricing in general. So, you don't actually need to use all of the pricing methods I'm going to talk about. A good example of one is, you know, you would not charge a percentage of revenue for something not in your control. For instance, I'm going to talk about um how to do percentage based pricing in a minute, but that's just a good example of how, you know, some methods are going to work better for specific circumstances than others. You probably also would charge different types of companies differently. So, you wouldn't charge a small to mid-size business at about 10 staff members the same way that you charge an enterprise
• 199:00 - 199:30 company at a thousand staff members. Odds are they also probably have their own rules and regulations and you know internal policies that dictate how they work with vendors. So you know you're going to have to work around that and I'll mention that a little bit later on in the video. Another thing I'll say is that some methods work better for different stages of your business. Hourly pricing is super popular especially on jobs platforms like Upwork and stuff like that. It's very simple to get started with. I actually recommend people that have never made money on the internet to start with it. But note that it becomes super limiting as you grow and as you scale your business. So I'm going to cover that. Uh, and really just
• 199:30 - 200:00 to loop it all together, the best agencies constantly re-evaluate the best ways to price to maximize their value. So, if you want to be one of those aforementioned best agencies, you should probably do that, too. Okay, great. Let's dive into method number one. We are going to start with hourly just cuz hourly is by far the most popular. I'm going to zoom in a little bit here and I think I'm going to put my face in the top right hand corner this time just be a little spicy. So, here's a quick example of what hourly pricing might look like. You get a client on Upwork. They want you to build a simple
• 200:00 - 200:30 automation from the ground up that's custom to automate some repetitive data entry task. Maybe you are grabbing data from source A, pasting it into a spreadsheet, something like that. You think that it's going to take maybe four or five hours. So you tell the client and then they say great. They accept the offer. You guys do all this fun stuff together on the platform and then the billing begins at $100 per hour until the project is complete. Uh if the client adjusts the scope or wants something new, you're just going to continue billing them at that rate. This is how the vast majority of hourly gigs
• 200:30 - 201:00 go. Typically, this works best for very small projects. Uh discovery phases with high uncertainty in scope. That means that, you know, the client doesn't really know what they don't know. So, just to hedge their bets, they don't want to pay somebody $10,000 or $100,000 for something they're not really entirely sure what they want. Automation agencies and freelancers that are at the start line of their business tend to choose this as well. And there's also some good and some bad. So the good involved in pricing on an hourly basis is that it's super easy to start, right? If you think about it, hourly pricing is the default. Everybody on planet Earth
• 201:00 - 201:30 after the age of five sort of understands how this works. The clock goes by 1 hour and every time that that happens, you receive a certain amount of money in your pocket or on your time sheet. It's very well defined. It's supported by all major freelancing platforms, which is where a lot of newbies get started on. It's something that just sort of transcends you having to explain it. And it also appears from the client perspective very low risk. So these are all the good points in hourly pricing. This is the main reason why somebody might want to uh start with hourly pricing just because it minimizes
• 201:30 - 202:00 friction. Lets you get up and running. Lets you get your first couple jobs out of the way. You'll notice that the bad is a lot longer than the good here. And the reason why is because if you think about it logically, the time that you spend building a system does not accurately reflect the value that you bring to an organization. Especially nowadays with templated systems and solutions like make.com, Zapier, no code, it's the time that you spent and invested learning how to build those things and maybe building out those
• 202:00 - 202:30 templates that actually matters. That's what actually reflects the value you bring to an organization. So the point I'm making is if you're really really good, you're going to work much faster than other people and you're going to make less money because of it. So, why would you want to commit to hourly pricing uh if it's not just your first few gigs and if it's not just this crutch? Because it penalizes you for doing good work fast. It's silly. I should also note that this actually can be less appealing to clients sometimes, especially on larger projects because
• 202:30 - 203:00 from their perspective, you know, costs can escalate. There's no fixed cap to it. They don't really know when costs are going to end. things typically in the contractor world go over budget and over schedule as well. And you know, a lot of clients are are cognizant of that. So, the reason why I talk about hourly here is just to show you guys that this is a viable way to price. It's especially powerful if you're just getting off the ground. I definitely took a lot of hourly gigs when I got started in automation. Um, even in
• 203:00 - 203:30 content writing before that, um, even in like webdev, freelancing before that. And it's it's totally cool because, you know, it allows you to figure out how to do client management. It allows you to figure out a lot of the the things that um you won't know until you actually find yourself in some sort of contract. But the second that you have a couple of hourly gigs, it's best to uh off-ramp and switch to one of the subsequent models that I'm going to talk about in a minute. So now we get away from hourly and now we're moving into higher value ways of pricing. I'm calling these
• 203:30 - 204:00 valuebased methods. They're all fixed price. That just means that instead of you billing the customer or client based off time, you actually just give them like a fixed amount of money and then based off that fixed amount of money, you can bill them maybe half upfront, half after the project's completed. If it's like a big enterprise company, a lot of the time they'll want to work um based off what are called milestones or tanches, which is where, you know, maybe it's like 25% at the beginning and then 25% after some milestone is completed, 25% after another one's completed, then another 25% at the end. Anyway, that part isn't super important. Just
• 204:00 - 204:30 understand the broader concept here. Here's how this first way of valuebased pricing works. It's called cost savings. So, example, a friend of yours runs a consulting business. Right now, it costs this consulting business $50,000 a year to pay a staff member whose sole job it is is to generate reports. They do analyses, graphs, spreadsheets, package them in a PDF, send them off to customers. This is extraordinarily common. There are a lot of consulting businesses that pay people, you know, between $50 to $100,000 a year just to do like this. Now, you being a proficient automation engineer that has watched all of my YouTube videos, you
• 204:30 - 205:00 are confident that you can automate this completely and save that company $50,000 annually. So, the way that you would do cost-saving based pricing in this manner would be to charge them 25% of the savings. So, somewhere between 10 and $15,000. Why didn't I just write $12,500? I don't know. I guess I was a little bit sleepy. Uh the point that I'm making is what you do is you figure out how much money you're saving the company with the system and then you charge some percentage of that money. You can only do this if you obviously talk to the
• 205:00 - 205:30 customer, if you consult with them, if you figure out their pain points and how much money uh this lack of a solution is is impacting in terms of their bottom line. But once you know that, you have a ton of leverage in negotiations uh and you can charge some percentage of that to help their business out. So this is the first method. There's another method in a second, revenue uplift, which I'll talk about, but this works really, really well as an off-ramp or a transition from pure hourly based pricing. Typically, this works best with automations that directly reduce operating expense or they streamline
• 205:30 - 206:00 some sort of very resource-heavy task. That contractor or consultant that costs $50,000 a year is a good example. Larger companies with high revenues but poor margins or inefficient operations are great targets here because let's think about it. If a company makes a hund00 million a year and if you can improve their margins by 1%, you are making that company a million dollars a year, right? So, they can justify spending a lot of money on you. It doesn't really work as well in the other way around. Like if a company's making $10,000 a month, let's
• 206:00 - 206:30 say hypothetically, and you can shave 1% off their margins, well, uh what is that? Like a hundred extra dollars a month. You can't really justify too much from there. But I think you guys kind of get my point. It does take a few clients before you can intuitively scope projects like this. A lot of the time, one thing that I see in my community, specifically my beginner community, Maker School, is people really struggle with talking about about money, about dollars with customers or prospects, uh, at the time, I should say. You know, they just feel like it's this elephant in the room that's kind of staring them down, but they just can't really get down to brass tax and okay, so how much
• 206:30 - 207:00 money is this costing you? Oh, you don't know? Well, let's figure it out right now together. So, if you're just at the very start line of your automation business or your agency and you haven't really figured out how best to talk about stuff like that, you may find this difficult. You may also screw up a little bit. You might quote either way too much money or way uh too little money a few times. That's all right. This is all just part of the learning experience. Um, at least now you know what this is. So, the real benefits here is that cost-saving based pricing is not tied to your time. It is way more scalable than something like hourly,
• 207:00 - 207:30 which we talked about a moment ago. It also lets you template out your work. It aligns incentives between you and the client. What I mean by aligning incentives is instead of you being penalized for doing a faster job better. If you do a faster job better, you're rewarded because you just did the same job and made the same amount of money in a fraction of the time. You can make 10,000 bucks in a few hours if you build it right. There are a lot of systems out there that do stuff like what I just talked about, generate reports and assets and PDFs that can literally eliminate a staff member like Terminator
• 207:30 - 208:00 T2 style. um I'll be back that you know you can build in just a few hours and you can charge five 105 $20,000 for it, right? And note that you know I'm charging them 25% of the savings here or in this hypothetical we're doing this on an annual rate. So you know in this case it's probably like a one-time build plus some sort of like low monthly maintenance. I'll get into retainers and subscriptions in a moment. But yeah, you can make a ton of money in a few hours if you build this right. The bad here, and there is always bad, as I mentioned,
• 208:00 - 208:30 no pricing method is perfect, is it's harder to justify saving money in practice than it is to making more money. The gap between the money that you save them and the money you charge for them, there will always be a gap. You will never be able to charge like $50,000 for a system that saves somebody $50,000. The reason why is because you got to think of it from the client perspective. They have a solution right now that costs them 50 grand and it works, right? It does the thing that it's supposed to do. Your solution might cost $10,000, but there's uncertainty. You don't know if it's going to work. There's risk on behalf of the client.
• 208:30 - 209:00 They aren't entirely sure if you're the professional that maybe you seem to be. There's risk on behalf of the technologies. They don't know if these technologies have 100% uptime. They don't know if there might potentially be some issues with them. There's costs for the technology. There's costs for your time that might be hidden. Right? The point I'm making is you can never actually charge the amount of money that you save. you can only ever charge a fraction of that. In context, you can usually do up to about half or so. I mean, this is like a a loose rule of thumb that I'm just giving you guys from
• 209:00 - 209:30 my own experience here. I have only ever charged up to about half of the savings. And that was when the client was extraordinarily confident in me, very risk tolerant. We had basically no maintenance costs and we had basically no infrastructural cost. So, yeah, that's the bad. As you guys can tell, this is still way better than hourly pricing, but no pricing method is perfect. Let's move on to the third. The third major method is called revenue uplift. Or rather, I just decided I would call it revenue uplift, so now we're all calling it revenue uplift. The example here is you're working with an agency. Uh you build them a cold email
• 209:30 - 210:00 system that you project will net them $10,000 a month in sales, about 120k a year. So what you do is you charge them a one-time fee of $3,000 for this system, which is 30% of rev. And that's just to set up the the system to I don't know connect the mailbox to do whatever hy jinks you need to do in the background along with a monthly management cost of $2,000 20% of revenue. Why did I break it up like this? Well, I broke it up like this just to show you guys that at the end of the day, this is your business. This is your freelancing operation. You could do whatever the hell you want. You could
• 210:00 - 210:30 charge an upfront amount for a certain thing and then a monthly amount for another thing. Um I I'm just trying to show you guys that you guys can be flexible in the way you do these pricing uh you know the these proposals. I want you guys to know that there are a variety of options here and you can also mix and match them however you like. So typically, how does this work? Um, typically this works best with sales and marketing automations that have clear attributable revenue impact. What I mean by revenue impact is I mean like you know it's a sales system. It's a growth system. It does something on the front end. It DMs people on LinkedIn or it cold emails people uh by scraping their
• 210:30 - 211:00 their leads from Apollo or something, right? It's it's something involved in outreach, something involved at the front end of a business. And because it's involved at the front end of the business, you can typically actually take uh you can typically actually make a lot more money with stuff like this, right? You can only ever save 100% of your revenue, but you can make an infinite percentage more of your revenue. So, what I find in practice is beginners also find this difficult just because again, they don't really know how to talk about money. They don't really know how to conceptualize what the customer lifetime value is. If a business uh I don't know, every 10
• 211:00 - 211:30 meetings they close one client and the client is worth $10,000, you can kind of think of it as that meeting in and of itself is worth $1,000 to that business, right? Well, you can continue reverse engineering from there to figure out how much a lead is worth, how much money that the company would need to spend to acquire an equivalent thing. You can do a bunch of math, but a lot of the time I find that, you know, beginners just they just can't because they don't have the experience, they don't have like the business knowledge. So, yeah, this is definitely a little bit harder. It's harder than hourly, but uh maybe it's about on the same level as cost savings. Okay, so the good is again this isn't
• 211:30 - 212:00 tied to your time. It's much more scalable. It lets you template out your work and it aligns incentives between you and the client. You can also make 10,000 bucks in a few hours if you build this right. The bad is the gap between the money that you think that you're going to make them and the money that you actually charge for the system is again a product of these three things. And in practice, I find that you can charge a lower fraction of the money for revenue uplift than you can for cost savings. So what I what do I mean by this? Well, you know, in the previous
• 212:00 - 212:30 example, we saved a company $50,000 and then I said the maximum that I've realistically charged about half. And you know, I've worked on a ton of projects here. So I don't really think this is just my own lack of confidence. I think that there is some theoretical limit here and it's about half. Um, you know, you wouldn't be able to charge half of the equivalent value that you'd bring to a company revenue-wise. That would just be crazy. Companies also have like operational costs to acquire sorry operational uh costs to like uh fulfill the deal, right? They have a lot of revenue uncertainty. They have like operational uncertainty. They have debts
• 212:30 - 213:00 a lot of the time, right? So if you were to charge them 50% of every dollar that you made them, most of them wouldn't be able to survive. In practice, I find 30% is like that theoretical limit. Um most of the time it's less. Most of the time it's like 10, 15, 20%. But you know, obviously you could still make a ton of money on this. And I'm going to show you a few alternative revenue uplift models in a moment that frame this just so that it's not like a one-time fee. It's sort of like a distributed recurring fee based off of performance. Okay, speaking of performance, this one is the per outcome model. Now, I say eg meetings booked just cuz that's the simplest way
• 213:00 - 213:30 for me to conceptualize this cuz I sell a ton of cold email. Here's a quick example. You're working with an agency. You build them a cold email system and you project just based off of, I don't know, the volumes that you guys are going on, the math that you've done based off similar offers and all that stuff that you're going to book them about 20 meetings per month. So maybe one every business day or so. Now, historically, they close a quarter of those. So they close 20 divided by four, five, right? And the customer lifetime value of that is $2,000. So if you do the math, basically what I'm trying to show you is this is equivalent to this,
• 213:30 - 214:00 right? It's about the same thing. 10,000 bucks a month over here, 10,000 bucks a month over here. So, what you do is you pitch them that first thing and they say, "You know, man, I don't really like this. I don't really think that this is feasible or possible. Uh, I don't have the money to spend up front. Why don't you only pay me uh or you know, I'll only pay you on on results or something." So, what you do instead is you pivot and you charge them a per meeting rate of $150 each instead. So, instead of you getting that money upfront, sort of guaranteed, what you do is you say, "Hey, I completely understand. I'm going to charge you
• 214:00 - 214:30 based off of the outcome because that's how confident I am that I'm going to crush it. So, if you do the math on this, 20 meetings times 150 bucks. Well, that's 3,000 bucks a month. That's actually a little bit more than what we were charging before. And in reality, um you can make a lot more money with per outcome and revenue based uh revenue percentage based splits, which I'll talk about too, than you can with like a fixed price thing simply because these things scale with performance. And if you're a really high performer, you can make a ton of money for other businesses. Okay. So typically you do this with projects that have quantifiable outcomes that you are super
• 214:30 - 215:00 confident you can deliver. This is going to be stuff like meetings booked. Maybe you do some recruiting automation that's going to be candidates placed. The unfortunate part is beginners are going to find this very difficult to do in practice cuz they're just not going to know enough in order to land these deals consistently or get these booked meetings or get these candidates. The kind of terrible irony is unfortunately it's usually beginners that take these projects on disproportionately because a lot of the time cheap clients will respond just like they did in my example. They'll say no work unless uh you don't charge me anything upfront
• 215:00 - 215:30 only on deal sign or something of that nature. So a lot of the time you will sort of be forced to do this as a beginner especially if you have no real experience under your belt and you just want to get a case study through the gate which I find just hilarious. I mean I did a couple of these as well when I was first starting out. I had a couple of them that worked. The vast majority of them did not, just to be completely clear with you. I've also had a few people that I work with now that charge per outcome and they make a boatload of money because they're pros at it. We're talking 30, $40, $50,000 a month. So, you know, it's usually like high- risk, high reward thing that you only take on
• 215:30 - 216:00 if you're good. Okay, speaking of good, the good is that it's a lot easier to conceptualize on the client perspective than an upfront cost. Instead of the client spending $3,000 on you, basically, mentally, they're saying, "Well, I'm gonna spend $150 on him. I will wait for him to generate results and then I'm only gonna have to spend $150 on him." Right? So, you're tying it to a performance metric. Technically, there's unbounded upside. You can make as much money as you want. And since book meetings are probably entirely in your control in this example, you are mostly responsible for how much money you make. Like, if you're not delivering, well, that's not really on them, right? That's on you. So, you
• 216:00 - 216:30 could just become better at what you do. You could find a more effective method to squeeze all the value out of these cold leads and you'll make more money. The bad is it's not stable. It's not guaranteed. There's no upfront revenue. Though you may feel confident, there will still be some circumstances that are definitely outside of your control. Um, you also have no deposit. You have no way of paying off startup costs. You think about this specific system, which is cold email system, you are going to have some startup costs. You're going to have to buy some domains, buy some mailboxes, you're going to have to, I don't know, maybe pay somebody to set
• 216:30 - 217:00 all of this stuff up for you. If you don't have something to offset those initial startup costs, you will basically always be operating at a loss until some inflection point. Theoretically, I also find just anecdotally, if a client doesn't pay you something, like to start a project, to kick off a project, they tend not to be as locked in to that project and they tend to I don't really know what it is. Maybe the lack of like confirmation bias or cognitive dissonance or something. They tend not to believe it in as much if they haven't paid for it, which is funny cuz it's like, well, shouldn't you
• 217:00 - 217:30 believe in it more because I'm doing it all without even charging you anything? But clients are funny. More generally, humans are funny. And that's sort of how we do things. The last thing I'll mention here is payment schedules can suck, too. This is contingent on how you set up the payments. I recommend setting up your payment schedules as shortly as possible and as a small interval as you can. So, most of the time we'll bill people monthly, right? Well, if you're doing some type of per outcome based thing, don't build them monthly, build them weekly. Um, send an invoice every 7 days or something of that nature that counts up the number of meetings booked
• 217:30 - 218:00 and then charges them. Better yet, put them on autopay and you actually just decide how much it is and then bill them. Obviously, it takes some time to get to the point where you're confident enough to do these sorts of arrangements, but I think you guys get my point. Minimize the intervals. All right. Another pricing method here is called the hourly retainer. I think that's probably the most obvious, you know, way to transition from doing something purely hourly to getting some sort of MR here. Here's a quick example. Let's say you've been working with a law firm for the last few months. You've been creating simple systems that streamline their man, what the hell is
• 218:00 - 218:30 that called? Patient client intake. On average, you bill around 20 hours at $120 an hour. Next month, you approach them with an offer. You say, "Hey, Mr. Whatever, instead of you paying me $2,400 at the end of the month, why don't you prepay me 20 hours at a reduced rate of $100 an hour at the beginning of the month? Aka, instead of paying me 2,400 bucks at the end, why don't you pay me $2,000 at the beginning?"
• 218:30 - 219:00 you're going to get guaranteed sorry you're going to get cheaper uh hourly rate from me and you know that you're going to use and and exhaust my hours anyway and then I'm going to get guaranteed work so I'm going to be able to go to sleep at night without tearing my hair out. So it becomes a win-win for both of you basically and this is one of the simplest ways to go from working entirely on a project basis to working on a consistent MRR or some sort of monthly recurring basis instead. I took a ton of these when I started out.
• 219:00 - 219:30 Hourly retainers were still hourly, of course, but they were also monthly. And it was that monthly revenue that gave me a ton of financial certainty that calmed me down quite a bit and enabled me to look a little bit further than just like the next day ahead. You know, I was able to start making longerterm plans for weeks, months, years in advance. So, typically what this looks like is some sort of ongoing automation maintenance, some incremental improvements to systems. If a client hires you consistently every couple of weeks or
• 219:30 - 220:00 something like that, then pitch them on an hourly retainer instead. Save them a little bit of money. Save you a little bit of that variability. The benefit there is that it's the simplest and easiest transition to a monthly payment model. It's also great for beginners. I highly recommend do hourly. Like if I could go back in time and tell myself, I would do hourly and then I would try and transition at least one client to an hourly retainer. And the second that I have that, I'd be like, "Okay, I'm probably good enough to now start charging on a value basis instead." You
• 220:00 - 220:30 can also put your clients on autopay. You can effectively buy yourself that MR with the $400 differential, which a lot of the time is worth it. The bad is obviously it's still hourly. Your value is not being ideally represented because it's not really in the amount of time it took you to build that system, right? It's the amount of time, energy, and and resources that you've built up over your lifetime in this career. Still not too bad if I do say so myself. Uh the sixth is deliverablebased retainers. So quick example here and let me explain why this differs a lot from the previous retainer. The example is let's say
• 220:30 - 221:00 you've been working with a marketing agency for the last couple of months. Every few weeks this marketing agency will ask you for a consultation. In that consultation you guys will discuss a system that you guys are building together. And up until now the way that you've been pricing these systems is using the cost-saving and revenue uplift models that we talked about earlier. But you really like these clients. You love them. They love you. and you want to turn your currently oneoff revenue into monthly recurring revenue instead. So, here's what you do. You approach them with a deliverable-based retainer. You say, "Hey, Dr. Peter, Dr. Peter, for
• 221:00 - 221:30 $5,200 a month, you'll get a weekly strategy call with me. It's 45 minutes. You'll get a monthly priority plan where we lay out the next four weeks of operational priorities. You'll get daily Slack availability where you can contact me within 15 minutes between 12:00 to 2:00 p.m. Anybody on your team can. I'll be your QA guy. I'll help train them. Speaking of training, I'll give you one 2hour team training session. Maybe if they're in your city, you even go to their office and do this in person. On
• 221:30 - 222:00 top of that, I'll also give you unlimited maintenance on old projects. You never have to pay me a one-off amount to fix up an old system or something. I got you for life. And in addition, you know how you've been gushing over my YouTube videos that I've been posting and you love that system and that system and that system. I will give you one of those systems every single month and install it in your business myself. Um, you get to pick at the beginning of the month and then by the end of the month, you'll you'll have it. Doesn't matter what system it is, however complicated it is, I'll do that for you. All right. So, as you guys see,
• 222:00 - 222:30 we've shifted the value prop, right? Previously, the value prop was I will spend X hours with you or working for you. And now the value prop is you will get X deliverable as a result of working with me. Aka the $5,200 a month that you spend will net you some sort of return on your investment. Right? So typically this works best with clients that value your systems and routinely consult with you. Uh it's also great for longerterm growth oriented partnerships. I mentioned inbound clients here as well because this has been great for me as
• 222:30 - 223:00 I've started growing my YouTube channel. I've signed a lot more of these because people just instinctively like and trust you. I think they probably also listened to my logic around hourly pricing. They're like, "Yeah, that's right. Let me just pay Nick deliverably based instead." So, the good here is you have super high leverage. Okay? You have control over all of your deliverables, meaning you get to pick how you want to construct your retainer. You don't have to construct it like I did. This is just how I personally do mine. You guys can structure it however the hell you want. So, you could build it out in a way that's like hyper leveraged that takes
• 223:00 - 223:30 you as the service provider like 2 hours a month to do, right? And that means that you can feasibly make a lot of freaking money. You can feasibly make like $500 an hour or more consistently over a long period of time. And you can also, just like before, put your clients on autopay and then grow your MR. The thing is, it's also, and I mentioned, I put this in the good for some reason. It's very good that this is hard for beginners because we don't want any of them taking our money. Uh, but it's very hard for beginners to do because they have to constantly justify their cost.
• 223:30 - 224:00 If their systems do not deliver an ROI, they will be let go eventually. And that's something that you just have to know. So if you're charging some sort of hourly rate or or whatever, uh it's personally a lot easier to justify this, right? Because they can just cut you off at any time on the hourly on the hourly basis. And also it's your time uh that they're they're paying for, not necessarily your ROI. But in this case, it is strictly framed as like, hey, if you're paying me $5,200, I want to make you some multiple on that. The only thing that you deliver are deliverables, obviously. So this calculation of does
• 224:00 - 224:30 Nick generate me more than 5.2K 2K a month. Uh I just find that it tends to happen substantially more often on a structure like this than it did on a structure like this. So again, it's just kind of a high-risisk, high reward thing. You can make a lot more money in this method uh if you're a little better and more mature, I want to say, with your business processes. It's just sort of what you got to do. All right. Now, I want to talk about one alternative pricing based method, and then I'll cover the last one, which is pretty contentious, which is uh percentage of revenue. But this is a very interesting pricing method and I've seen it happen a
• 224:30 - 225:00 lot more in my community as of late, specifically with people that are building SAS companies using no code tools. What do I mean by this? I mean, you know, SAS companies, the capital S in there stands for software. You're offering software as a service, right? Well, what you can do with a lot of no code tools is you can actually build out the infrastructure for a SAS company just in your noode editor in make.com or Zapier or NA10 or something like that. You don't actually need to do all of that programming. You could have a function that you know you have some website on the front end that people log
• 225:00 - 225:30 into and then they put in some website brief and they say I want a website that looks like this that looks like that looks like that and then you could send that request to your make scenario that could generate you a bunch of HTML and then you could spit it back at them and then voila you basically have your own SAS it's just your SAS is through your no code platform instead of code right so per assetbased pricing I find in practice tends to work really well for that and a lot of people are using that I have done per asset pricing myself just a couple of times. I personally did not find it super valuable. I ran a content editing SAS that actually worked
• 225:30 - 226:00 specifically like basically exactly like how I just told you. You just put in your content and it would sort of edit it for you and then I charge per asset there. But let me give you an example here cuz why the hell else did I write all this stuff? The example is you create a content production system that's light years ahead of what most other agencies are doing. You start selling it to content and SEO agencies on a per asset cost. That means that instead of selling the system itself, you sell the deliverable which is an article and then you just charge a certain amount per deliverable. Right? So if I generate 20 articles a month as
• 226:00 - 226:30 a user of your system and everyone costs 20 bucks, well then I'm paying you 400 bucks. You can implement this in a variety of ways. You could have this be instantaneous pricing where every time you do it, you need to pay. Although I don't really recommend that. There's a reason why a lot of companies like this credit based stuff because when you spend money that isn't like money, you tend to spend a lot more of it if you've ever wondered. That's one of the main reasons. It's also easier to deal with on your end obviously. Uh so a lot of the time in practice what people do is you'll pay a certain amount of money for a certain number of credits and then
• 226:30 - 227:00 it's like well great now you have those credits. What are you going to do? Not spend them. Obviously you know you got to buy a 100 articles in order to make it into our thing. You know you're going to find a way to spend that other 99. So typically this works best for modular SAS like products where each deliverable can be separately priced and implemented. This works for content, so articles, blogs, books, assets like PDFs, white papers. You can do proposal generators this way. Legal, so contracts, reports like I was talking about in that first or second example way back when, right? If instead of you charging them some cost savings based
• 227:00 - 227:30 thing, you instead just charge them 50 bucks flat per report. That might actually make sense for people. Now, the good here is that it's super easy to productize. The initial upfront cost on the customer side of things is usually really low as well. So your deliverable costs usually a lot less than whatever the customer is doing before. Meaning that like as a company you can fix your costs and you can just make your fees a multiple of whatever it costs you internally to run your no code tool. So if I don't know you're paying 5,000 bucks a month for software and then you generate a 100 articles. That's sort of like $50 a month in every individual article. Well, if you charge $100 per
• 227:30 - 228:00 article, you know that you're making 50 bucks on that, right? Pretty straightforward. That's kind of a example because you're probably never going to get to a point where you're spending $50 an article, especially in our uh, you know, enlightened AI age. So, yeah, it's the most software-like way to price. It's definitely the most scalable. Now, the downside is despite the fact that it's super scalable, it takes a long time to make like good money here. If you think about it, the costsaving method that I talked about there, you could charge $12,500 for a system that saves $50,000. You could make $12,500 today. If you
• 228:00 - 228:30 wanted to scale to $12,500 with a per asset based system, well, you need to sell 600 and something articles, right? That might take you a lot longer to do so. So, it's a lot more scalable just like SAS companies, but it takes a lot longer to grow. Um, you're probably going to start from zero bucks every month, unless you have some recurring model as well. And the detriment is you also have to build infrastructure to track outputs, which can be an ordeal in and of itself. You're basically building like a whole other SAS app there. Uh, not to mention no deposit unless you ask for one. no way of paying off your startup costs and then the lack of lock
• 228:30 - 229:00 in on the client usually reduces perceived value. It hits your ability to like get that nice 105 $20,000 white glove project price. So I don't really do this to like make my money. I've done and experimented with this a couple times, but I'm bringing this up because I've seen it in my communities and there are a few people that are doing quite well all things considered. All right, now we make it to the daddy of pricing models. This is the percentage of revenue. Quick example, you build this amazing LinkedIn DM plus voicemail drop system and it reaches out to people. It leaves customized messages based on
• 229:00 - 229:30 their profile. You then hire a closer and install a closer in your business. This is the salesperson that you know closes the deal. Your system takes very little setup time. It's mostly templated and you're hyperconident that it works cuz maybe that's what you're doing for your own business. That's how you're getting your own customers. Now, you know of this old business acquaintance, Dr. Peter who currently needs leads and who could use a system like this to scale up his business. So you offer him a deal. Uh, hey Dr. Peter, I'm going to generate, nurture, qualify, and close all of the leads using this system and
• 229:30 - 230:00 all you have to do is fulfill them. Okay? So you are a marketing company or maybe you sell ads, PPC. I will generate you the clients and then all you have to do is just fulfill the clients. In exchange, all you're going to do is pay me 25% of the gross revenue of each deal. Maybe this is more money than you were paying before to get your own clients, but it's consistent as hell and you know exactly how much money you're going to pay for it every time, right? Benefits for you. You can make an insane amount of money doing this. You can make
• 230:00 - 230:30 a crazy amount of money, but you have to be really good at what you do and how you set things up. So, typically revenue generating automations where there's a clear correlation between automation and income work. So, this is almost always going to be something on the front end. It's going to be sales, right? Because we're doing a percentage of revenue. The good here is that you have super high earnings potential. Technically, they're unbounded. Partnerships like these are how you make the multi6figure revenues. I think if you look at anybody that's like between my revenue range and maybe like a million and a half a month or something, they basically all have some sort of partnership based thing going on
• 230:30 - 231:00 where they will produce some insane uh leverage on the front end and then just take some cut on the back end. You can kind of think of this like this is what a lot of affiliate people do as well. They take a percentage of the sale attributed to the lead that they generate um and and so on and so forth. If your systems are good and you trust the people you partner with, you can print money. You can also use very strong offers in this way to sell clients for your own company because you handle everything and the customer pays zero. I mean, think about the offer, right? I think Alex Poroszi talks about the perfect offer and it's like we'll do everything for you. It'll cost you $0.
• 231:00 - 231:30 We'll take like a certain percentage and if it doesn't work and you don't make this much money, we'll even pay you, right? It's like the perfect offer. Well, you actually get to use the perfect offer. Um, logically speaking, you would have to be very silly to say no to something like that at face value. It's like, hey, I only make money when I make you money. Therefore, there's zero risk. Why the hell not? That said, you do have to make sure you trust the people. So, you should have a strong vetting process if you do this. Now, here's the bad. The bad is you may not always have total control over the outcome here. So, you also don't get
• 231:30 - 232:00 paid anything upfront, right? Unless you structure it in a way where you do, and some people do, right? Like the growth partner model who was popularized by this one guy that I used to follow on Twitter. somebody in the comments will know uh does this where like you I don't know pay 10 or 15 or 20 grand up front or something like that and then you get like 7% of their revenue as well. So you can offset this but you know just speaking percentage of revenue you don't get paid anything up front which could impact your ability to deliver this at scale especially if it has high costs and again you have to be very good at your in order to make this work. If
• 232:00 - 232:30 you're not good at your your service if you're not confident that you can deliver what it is that you're promising you're not going to make any money and it's just going to be all cost for you. Similarly to what I talked about before with the per outcome model. Unfortunately, I find a lot of beginners get stuck here because they pitch some offer to somebody and then they say, "I don't want to do it that way. I only want to do it if uh when I make money, you make money. So, let's do it that way. If you're that confident about your service, you might as well, right?" Which I understand the idea, but obviously that doesn't really help you get your agency off the ground if you're
• 232:30 - 233:00 a total newbie, right? So, again, ironically, it's a lot of newbies that try this stuff, fail, and then are like, "I'm never doing percentage of revenue again." But it's it's just a time and a place thing. You just have to be skilled enough. You have to be obviously you have to have like a good network in order to make the stuff work and you have to trust the people uh that you you partner with. So obviously the big question is now which one is best? Typically my rule of thumb and you can do this if you believe in the stuff that I've been telling you guys about over the course of the last few months. And if you don't, you don't have to. But typically my rule of thumb is if you're a total newbie, the fastest way to go
• 233:00 - 233:30 from that total newbie to that expert that I talked about earlier is to go hourly. It is well established. It's a very easy transition from a 9 to5. It's the way that the vast majority of the corporate world works. So it's not going to be uncomfortable for you. It's not going to be uncomfortable for the client. All you're looking to do at that first stage is to make your first few bucks in the internet. We're minimizing friction. Just go hourly. It's super straightforward. After you get your first few clients and maybe one of those clients is an hourly retainer or something, begin charging based on
• 233:30 - 234:00 value. Remember I talked about two value based methods. There was cost savings or revenue uplift. Cost savings is going to be better if you're working with large businesses with small margins and then uh revenue uplift is going to be better for small businesses with large margins tend to be a lot hungrier. Let's combine this with some type of retainer or subscription based pricing for added leverage so that you're not restarting from zero every month. Maybe this is like clients 1 to three. Maybe this is like clients 3 to 10 or 3 to 15 or something. And then if you become a professional and you become confident in your ability to deliver, start
• 234:00 - 234:30 experimenting with per outcome or per percentagebased sales methods. Also combining with retainers or subscription based pricing for leverage. And this is how I know assuming you've found that golden goose laying hen laying golden eggs or some like that, whatever the saying goes. This is where you can start scaling up your revenue extraordinarily quickly. You'll eventually find some button on the internet that you press and every time you press, you make a dollar. You'll just start spamming that button like crazy with a model like this and you'll
• 234:30 - 235:00 start making a lot more money. Cool. So, now I know how to price your AI services strategically and learn how to close deals at premium rates. But here's what you probably don't realize, which is how to handle the first few days after a client now says yes to you. that determines whether they become essentially a long-term advocate or ambassador for your brand or just like a one-time headache. So, that is onboarding in a nutshell. If you onboard poorly, that will lead to scope creep, endless revisions, and then ultimately clients who disappear after the first project. Whereas, if you nail onboarding, you turn clients into raving fans who are more than happy to refer
• 235:00 - 235:30 you to their network, pay you good monthly retainers, and then get you more involved with their business in terms of like equity and partnersh. That's what we're going to be chatting about in the next section. We're going to show you the exact 41minute onboarding process to eliminate buyer remorse. set super clear expectations, then position you from warm upsells from day one. I'm going to cover everything from the psychology of new clients to the specific systems that make onboarding seamless. Let's do it. The three big problems that onboarding solves. There are more than just three problems that onboarding solves, but here are the three big ones. And here is how I want you to think about
• 235:30 - 236:00 onboarding. Essentially, onboarding is a tool that lets you solve the main problem of buyer's remorse. It lets you solve another main problem of client expectations. And it also allows you to essentially like frontload a lot of the BS and inoculate yourself against problems with logistics later on. What do I mean by logistics? I mean stuff like not having credentials to a software platform. I mean stuff like not fully outlining the timeline where you're going to be delivering stuff and then the client ends up like calling you rushed 2 weeks later being like, "Hey, where's the project? I needed it by
• 236:00 - 236:30 today." Essentially, this is another form of leverage. If you just spend a few minutes upfront dealing with this problem now, you will save dozens if not hundreds of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of the next couple years of your career. So, it just makes sense to figure this out like ASAP. Essentially, what I'm going to do here is I'm going to discuss every problem in detail just so you guys understand the problem space so that you understand sort of like my own mindset here when I came up with these solutions to these problems and then I'm actually going to show you how to solve every one of these problems as I mentioned including building a few
• 236:30 - 237:00 simple systems. I'm also going to provide you some templates. So, I have a few little assets and documents here, as well as just a couple of step-by-step checklists that I personally used quite heavily when I was first starting out. Obviously, the better that you get on the stuff, the less you need these assets in front of you while you're selling, while you're closing or while you're building stuff, but they tend to really decrease the learning curve or I guess your ability to get out there, close your first couple of clients and and get up and running. So, highly encourage you guys make use of them. All right, so problem number one that onboarding solves is buyer's remorse. Now, if you're unfamiliar with just
• 237:00 - 237:30 sales in general, um, or you know, the concept of buyers remorse, here's basically how it works. Somebody just sent you a bit of money. No matter how good the process that you use to sell them is, the fact that the money is no longer in their wallet or I guess their bank account nowadays will create buyer remorse. there's going to be some sort of remorse, some sort of doubt at the back of their mind essentially like did I make the right decision partnering with this service provider instead of you know other service providers or instead of doing it myself or instead of
• 237:30 - 238:00 finding some other solution. So if you think about onboarding from sort of like a sales perspective, it's an additional tool that you get to use to streamline the next steps immediately after the sale. And your goal running an automation agency is to minimize buyer remorse as soon as humanly possible. Good onboarding helps you do this. Great onboarding helps you turn this buyer's remorse into like buyer's gratitude essentially for being super stoked to start with you. And when you have projects that are like that, when people are extremely extraordinarily excited to get started with you and you also have
• 238:00 - 238:30 like very strong and clear expectations put out, those clients tend to be the ones that retain for a very long time where you start getting to take advantage of the multiples of this business, right? Like your first project with the client, it's a small one and you're selling automation services might be like 1 2 3k let's say. If you nail onboarding and nail everything that I'm going to show you in this guide, you essentially have the opportunity to turn that 2 or 3k client into like a 5k a month client for the next year and that's 20 times more money if you think about it that way than you'd be able to get immediately. So very very big point of leverage and something that you know I wish more people would think about in
• 238:30 - 239:00 advance. The second big problem is client expectations and this is like one of the biggest issues just in all service businesses not necessarily automation. One thing I'll mention here is automation is particularly terrible for it because of the presence of scope creep. Like if you think about it, right, I used to run a content writing company called 1 second copy. And what's really involved in content writing? Well, there's like two or maybe three subservices here. There's the writing, there's the editing, u maybe there's like the outlining, right? Very simple and easy sort of business model um comparatively. Whereas with automation,
• 239:00 - 239:30 if you think about it that way, there are like 5 million subservices. There's obviously like the scoping, there's like the process flow charting, there's like the make.com scenario building, there's like API integrations, there's like your ability to like drag and drop modules and know how that specific platform works, but also understand programming principles to be able to like put something together. Uh you have to know like I don't know, let's say you're working with a pipe drive. You have to understand pipe drive. You have to understand Panadoc. You have to understand all this And honestly, when you have all of this stuff going on, the client expectations and their
• 239:30 - 240:00 scope can blow up. And uh that tends to happen pretty often, especially if you don't really know what you're doing. So if you're just getting started with automation, maybe you've got like your first couple of clients, you'll probably understand what I mean by this intuitively. But having a good onboarding process can inoculate yourself against a lot of that stuff. It's sort of like a vaccine or something against, you know, some virus. If you just like deal with it right now, you eliminate that from ever being an issue. You eliminate all of the time, energy, and money that you waste later on dealing with it. Here's the fundamental paradox of client expectations. In order to grow your business, you have to win clients. In order to win clients, the
• 240:00 - 240:30 simplest and easiest way to do so is to increase the client expectations. What I mean by that is sort of the whole process of selling is incentivizing you to blow up this project and make it look even better than it probably really is in reality, right? That's just how sales works. But in order to grow your business, you also have to deliver projects. And if you think about the way that delivering projects works through incentives, it all involves reducing expectations. turning a complicated project into as simple a project as humanly possible. And so essentially
• 240:30 - 241:00 what you have here is you have two like incentives that are butdding each other right in the head. The first is sort of the sale incentive which is sell them the dream, sell them this, you know, super big complex comprehensive projects we can get as much money as humanly possible out of them. And then the second is sell them something small, something packetable, something manageable that I can do in, you know, a weekend. The issue here is that most people will always do the former a little too well because they want to get the deal, which is totally understandable and I've done this a million and one times myself. And what
• 241:00 - 241:30 that means is when it comes time to deliver the project, they are screwed, right? Because now it's like, oh, okay. Um, sure, we might have made an additional $10,000 or something like that, but the cost to that additional $10,000 is now our delivery team has to spend another three weeks creating all these additional systems, right? It's a pain in the ass. What onboarding does is it provides you the opportunity to frame those expectations ASAP and upfront. And by doing this, it lets you inoculate yourself against dozens of common gotchas. And by gotchas, I mean just like things that most service providers
• 241:30 - 242:00 deal with, like uh communications being an issue, timeline being an issue, your working style being an issue, not knowing what the wind condition of your project is. Like when do you actually know when your project is done? You got to talk about this with the client. Otherwise, what are you going to do? Do all the work and then deliver the project? And the client's going to be like, "Well, it's not really done, right? Why not just do it immediately and save yourself that stress? Basically, what your goal is with client expectations is to give the client all the info that they need up front so they never have to bug you later and so that they'll be satisfied when you deliver what you said that you were going to deliver. Sounds pretty easy, you know,
• 242:00 - 242:30 theoretically, but in practice it can be a lot more difficult. And I'll show you how to solve all of that. Now, the last part here is very specific to automation and it's sort of like logistics. This is what I call automation is a lot of moving parts. By nature, at its core, what automation is is it's like juggling 5,000 different platforms and gluing them all together with an automation platform like make.com or something like that. And when you're juggling all these different platforms, you can imagine how in order to like logistically manage the work, you need to gain access to all of
• 242:30 - 243:00 them. You need to deal with two-factor authentication concerns. You need to deal with the right subscription plans. You need to have good credentials. Your customer needs to know the credentials. You need to go the credentials. you need to deal with sub accounts and all that stuff. This is sort of like the nitty-gritty dirty part of doing automations. And if you don't have all of this up front, and I meant to write, you end up having like a much more difficult time later because then you have to drip this stuff out over time every time you ask a client for some information. It'll take them some time to get back to you. Sort of like this cat-and- mouse stuff that a lot of beginners unfortunately fall prey to,
• 243:00 - 243:30 especially with 2FA stuff cuz you need to like be in the same time zone as your client or whatever at like the same time and they need to be available and and a lot of And it ends up just like really hurting your professionalism. And not only does it hurt your professionalism, it very negatively impacts your ability to deliver on the schedule that you said that you were going to do. So your goal in solving this problem is to minimize friction and get access to everything ASAP. You should not need to ask the client for any sort of credentials, accounts, two factor authentication codes, change the subscription plan, none of that stuff after the first day, basically just
• 243:30 - 244:00 because it really really hurts your ability to get that client again in the future. And if you solve all this upfront, the client will think that you're super prepared, you're super professional, and that like you know your your business really well. Uh which will obviously allow you to retain them super easily later on. All right, so how do you actually solve these three problems? Well, each of these three problems I solved in three ways. So the first buyer remorse, I solved by basically front-loading the dopamine and front-loading notifications, frontloading gratitude, and basically just filling up their email inbox as quickly as possible after they make the payment. Um so that they think that
• 244:00 - 244:30 essentially the perception of process, sorry, perception of progress. And I'll show you how to do each of these three in a moment and I'll build out systems for them as well. The second to manage client expectations, there are three solutions here. The first is that you need to define your communication style as well as the frequency with which you will be communicating upfront. The second is you need to set a timeline which is basically how long every step will take and what sort of deliverable you have at every step. And the third is you need to define the win condition. The win condition, you know, sounds super fancy, but it's basically just like, hey, how are we going to know when our project is done, right? Like if I'm delivering you a lead generation system,
• 244:30 - 245:00 how do I actually know that that lead generation system is finished and I can like take a step back? When do we start on my retainer for instance? Like like what's the next step after the project is done? The problem number three, which is the logistics and the moving parts and all that stuff. You solve them in three ways. Uh the first is you itemize all the platforms and you basically provide them a list that they can use in order to sign up to them for you. The second is that you have an onboarding call that just frontloads all of the that you otherwise would have to drip out over time. And tons of people have tried to do the logistics step uh through forms and whatnot. They're like, "Oh, well, I got to automate this cuz I'm an automation engineer." But you really shouldn't.
• 245:00 - 245:30 This is like the highest leverage point of you being in front of your client. And then um you can use secure credential management essentially to to solve the problem of password sharing and and all that fun stuff. So yeah, we're going to go into detail and build all of them uh right now. So first and foremost, let's talk a little bit about um the first solution here, which is transactional alerts. This is going to sound really simple and really basic for a lot of people, but if you pay somebody and you pay somebody a fair amount of money, let's say $4,000 or something like that, and you don't receive like a
• 245:30 - 246:00 receipt of that purchase, um, basically immediately, you're going to have a very, very bad taste in your mouth, and that buyer's remorse is going to sort of snowball into, uh, like, who the hell am I working with here? Is this person professional? Like, like what's going on? Basically, there needs to be some type of transactional alert or notification immediately after the person pays you all this money and they just need to have like a receipt for it. So, um this depends on your payment processor. A lot of payment processors do this automatically. Thankfully, in Stripe, which is a payment processor that I personally use and that I recommend for a lot of people, you need to specifically go into customer emails,
• 246:00 - 246:30 enable receipts, and then, you know, have those receipts sent basically immediately after the purchase is done. So, what you would do here if you were doing this for yourself is you'd have to open up the Stripe homepage and then go to settings up here in the top right and then go to business and then you'd have to go more uh customer emails, I believe. And then under payments, you'll have to go successful payments and turn that on. And essentially what this is going to do is every time you send somebody money, you're going to get something that looks a little bit like this right over here. Um, so every time,
• 246:30 - 247:00 sorry, you send somebody money, you get a receipt. And obviously make sure that the experience that they have when they get a receipt from you is as high brow as possible. Make sure that you've done all like the stripe BS of like adding your logo and making it look all pretty, having your brand colors, whatever your payment processor is. Obviously, this will differ. Uh, but I personally always recommend anybody watching my videos just to like use Stripe. It's super simple. It's very well supported and it's super integraable, which is an automation specialist makes a lot of sense. So, you're going to want something like this um basically to happen within 30 seconds of somebody working with you or choosing to work with you or paying you money. And this is just sort of like a quick little hit.
• 247:00 - 247:30 It's like, "Yeah, you did make that payment, and you know, all of the logistical stuff is like taken care of on our end. Don't worry, your receipts here, uh, we're we're professional about it." I know it sounds super simple, but you'd be surprised at how many people don't do this. All right, the next thing I want to talk about is gratitude. What do I mean by gratitude? Well, I mean expressing sincere gratitude to your clients for choosing to spend time, energy, and money with you. I know this sounds simple again, but turns out that most things in the agency space are very
• 247:30 - 248:00 simple. You can go very far simply by remembering to thank your client for doing things for you. What do I mean by this? Uh, every time a client sends me a message, I uh I thank them for reaching out. Every time they follow up with me after I haven't heard from them for a while, I thank them for doing so. Every time I jump on a call with them, I thank them. Every time I get a payment from them, I thank them. This makes you look extremely professional. But not only that, I've worked with enough clients at this point in my life to definitively be able to say that the situations in which I've consistently expressed gratitude
• 248:00 - 248:30 for being able to work with somebody um tend to yield me substantially higher ROIs. Like our relationships go way, way further. And I'm still not 100% sure if it's just the professionalism or if it's just the fact that, you know, I I'm just a like I'm I'm acting like a human being when I do it. And people tend to pick up on that and they think that I'm a lot more genuine. But it works. Now the great news about gratitude is if you are truly gracious, you can build a very simple system that just watches events or uses a web hook and when you receive a new payment transaction notification,
• 248:30 - 249:00 uh you can just send an email uh that's like, you know, like a one sort of I don't know three or four line email, which I'll show you in a second, uh that just thanks them. Uh and you can do it within about five or five or so minutes of receiving the payment. And by doing it this way, um it tends to be it tends to seem a lot more like handwritten and customized and that sort of deal. uh which obviously c their customers or clients tend to like a lot more and it tends to seem just a lot uh you know a lot more genuine. So again the goal is basically and I do this in a separate email but the goal is we want to provide people the perception of like customized
• 249:00 - 249:30 highquality care and I actually send them a bespoke email with a thank you on it in addition to the receipt. And here's what my personal one usually looks like. I mean you know it's evolved over time and I used to do all this stuff manually but now I automate the vast majority of it. It's just hi Nick. Thanks for taking care of that invoice so promptly. I'm beyond happy that we get the chance to work together and I'm excited to nail this for you. I'll send you some onboarding instructions plus a calendar in a moment and we can then book a call to kick off our project. Looking forward to chatting and I appreciate your business. So that's it. Doesn't have to be super magical. You're
• 249:30 - 250:00 sending somebody an email as if you would text them thanking them for doing something for you. And on a more general note, I find that that's just the best way to proceed with all client communications. just proceed with them like you're texting a friend of yours because um clients tend to pick up on that and and treat that as substantially more genuine than what a lot of other people do which is they'll write these big fancy long email sequences that just seem like you are treating them like another cog in your machine if that makes sense. But yeah, so my goal is I want them to get a bunch of emails simultaneously to minimize buyers remorse to just make it feel like shit's happening. Like they just gave me their
• 250:00 - 250:30 money. I want to give them something too. And the number one thing that you can give a client is just the impression of progress and things are moving in the direction that they want them to. And then the last thing is indeed that perception of progress. And what do I mean by this? I really just mean like next steps. Now that they paid, it's essential that you provide the perception that you are getting their project started like immediately like within 5 minutes of them getting paid. If you do this, the clients that you provide the impression of progress within 5 minutes are going to go much much farther for you than the clients that you don't do this for, I don't
• 250:30 - 251:00 know, like several hours or days. As mentioned previously, tons of situations where I've hired a service provider and I haven't heard back from them for like 48 hours. Frankly, if I'm being honest, I think that sort of thing is unacceptable, especially given that like basically everybody on planet Earth has hired a service provider for something at some point and so they at least understand how it feels from the other point of view. The fact that, you know, a lot of these business owners can't put that together, I think is the primary reason why you can crush it in this industry so easily. So, yeah. Um, again, we can build a very simple system and we
• 251:00 - 251:30 can have the system just watch events or use a web hook and then send an email from you. I'll do that right now in a second. And then I would encourage that you do this within 5 minutes. At this point, they've received three or four emails in a very short period of time, which makes them feel really good. It also makes them feel like you're on top of things. You have a very defined, streamlined process for this, and they've done this multiple times before, which eliminates a lot of like the perceived risk of working with service providers and is basically the most straight line way of maximizing the uh the customer experience. But, okay, how do you actually build this out? super simple and super easy. Um, I personally do this in make.com, an automation tool that, you know, I popularize a little
• 251:30 - 252:00 bit, but I'm definitely famous for like the make.com stuff, not the Zapier stuff or the NA10 stuff. If you are using another automation tool, it's very simple. Just follow along sort of the process logic that I'm doing here. We're going to pretend that there is some event that is occurring. U, maybe some type of booking. And then uh, what do we do when we receive that booking? Well, if you have a CRM or something like that, you're going to have to pull data from the CRM. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to set a bunch of variables. And I'm basically going to pretend that I'm pulling them from my CRM. So, one will be like name. We'll just say
• 252:00 - 252:30 Nick. We'll say email address. We'll say my email address right over here, niclick.a. And then we just use the mail module here to send an email. You will create a connection up at the top right hand corner uh in make.com. I'm going to use that to sort of this will be your from email. And then the two email I'm just going to map this as the email address. The subject line I'm just going to use thank you and welcome aboard. And I'm going to do it in HTML, but you don't necessarily have
• 252:30 - 253:00 to. You could do this in plain text if you wanted to. The way that you do it in HTML is HTML uses some tags. Uh specifically this one tag called BR. And so basically every time you do a BR it's a new line. So I'm doing two BRs between every um piece of text here so that there's two new lines between them. And then between this one, I'll do one. So when you know somebody receives this email, well, we can actually test this right now. When I run this module and then I type in the email address and I think this is going to work. I mean, I am
• 253:00 - 253:30 sending this to myself, so maybe there'll be an issue of some kind. Oh, sorry. I need to reauthorize my connection. Just give me one second. We'll just add a new one. Call it Google. And we'll go and make it leftclick.ai. We'll go July 19th, 2024. This is what you have to do if you've never set it up before. It'll um open another window that allows you to select your Gmail account. And once you've connected the two, it'll verify. Once it's verified, this little button will go purple. You
• 253:30 - 254:00 can go ahead and send it. And I think you can send it to yourself. Not entirely sure. Yeah, you can. Okay, great. And you know, at this point, I've just automated this email. The benefit here is, you know, the way that I've written this copies just seems very incidental and it seems very like, hey, how's it going? I totally just wrote this myself, which is great. You can imagine how you could do the exact same thing for our other piece of copy. And uh what else you could do is you could add a little bit of a sleep module. And you could say that I don't want I want to delay let's say 240 seconds. So I want to delay 4 minutes
• 254:00 - 254:30 basically. And this is going to be wait 4 minutes. I'm going to call this grab data from CRM. Right? If you're using ClickUp or Monday or Pipe Drive or whatever, you would just use like the retrieve record uh module here. And then what we want to do is we need to use a router uh because we just want to send this to two places. So this is going to be route number one and this is going to be route number two. This is going to be send thank you email and then this one's going to be send onboarding
• 254:30 - 255:00 email. And then all I'm going to do is I'll go over to next steps and then I'm just going to change um the email copy so that instead of what I had before, now I have this. And because I'm going to be doing two BRs in a row, I'm just going to copy paste, copy, paste, copy, paste, copy, paste. And then uh because it's HTML, if you want to embed a link, you need to use this format, this A tag with an ending A tag. And this needs to go to where you want it to go. I'm just going to pretend this going to this calendar
• 255:00 - 255:30 right over here, which is my like discovery sales call calendar. Um, and the last thing is I'm just going to write an email here. Call it next steps. make sure that you know the connection is correct and everything. This looks good to me. Let me just make this a little sexier. Uh and then what I'm also going to do is I'm going to add one more sleep here so that when I do ultimately send the email, um there's some like offset between uh the first one up here and then the second one over here. Make will run these um one after another. So it'll start up here and then it'll go down here afterwards. So let's say it'll take
• 255:30 - 256:00 me another 3 minutes or so to to write the email or something hypothetically. And now what'll happen is um we'll grab the data from the CRM when the new event comes in. We'll wait four minutes. We'll then send the first email. And then we'll go into the second route. Wait another what's this? 3 minutes and send the second email. And just for testing purposes, I'm just going to turn the delay here to one cuz I don't actually want to wait that long. And then uh I'm going to pretend that there's no event here and I'm just initiating the flow from this. But we'll just call this onboarding emails. I'm just going to give this
• 256:00 - 256:30 thing a little run. We're going to send that first email. Going to wait 3 minutes. Send the other email. If we go back, you'll see that essentially we've replicated the same event or the same idea that we had previously where uh they'll get a receipt um you know with a stripe transaction and then they'll get a thank you and welcome aboard and then they'll get a next steps email uh which is very very simple. As you can see, this is really one of those automations that I sh you not, it takes you like less than five minutes to set up. And then it's one of those automations that if you spend that five minutes to set it up, this will make you thousands of
• 256:30 - 257:00 dollars, tens of thousands of dollars over the course of the next 12 months simply for having the foresight to put that infrastructure in place. Obviously, you're going to have to connect the beginning part here with this web hook to your payment processor. So, that's something that I'm leaving out because I don't know what payment processor you're using. If you're using Stripe here, you would go to the Stripe module, go to the watch events module, and then you have to configure it to watch a payment intent events essentially, whatever the payment uh is that you're that you're getting. If you're using something like, I don't know, QuickBooks, hypothetically, um you
• 257:00 - 257:30 could watch uh a new event, you know, anytime an invoice is sent or received, you could, you know, have that run a variety of different ways to do it. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to export this blueprint and I'm just going to use this in my materials like as a as a lead magnet. And then I'm going to put this inside of the YouTube video so that you guys can just, you know, copy and paste this if you need to. All right, so that's it for gratitude and perception of progress. Um, at this point, as I mentioned, they've received three or four emails very quickly and it's just super straightforward and easy for them to get started, which is nice. The second major problem, as I mentioned
• 257:30 - 258:00 before, is client expectations. Now, client expectations, unfortunately, in the automation world, are very, very difficult to get right. And and I mean if you haven't done a lot of projects before, you will basically always screw this up. The simplest way to make some serious progress, you know, on this problem is just to spend like 2 minutes thinking about how much you want to communicate and how you want to be communicated with in a client relationship. Most agencies and service providers will never even spend like 2 minutes just thinking about this. And
• 258:00 - 258:30 it's why they tend to struggle with scaling their businesses and doing good things. But as I mentioned here, it's the simplest lever you could pull to eliminate 90% plus of problems. All you're doing is you're telling the client, "Hey, this is how often I'm going to communicate with you. This is where I'm going to communicate with you." For instance, hey, I'll be available 12 until 2 p.m. PT on Slack every day if you have any questions. And you're going to get progress updates on Tuesdays and Fridays, EOD. Hey, I'm going to send you an email at the end of the day, every day, Monday to Friday. Just going to summarize where we're at. If I have any blockers, if I need your help on something or whatever, we'll deal with it then. And the goal here is
• 258:30 - 259:00 just to ensure we're consistently make progress towards your delivery. There are dozens more examples that you could pick from. I'm just choosing a couple of random ones that you can use as inspiration, whether you're on Slack, whether they prefer email. Hell, some of them might even prefer a call. Uh, and it's really up to you to determine whether or not that's something that you're willing to do. So, I acknowledge here that there is an optimal communication style and probably an optimal communication frequency, but you can probably deliver more than 90% of the results here by literally just telling them how often you're going to communicate with them and then just sticking with it. So, maybe you
• 259:00 - 259:30 communicate with them once a month or something. I don't know. If you just tell them you're going to communicate them once a month and then you give them that expectation and then you hold to your expectation, um you're going to do much better than somebody that communicates with somebody 30 times a month, but they never really tell them when and why they're doing it. my own personal SOP for this. Um, in the past I did once per week and I thought once per week was good because it would, you know, allow me to be very autonomous and I wouldn't have to communicate with them often and I don't really like jumping on all these silly calls just to give progress updates and that sort of deal. But I did occasionally run into a few
• 259:30 - 260:00 issues and the specific issues were clients felt like I wasn't keeping them in the loop. they tended to wonder when things were going to be delivered um even though I told them before and essentially they just sort of forgot about me and uh it led to a couple of client blowups from every now and then. It was nothing major, but you know, if we're trying to be as efficient as performant as possible, obviously that's something that I could have changed, right? So now what I'm doing is two times per week and I give them a defined Slack availability where they can expect me to respond to them within 10 or 15 minutes. Um, and that tends to be, you
• 260:00 - 260:30 know, about an hour or 2 hour slot. What I do is I just batch all of my clients for that hour or 2 hour slot and then I just know, okay, like I got to be by the computer for, you know, 2 hours 12 to 2 p.m. PT, for instance. In practice, clients will rarely ask me questions. And usually what I do is I just work on other during that time anyway and I'm just like buy my computer. So that adds a ton of value. This defines Slack availability. Although obviously, you know, you have to make sure that your client is the type of client that wants to work on Slack. A lot of clients don't like Slack. A lot of clients use Teams instead or they use email or whatever. So just make sure whatever your offer is is sustainable essentially. Okay.
• 260:30 - 261:00 Problem number two that you can easily eliminate is kind of the stress at how the project is proceeding and when the project will be completed. And the simplest and easiest way to do this is to spend another 2 minutes upfront just setting the timeline. As most of us probably unfortunately know, the vast majority of projects that any service provider will ever do for any client uh will be behind schedule. Their project timelines are almost always optimistic and as a result uh there's always some things that they didn't really account for that uh crop up during the project. They end up being late. for simpler
• 261:00 - 261:30 automation projects, especially some of the ones like what I was just showing you back here. I mean, this is like what, not even 10 modules here. It took me five minutes. It's absolutely ridiculous that you would be behind schedule for something like that. Like that is something that you should be able to do in a few minutes. You probably shouldn't do it in a few minutes cuz you do want the client to feel as if there was some work that goes into it. Of course, we need some social, you know, we need some nuance here. Uh but it's not something that, you know, you should set a timeline for 3 weeks for and then deliver in five, right? you can realistically do most of the work
• 261:30 - 262:00 that you're going to be demanded in a few hours if you're smart about it and if you work with software platforms that you know and if you take advantage of templates like I've talked about in previous videos. So one of the simplest ways to retain your automation clients and to basically multiply your revenue is to set a reasonably generous schedule, not super generous but reasonably generous and then just exceed the expectations by delivering ahead of it. So for instance if you wanted to set up some big email system let's say we had like 10 of these scenarios or something hypothetically uh 10 times 5 minutes takes me about an hour to do. I'd probably set like a 3 to 5 day turnaround time for that and then I'd
• 262:00 - 262:30 deliver it by like the second day or something and I'd say, "Hey, how's it going?" You know, had a lot of additional time. I wanted to make sure that we could deal that I could handle this and give it to you ahead of schedule to see if there was any more work that you needed or something like that. Very, very simple thing to do. Uh, but you'd be surprised at how much money that it leaves on the table when you don't do it. Okay. Another thing is this doesn't have to be complicated. I gave a quick example here of some AI scenario where you're doing some prompt engineering. July 19th to 22nd, I'm doing prompt engineering. July 23rd to 26th, I'm doing the make.com scenarios. July 27th to 30th, I'm doing testing and delivery. And then when you deliver your
• 262:30 - 263:00 final project on July 27th as opposed to 30th, the client will be really impressed. Right? I give you a quick example of just some little snippets that you can write to them in order to drop that. The last thing that you could solve very easily with onboarding is the win condition. And what I mean by win condition is I mean the set of conditions that a client needs to see before they consider the project completed and done. So a lot of the time we'll never just have that conversation. And if you think about it, it's a very logical conversation. Hey, when am I going to be
• 263:00 - 263:30 done? Like what sorts of boxes do I need to check before our project is over? The problem with not doing this is a lot of the time the client's internal win conditions will be different from your win conditions. And so you will deliver a project that you think is done and that you know delivers the win condition and they'll be like, "Huh, I wonder why you didn't deliver X, Y, and Z. Hey man, when are you going to do X, Y, and Z?" Now you're doing more work than you were initially banking on. the client is unhappy. And this is just the sort of way that projects lead to unfortunately. So, a quick example of this is, you know, a lot of the guys in
• 263:30 - 264:00 my community right now are starting to sell lead generation projects because I've shown uh, you know, provided ample amount of material showing people how to sell lead generation projects and it's quite an easy and and productizable offer. But if you are selling a lead generation project, what are you actually giving to the client? Like, what are they actually getting at the end of it? They're not just getting leads, right? Your deliverable is a lot more specific than leads. Your deliverable is hypothetically on July 30th, you will have a completed air table that automatically populates with new positive responses from your smart lead campaign. Your campaign will
• 264:00 - 264:30 operate Monday to Friday from 7:00 to 7:00 using our best-in-class copyrightiting formula. And you'll also get Slack notifications every time a new one comes in to minimize the response time. You'll get an SOP sheet that you can use yourself or to hire an outreach manager to do the response management for you. And I'm also going to give you a video walking you through the system from start to finish. Okay, that is a perfect example of a win condition. If you check all of those boxes, the project is completed. If you leave some of those boxes unchecked, your end of the bargain is still not completed. Just have that conversation with the client
• 264:30 - 265:00 ahead of time. And if you do, the vast majority of the problems that most other service providers have, like with repeat revisions over and over and over again or with client scope creep going out of control, they're not going to be a problem for you. And all of the other people that are in your industry are going to be looking at you being like, "How the hell does that guy deal with this? was super unscopable, difficult projects. I have no idea what sort of magic witchcraft he's doing cuz you know I get a lot of people asking me that. Okay, so that is the second problem which is client expectations, right? First problem was um buyer's remorse.
• 265:00 - 265:30 Second problem is client expectations. The third problem is uh the logistics and basically how do we deal with all the 5 million moving parts that automation contains? Well, there are three very simple ways to do so. The first is by prepping for so what I always do is I always do an onboarding call and I realize now I probably should have had this before this but um anyway I normally do an onboarding call and you know that's why the person books an event in the calendar link that I sent over right and on that onboarding call I will have them sign up to all the
• 265:30 - 266:00 platforms that I need them to sign up for in order to do the job and make sure that it's all done. And the simplest way to streamline that onboarding call is simply to itemize all of the platforms that they're going to need access to in advance and then build them a list of very simple instructions that they can follow on that onboarding call in order to sign up for all those platforms that they need. You can send this in the above email. Um like if you wanted to create a PDF and like you know attach something, you could do that. But either way, they need to know what they need to do in order to make your onboarding call success. It's sort of like the win condition of the onboarding call, right?
• 266:00 - 266:30 A quick example of what I mean by itemized platforms is literally just let's say they need to sign up for make.com. It's super simple. This might take you like 15 minutes to put together for all platforms. You just give them instructions on how to get going. Hey, head to this thing. Sign up with this for hosting region. Select US. Click register. Right, ABCDE EFG. The fact that you have all this prepared will make a very big impression on the clients and they'll tend to think that you know you've done this again tons of times before and you know you're very on top of your ship. It'll also just make it very easy for them and um make the onboarding call a lot less uh basically
• 266:30 - 267:00 you're going to mitigate a lot of the friction on onboarding calls. There's also some situations where the client has signed up to a platform on their own using OOTH or similar um meaning they'll have two-factor authentication. And if you guys have built any automation projects up until now, you'll know two-factor authentication is like the bane of an automation engineer's existence. It's freaking terrible. uh because you know in order to bypass it you need to the client needs to get a text message and they need to send you the response and then you need to plug that response in within a certain amount of time and if they don't do it within a certain amount
• 267:00 - 267:30 of time the code is wrong so it resends it and it's just very difficult to coordinate you know when that occurs. Some platforms also require you to do this multiple times which can be massive pain in the ass. And uh generally speaking, you know, that's really where like a lot of the value in an onboarding call comes from because you just get to sidestep all like the logistical that typically plagues most automation specialists. The other edge case here on onboarding calls is clients don't understand the underlying technologies and they struggle with things like giving you access with the username and password, giving you credentials, that sort of thing. So um
• 267:30 - 268:00 you know having an onboarding call where you are just physically present and you screen share with them essentially uh solves so much of this because now you can just like guide them through hey the hm you don't remember your password for that well let's see here do you mind sharing your screen okay great why don't you click on this button and then click on that button and then go there right or if it's two-factor authentication okay you just got a text message all right that makes sense yeah sure what's the code and then you just deal with it right then and there this usually takes about 15 minutes and the benefit to this that not a lot of people talk about is it lets them feel in control of their data and their security like a lot of
• 268:00 - 268:30 automation specialists um will just sign up to all the platforms for them. That's what I used to do uh because it just you know moved me a lot faster if I'm honest. But by doing this I've noticed that clients just tend to respect our relationship a lot more. They tend to realize and understand the value that I'm providing because to a lot of them like all this tech stuff is super intimidating right and then it also makes them feel a little bit more secure which is nice. They're not like sending their credentials in plain text over email or something. Um they're doing it you know directly through um through through like a call and I'm there to see it. uh which is quite nice. Uh and you
• 268:30 - 269:00 know again it's not necessarily the most secure thing. It's just we're providing the impression of security which the client is the thing that matters the most. By the end of the onboarding call you'll have everything that you need in order to finish the project and the client is also going to be really excited to kick off. But the big question is obviously Nick what the hell is the onboarding call? And don't worry I put together a lovely template for you that I used I used to use in basically every onboarding call. Now, I don't actually really use this template anymore just because I've like memorized all these steps. Um, and I sort of have fun with it um as needed. But let me just jump over here. This is what the
• 269:00 - 269:30 template looks like. It's very simple and very straightforward as you can tell. Literally just, hey, thank you very much for joining. So, we're, you know, giving them some gratitude. And then I just um explain to them the schedule of the call and like what I'm going to be doing and why I'm doing it. So, um I'll always just say, hey, so thanks so much for jumping on the call. Uh, you know, the biggest issue in the space, and I've worked with dozens of people, hundreds of people on projects at this point, is logistics. If you've ever had a project on automation, you'll know that two-factor authentication is a massive pain in the ass. Passwords are a massive pain in the ass. All of this stuff ends up being a massive nightmare
• 269:30 - 270:00 and can really prevent projects from moving forward. So, I just sidestep all that by frontloading the onboarding call. And uh, it's just the most effective and simplest way I've found of doing this. Does that make sense? Everybody's like, "Yeah, of course." And then, you know, I align the call by giving them my road map. What are we going to do in the next 20 minutes? Well, first we're going to cover timelines. We're going to talk about how best to stay in touch with each other, what you can expect basically at every part of the project and that sort of deal. Then we're going to sign up to all the platforms listed. I've already prepared a bunch of detailed instructions which I just sent you in the chat. Um, this will enable you to
• 270:00 - 270:30 literally just go from top to bottom, sign up to all these platforms, and then I'll have access before the end of the call. And then if any of these platforms require two-factor authentication, I'll be able to like request a code immediately right in front of you. You'll get it on your phone and you can just tell me what the code is. That way I don't need to like, I don't know, borrow you for 15 minutes randomly at 8 PM on a Tuesday, right? We can just streamline all of that right now. Um, the last thing we'll do is we'll just have a little Q&A period and if you have any questions that you've been wondering about um before we actually start the project, I can just answer them then. Does that make sense? Great. All right,
• 270:30 - 271:00 let's get started. And you just proceed from top to bottom. It's a very simple process, of course, and there are better onboarding procedures out there to be sure, but this is one that I've used and it's one that worked for me. From there, all you have to do is actually go out there and do the freaking project, which is obviously the more complicated part. But the good news is you have everything that you need in order to thrive. Um, at this point, you have every platform access piece of credential, two-factor authentication. You have all that stuff taken care of. The client also understands the timeline. They have
• 271:00 - 271:30 great expectations in place for when you're going to be communicating with and you've essentially inoculated yourself against the major issues in providing services, right? on the good onboarding process uh makes for a good project. And ever since I started implementing like consistent onboarding, I found that the value of my projects and like the retention rate on the clients that I get, especially initially because I usually do like a small onetime project to start and I do like a repeated um retainer afterwards is like five or 10 times higher. It's
• 271:30 - 272:00 stupid. Last thing I'm going to say to this before I jump off here is that you can do this with yourself or with a small team. You don't have to do this with like a big giant like you don't need a giant team in order to do onboarding, right? One uh unfortunate thing that I've seen a couple of companies do is for whatever reason like I was actually just working at a company that did this like 2 months ago. They had a team of uh maybe six or seven people and every time they onboarded a new client they got all of their people on the call to like say, "Hey, how's it going? Thank you very much for signing up." And I kind of get the idea of this, but it was it was massive overkill. You
• 272:00 - 272:30 don't need to do this at all. As you saw earlier, you can do the automations in less than 5 minutes, and that's including the receipts. Um, all you have to do is, you know, you can use some of my copy, borrow it if you want, or you can just come up with your own. Um, all you need to do is just think for another 15 minutes about how best to define your win conditions, how best to set a timeline, and how best to define your comps and frequency. That's something that all of us here can do within a few minutes, which is quite nice. And then, uh, you know, you just follow a simple onboarding call SOP. Do it a couple times, and you'll know like the back of your hand by the third or fourth. So,
• 272:30 - 273:00 it's very very simple and very straightforward and automation is a leverage here. You know, this isn't something that requires really more than just a few maybe an hour of thought max. As I mentioned a couple times throughout the call, onboarding just provides a lift to everything else. Your retention, your relationship, the ticket sizes that you can charge and that sort of thing. Um, and the number one thing that it's actually done for me that I did not include here is it's really improved my reputation. This is a much smaller market and a smaller world than most people think. I mean technically, you know, if you're in automation, you can work with anybody because you're just improving their margins and you're
• 273:00 - 273:30 improving their topline and increasing the efficiency of their processes and that sort of thing. But I find in practice my name gets around quite a lot more and it has been not just because of this YouTube channel, um, but because of just the way that I work with clients. Uh, so if you're looking for a type of business where, you know, you have like very high referral rate, you know, for every 10 clients you get, they refer you to an average of five or something like that, the best way to do it is with a very strong onboarding process. Um, and just setting yourself up for success. Great. We've now successfully ran you through how to onboard a client and set clear expectations. Now comes ultimately
• 273:30 - 274:00 the moment of truth, which is actually delivering the automation project in a way that'll impress the hell out of them and then set you up for that repeat business that we keep talking about. Most AI automation providers focus only on building the system, but the real money is not actually in the build. I know this is crazy, but the real money is in how you deliver the build. Your delivery process determines whether clients see you as just another builder or an integrator or a freelancer or as a strategic partner that makes decisions and that they can't really live without if they want to continue operating at such great margins. This next section is going to talk through my exact step-by-step delivery process from end to end. We're going to be talking about
• 274:00 - 274:30 testing to creating documentation that makes clients feel like they got way more value than they paid for. We're also going to cover how to minimize revisions, maximize perceived value, then ultimately position you guys in a really good spot for retainer agreements, too. Let's get into it. I'm going to walk you through every one of these steps in excruciating detail, but just before I do, I just want to show you guys the example system I'm going to be using. Um, I'm keeping this super simple. This is just a super straightforward four module system that I built that literally just scrapes my own school community once every hour and it just tells me if the member count is
• 274:30 - 275:00 400. I built this a few months back, back when I needed to do stuff like this. I now have much more sophisticated systems for this, but we're just going to be using this as my like finish system. Obviously, you know, I could use other systems, but part of what I'm going to be showing you guys in a minute is like how to do documentation, how to increase the perceived value of your projects at the most crucial steps, and I don't really want to have to do the documentation for this. It would just take too long and kind of defeat the purpose. So, we're going to start with a simple four module system. I want you guys to know that you can apply this to whatever system you're running. Exact same approach. Doesn't matter if it's four modules, 400 modules, although I
• 275:00 - 275:30 highly recommend you do not build 400 module flows, but I think you guys get my point. Okay, great. So, let's actually dive into my step-by-step automation process here. This is the most effective way I found to deliver high-quality automation projects at scale. Period. I've experimented with dozens of approaches. This way, from what I can see, is the best. The way that this works is, and if you follow this system, you know, you guys will see what I mean. But the way that this works is this maximizes the retention of my
• 275:30 - 276:00 customers and it lets me get my foot in the door for upsells later on that include things like a second project, things like a monthly retainer. It also impresses them and it like makes asks to do those upsells at very particular points that I think a lot of people don't appreciate are very high ROI times to do so. So in a nutshell, when the project is completed, what we do first is we do an endto-end test. This is really important. I'm going to dive in exactly how to do it with some examples in a moment. Then we're going to copy all of our blueprints and templates for that project. This is the secret to
• 276:00 - 276:30 scalability with an automation agency. If you're not doing this, then uh basically every time you get a new project, you're starting from scratch, which is silly. We should really be doing is building a whole automation template library so that next time that you're faced with uh final boss, you don't have to start them at 100% health. You could start them at 20%. I'll show you guys how to do that in a second. Then we're going to record some SOPs or documentation. The reason why we do this is because automation is sort of like ephemeral. Like automation, if you think about it, is just a bunch of bits and zeros and ones stored on cloud servers
• 276:30 - 277:00 and god knows where. It's very hard for a client to conceptualize the value of this. So, you need to increase the deliverables that you're providing them as much as you can. And a video is a quick way to do so. It's something that they can see. It's something they can hear. Um, and it's something that they're going to think adds value to the project, even if it only took you 10 or 15 minutes. We're then going to turn that Loom SOP into a text SOP using large language models and screenshots. That is again something that's going to take you like 5 minutes, but it's going to double the perceived value of the documentation. We're then going to dive deep into the client business and we're
• 277:00 - 277:30 going to see ways that we can actually like scope out a proposal to to do retainer services and we're going to deliver this in a templated delivery email that just like uh you know hits all the notes, make sure that you get everything you need. If you're doing some type of platform sales, you'll make sure that you get your review taken care of. Uh it's going to maximize the probability of you receiving a paid invoice as opposed to just hanging there waiting. I'm then going to talk about how to minimize revisions, how to frame your project in such a way that allows you uh to, you know, confidently deliver thing without actually having to be like, hey, is everything okay? Like, do
• 277:30 - 278:00 you want some changes? Which I used to do a lot back when I was starting and absolutely murdered my service uh deliveries. And then, you know, we'll we'll deliver the project. And as you can see, I've sort of created a little loop here where it just goes from eight back to one. Uh, and so on and so on and so forth. So, this is a loop. That's how I want you guys to think about it. Let's jump in with our very first example, which is what to do when your project just finished and it's time to do the delivery and actually give it to the client. So, this is the endto-end testing part. This is one of the most important steps in the entire automation
• 278:00 - 278:30 agency business model. I want you to think about this logically. Let's say you spend 30 hours developing the best project ever known to man. It is so amazing. It's an automation that summons God. I don't know. It's really cool. All right. It does some just amazing Let's say it does everything the client wanted and it makes them a million billion dollars a day. But when it comes time to deliver that project, there's just a little I don't know, you added an extra semicolon somewhere in one of the text parsers assumption and it just it doesn't work.
• 278:30 - 279:00 The first time the client tries to use it, it doesn't work. How much value do you think that you have just destroyed for yourself by having that system not work? It doesn't matter if you spent a million hours building it. If it doesn't work when you deliver it, it's as if you spent zero hours on it. The client perception is going to be basically the same. So end toend testing ETO is by far one of the most important parts of any service delivery. Whether it's automations, whether you're doing some marketing campaign, whether you're doing
• 279:00 - 279:30 some security, it whatever the hell across business models, if you don't just give everything a onceover before you give it to your client, you are shooting yourself in the foot and you're wasting a massive opportunity. So, an actual end to-end test, like logistically, is just where you execute your flow from start to finish as if you were your client. and you make sure that every one of the modules in your flow like if you're using make or something like that activate even if you have filters even if you have um I don't know several routes or several subsequences or or
• 279:30 - 280:00 whatnot. It's obviously very tempting to think that, well, hey, I just spent 30 hours on this thing. Like, I I get how it works, okay? I've just isolated. I've ran this module and that module and that module, but trust me when I say I can't tell you how many times I have thought the exact same thing, and then I deliver a project that maybe a client paid three, four, $5,000 for, and their first thing is like, "Nick, this isn't working." Like, you're just you're obliterating your odds of getting a retainer, a follow-up. Uh, you don't want to do that. You want to be very detail- oriented with the stuff. Um, and you know, as I always mention in my videos, like retention unlocks a massive amount of leverage here. That's what
• 280:00 - 280:30 we're going to talk about. All right. So, I have this little scenario set up here as I mentioned previously. Let me just walk you all through it so we're on the same page. It makes a HTTP request to school/makemoneywithmake/about. You know, the little get method. Then we parse the text uh turn it into sorry, we parse the HTML, turn it into text. That's what that looks like. And as you see, there is a very important little snippet right here. Private group 400 members. That's basically what we're looking for. We're looking for that little number 400. So, what do we do?
• 280:30 - 281:00 Logically, we're going to use a reax here. I'm going to just be feeding it in a very simple pattern, private group, and then this is what I'm looking for. Space members. I don't need all of this text, but I just copy and paste it in. It worked one time, and I was like, "All right, good enough for me." And then last but not least, you know, if the number is not 400, we create a message in Slack and I publish it to my leftclick sales channel, right? Voila. We have our our code here. It's like a little block formatting. You could just use plain text, nothing special. But if I uh if I jump to my Slack, this is what
• 281:00 - 281:30 the notification looks like. I just ran this again because I wanted to test that last module, but let's just use this one. MMWN member count is no longer 400. Current member count 399, right? Um the purpose of the system way back in the day was just to like notify me when stuff like this would happen. I don't really use it anymore. But yeah. All right. So, I need to somehow magically get back to the screen. Should be good. Working with two monitors is weird. Uh awesome. So now that we understand what the system looks like, the question is like how how do you actually go about end to end testing this thing? Well,
• 281:30 - 282:00 it's pretty simple. Um all you need to do is you just need to run every single module. Uh and you don't want to do so isolated. You don't just want to click run this module only. You don't want to just click run this module only. You you don't just want to do that and work your way down. You actually want to run it as if the client were to use it. In my case, this is scheduled to run once every let's just say 60 minutes. So I'm actually just going to click run. We're going to see what happens. Okay, cool. Number one, that executed fine. This looks like it executed fine. That looks like it executed fine, but there's some filter here and we can't actually see the execution of that last module. Uhoh.
• 282:00 - 282:30 So, what we need to do is in order for us to have fully end tested everything in our flow, we're going to need to find a way to either remove that filter or or just have it run anyway. So, uh this is not 400. So, it says if you know this number is not equal to 400, then it'll run. I'm just going to go like 401, you know, just so I can really quickly run it. And let me just change this number here too, just so that it doesn't seem weird. Okay, great. Let's run this. Awesome, awesome, awesome. What is the intended output? The intended output is a message that says make money with make
• 282:30 - 283:00 member count is no longer 401. And then we have a current member count of 400. Perfect. So now I'm I'm going to go back here and I'm going to very intentionally just make sure that I reverse that change. And this is the same production ready system it was just a second ago. Awesome. And uh yeah, now I am good. I can continue onwards with my system. I've verified that, you know, I have every module here working the way
• 283:00 - 283:30 that I want it to work. I'm I'm good. I I don't need to worry about this anymore. As you see, that took maybe 2 or 3 minutes. It's by far the most valuable two or three minutes that you are going to spend throughout this entire process. If you forego this two or three minutes for some other reason, you are making a very big strategic error. You're always going to want to do some type of end testing in your system. Okay, great. Let's talk a little bit about step two, which is copying blueprints and templates. This is hyper important. If you think about this logically, automation and software engineering are one of the only
• 283:30 - 284:00 industries that you can effectively do this. But let's hypothetically say that you just spent 20 hours working on a project and you were just making, I don't know, the project was like 500 bucks, okay? Really small project. You made 25 bucks an hour with this. You're like killing yourself. You're like, "What the hell is wrong with me? Why can't I make more money than 25 bucks an hour? I'm a useless automation agency and I should just stop." Well, I want you to think about it this way. Um, you didn't just spend 20 hours to solve this project. You spent 20 hours to solve every instance of this project ever. If
• 284:00 - 284:30 you ever get this project again or a variant of this project, you now have blueprints and templates that allow you to get 99% of the job done in 5 seconds. So, sure, it might have taken you 20 hours at the very beginning, but the second time it'll take you 30 minutes. The third time it'll take you two minutes. The fourth time it might take you 30 seconds. Maybe you build an automation that delivers the automations, right? It's kind of like Apex um stuff and that's what a lot of people aim for. So, the point that I'm making is the reason why automation as
• 284:30 - 285:00 an industry is so freaking awesome is because once you're done, you can just copy and paste this forever. The issue is most people do not save their blueprints when they develop them for clients, especially on like other client environments and stuff like that. And so, I made this mistake a lot when I was starting. If I had, you know, been very organized about the way that I copied all my blueprints, clocked all my templates, change, you know, when I say templates, I mean like the ClickUp environment, I mean like the the Monday environment, if I had been a little better with this, I think I probably would have been able to hit at least another, you know, $30 $40,000 a month. I think I would have been able to make
• 285:00 - 285:30 at least $100,000 a month with the automation agency. Um, but I didn't, you know, I was pretty disorganized. I said, "Ah, well, maybe I'll just I'll just copy it later." And lo and behold, you know, a year or two later, everything's disorganized. I have no idea what system is which. I don't have access to a few of my client environments anymore. I've lost a lot of that leverage that I could have gotten. So, what I highly recommend you guys do is after every one of your projects is done, download all of the blueprints if you're in make.com, download the I don't know, scenarios or
• 285:30 - 286:00 or n10 JSON if you're using another platform and store them in a Google Drive or similar. Um, so I have a very simple folder structure set up here. As you can see, I just called it the name of my company. Left click. Underneath we have just my clients and inside of them, you know, there's this one called NSM, Nick Media. I'm not very creative clearly. Uh, and inside of that we have MMWM, member account scraper, Slack notifications. So, this is where I'd store that blueprint. So, what I would actually do is literally I would go here, I would export this blueprint, okay? And then I would go back over and
• 286:00 - 286:30 drag it in just so that I have an organized record of every blueprint that I've ever made. And then just to make it even better and more organized, I'd actually copy the name of this scenario. Um, because make and has the unfortunate tendency to just call it like blueprint 5.json or whatever. Um, and then I just I' I'd name it that just so I know, you know, let's say 6 months from now when I come in and get a similar project and I want to copy and paste this. So that's personally the way that I highly
• 286:30 - 287:00 recommend you guys do things. Um, if I had done this from the very get-go, if I had done this from day one with my agency, I would have made a lot more money and it also just would have probably spent way less work rebuilding the wheel 55 million times. Um, but I'm going to leave it at that. All right, so step three in our system is to record a Loom standard operating procedure. What exactly do I mean by this? Well, you need to understand that automations are ephemeral. They are virtual. They don't really exist, right? The vast majority of the clients that you're going to be working with are
• 287:00 - 287:30 going to be working with you because you're like a technology expert. You're an automation expert. You typically know more about like cloud stuff than they do. So to you, these automations have value, right? You're working with them. It's drag and dropping across a screen. They they do stuff, right? But to a client, you know, especially a client that you've like done most of the work away from, sort of this black box thing, their ability to conceptualize the value of your automation is very limited. And so what you need to do instead of just delivering the automation is you need to
• 287:30 - 288:00 find excuses to add some more onto them. Uh you know, instead of just delivering a blueprint, let's say, which I highly recommend you never do. You actually record a video that goes in-depth walking through what the automation does from start to finish. It shows the the the result of the automation. It shows how to make changes to the automation if necessary. You're there so you can kind of walk them through and frame how great your system is. Give them some ideas. obviously charm them with your personality. Uh but this is essentially like another deliverable that you are providing alongside your system and alongside what
• 288:00 - 288:30 the system is supposed to produce which just instantly buys you uh an extra win. If you think about it, if my deliverables previously were the system and now my now now my deliverables are the system and a loom. I basically doubled the number of deliverables but I've done so in like 15 minutes or so. Now I've actually recorded a whole loom here for you guys and I'm not going to go through that loom in this video. I think it's right over here. Yeah, I'm not going to go through the whole loom in this video, but this is exactly the format that I take every time I do uh you know like a documentation or video walkthrough. I typically start off with just like a brief introduction of what
• 288:30 - 289:00 the purpose of this video is. I will never ever say like, "Hey, Peter, how's it going? Great delivery, man. I'm going to walk you through it." I'll always say something like, "Hey, the purpose of this video is to act as video documentation for Peter Blank's team. I'm going to ensure that you guys know how this works, and I'm also going to ensure that you guys can make some common changes to the system if need be. The reason why is cuz I just want them to be able to copy and paste it to their team members as necessary. If you do little things like this, they'll appreciate it and they'll also think like, man, this person really knows business. I mean, if they're just making my life that easy and it helps. Anyway,
• 289:00 - 289:30 uh, you know, you go through, you talk about the use case, you talk about what the system is for, the problems the system solves, you actually walk them through if they wanted to make some changes to this. If they wanted to, let's see, change the scheduling from 60 to 30 minutes, they could do it that way. If they wanted to change uh, the message that they're getting, they could do it this way. uh you actually go through and you like record a very detailed comprehensive video that walks them through this. And this does like a couple of things um that that I consider bonuses. One, your client is going to think that it's a bonus cuz they weren't really expecting to get anything at this level of detail. And they're going to
• 289:30 - 290:00 think that you spent a lot more time on it than you probably did. But like remember, you've just been working with this system for god knows how long. You know everything about this. Like it's it's not that big of an ask to have you just talk through those thoughts out loud, right? You realistically do it in like 10, 15, 20 minutes. But the second and probably one of the most important issues is you get the chance to show off a little. You also get the chance to shape the client perception. Like again, you know, automations are these ephemeral things that just exist in the cloud. If you are here walking people through that automation, you have the ability to turn it from something that's
• 290:00 - 290:30 ephemerraable, ephemeral and, you know, virtual or whatever into something physical, right? You can constantly relate this back to ROI, demonstrable um some type of like demonstrable savings or demonstrable revenue. uh you could talk about, you know, the complexities of the system. You can treat yourself as an authority essentially and really sell yourself even more than you've already done. Um so I I highly recommend you guys record Loom SOPs anywhere uh for any service that you do, whether it's, you know, automation or any anything else that's technical. It's obviously going to put you miles ahead of other
• 290:30 - 291:00 service providers. And then yeah, you know, it takes you like 20 minutes. That's about it. Like it's super fast and easy to do realistically. Um, and the cool thing is once you have a piece of Loom documentation, you can very easily turn this into other forms of documentation as well, particularly text documentation. The value here is not only have you just created a video. So, so you know, if we go back a little bit, like at the very beginning, your first deliverable would have only been the system, right? But then you made a video documentation. So, now you have two
• 291:00 - 291:30 deliverables instead. And now what you're doing is you're literally just copying and pasting the Loom transcript into GPT4 or a large language model and you're saying, "Hey, turn this into a standard operating procedure." In like three or four minutes, you're turning the deliverables from two into three. You're basically tripling the perceived value of this on the customer side of things. And you're giving them more that they can touch, feel, hold, uh, and so on and so forth. And so, uh, you know, this is a reasonably simple prompt. I'm not going to get super deep into the prompt engineering, but I'm going to show you guys an example of what this might actually look like in practice. just drag this puppy all the
• 291:30 - 292:00 way over here. What I did was I went to my Loom video, right? And then let me just uh not make this other one full screen. That way we can actually like jump through tabs and stuff. Okay, great. So, I went to my Loom video which is right over here. And then, you know, I watched it back which took me I don't know like 5 minutes at 2x speed. And while I was watching it, what I did was I just took screenshots. I just did this. You know, on a Mac it's uh command command shift or command control shift 4 or something. I literally did this and then I went
• 292:00 - 292:30 back to GPT and then I pasted that image in and then I did this in three or four key areas that I think that uh you know like the person would need some visual help for in my documentation. Then I just said you are writing documentation for an automation system that manages whatever company I said cleaning company in this instance. Below is a transcript and several images from a video that we recently recorded. Convert these transcripts and images into a piece of text documentation. Use markdown ATX formatting. I then went to my Loom video. I clicked on the transcript button up here and then I clicked copy
• 292:30 - 293:00 and I just pasted it all in here. And then what did we get at the end? Make money with make member count scraper documentation overview. This documentation outlines the functionality blah blah blah blah blah. Right here we have our whole documentation. Basically, it's extraordinarily simple for us to do. And as you can see, starting from the very top and then give that a paste. There we go. Okay, great. So now we have basically like a full Google doc that's up and running, ready to go. Looks
• 293:00 - 293:30 really sexy, you know, even includes some formatting with the the URLs and stuff like this and just walks people through what to do. And then, you know, I've experimented with having it output images as well. Um, unfortunately, I think Claude could do this. I don't think that chatbt40 can do this or perhaps I was experimenting with the API version. Uh, but what you can do is because you just included all these images in your prompt, you can actually just copy these and then just paste these directly in. So very simple, you know, as you can see, this just takes a couple of additional seconds. So I'm going to go
• 293:30 - 294:00 here. Then I'm going to go over here. I'm going to feed in I don't know. Let's just feed in this image here. Uh let's do this one here. Actually, we should do this first. That's probably higher quality. Probably makes more sense. Yeah. Great. And you know, now we have
• 294:00 - 294:30 some images. We have Just going to copy this and paste this on the Reax part. Somebody's going to yell at me for saying Reax again. Um, now we have like a pretty high quality text that we can just include alongside the delivery in a templated email, which I'll show you guys in a second. So, you know, that took me, I don't know, two or three minutes. I was obviously just pasting randomly. Might take you a full five. So, let's just go back here and not get myself in trouble
• 294:30 - 295:00 here. People always exaggerate on the internet. Um, you know, this might have taken you, let's say, 15 or 20. That might have taken you five. Realistically, you've spent less than half an hour, but you tripled the number of deliverables that the client is going to get. Not only are they going to appreciate it, but they're going to be very impressed, which is the perfect opportunity for us to get into actually thinking like, okay, you know, if they're super impressed in a perfect world, what more can I get from them? What more do I want from them? And what you probably want from them, if you're in the automation industry anyway, is you want a retainer of some kind. You want some type of subscription billing
• 295:00 - 295:30 model, some long-term upsell uh that allows you to work with this person not just on this one project, which you know might have given you a tangible ROI, but we want to talk, you know, months or years in the future, but consistently over time, generating some type of MR that, you know, you can depend on and then you can ultimately use to build revenue stability and and build the rest of your business. So, at this point, you are delivering a high-quality completed project. You're also delivering detailed video docs and training and then detailed text docs and training. This is crazy. They're getting three things here for the price of one. In contrast to
• 295:30 - 296:00 what most service providers do, which is they just only ever do this You're going above and beyond this. And you're giving them three deliverables for a few moments of extra work on your end. Half an hour. If you spent 5 hours to build the system, you spend an additional 30 minutes at the end doing all this stuff. You know, you're doing what's that 5.5, I don't know, 10% or something more work for like three times the results. This is the time to upsell. Now, what I personally do is I don't like try and sell my customer or client really hard. I'm I'm pretty soft about this if I'm honest. And I like to think that like I
• 296:00 - 296:30 buy myself a lot of goodwill with this. And this is why I've been as successful as I have. There are a lot of people out there that are like hard sales. You know, they'll probably recommend that you do a delivery on a call or something and then you try and bring this stuff up with them. I've always thought personally that that's like high pressure sales and I I used to do a lot of that stuff way back in the day and always just had a sour taste in my mouth. So personally what I do is I just try and just make the most sense possible and then I try and just give them really good over an email, peique their interest, then try and get them on a call to to chat about a retainer or or something of that nature.
• 296:30 - 297:00 The way that I do it is I will frame this in terms of client ROI. I'll say something like, "Hey, I think that you might be able to make an additional 10% here. I think I might be able to bump you up by another $20,000 a month there." And then I say a simple three bullet point snippet along with estimated returns. I then take that and then I include it in our next step. And you know, it's hard for me to really make this work without showing you this template. So, I'm just going to show you what this might actually look like. I'd also like to discuss that retainer. I see no reason why I can't add 5% or more into your margins with a few changes.
• 297:00 - 297:30 I'd need a bit more context to this effectively, but here's what I'd look to do in the next few weeks. Number one, I'd like to build out a dashboard that does this. Number two, I'd like to create a streamlined work management system for you that does that. Number three, I want to do something that does that. you know, if you could scale past 250K a month with 35% margins. We need to make some tweaks, you know, they sort of do the math and they're like, "Holy this guy could make me a lot of money." So, obviously, you're going to need to understand what the client business is in order to make this work. But that's what the whole consultative sales side is really. Like, you're getting to know them during that sales call, the disco call, and then you're
• 297:30 - 298:00 getting to know their business over the course of your project. You're getting to learn through their systems. You're getting to poke around their CRM. You're essentially getting to see what they're missing and where you can fill that gap. as an automation engineer, um whether you're an agency or freelancer or whatever, you have a ton of value after you've worked with two or three businesses because you could literally just look at like business A and be like, "Huh, business A is doing that wrong. Like that just looks really ineffective." Then you start working with business B and you're like, "Huh, business B is doing a really good job with that part. I wonder if I just like took some of the elements of business B or the systems I'm creating for business
• 298:00 - 298:30 B and applied them to business A, I wonder if they'd make more money." A lot of the time you will. Um, so this sort of sharing and like building your template base and consultant knowledge base can be really valuable and a lot of people just need like a simple uh bulletoint uh sort of thing in order to be like, "Holy yeah, you know what? I can do that. I am willing to spend money on this." Okay. Now, in terms of what this actually looks like, the second last step is to send a templated delivery email. At this point, you know, as I mentioned, we have these three features. We have the high quality completed project, the detailed video docs, the detailed text docs. Now, it's really just time to tie all this stuff up together in a nice bow and then just
• 298:30 - 299:00 like present it to the customer. So, I just have a pre-created template that I make a few modifications on. You could just save this and make this like a Gmail template or you could find a way to automate this completely. I automated this uh a little while ago, but then I found that even if the automation did it like way faster and it was like pretty good quality, I wanted the ability to make a few minor little changes that the automation just couldn't really do, like AI would struggle with. So, I personally send these myself. As as I mentioned, you know, it uses a template. It takes me like 10 minutes. And this is another really high ROI, 10 minutes to spend.
• 299:00 - 299:30 Um, before I do this, I do make sure that my client has access to everything that they need. I think that's really important. Not a lot of people talk about this, but I don't want my client to feel like pressured. I don't want them to think that they need to keep working with me in order for their system to continue running or in order for me to maintain it if that was the promise in the contract. They don't. Um, I want them to be able to make a decision from like a a place of strength and from a place of like cost benefit as opposed to fear. Um, and I think I think that's really important. Um, I don't know if everybody agrees with me on that
• 299:30 - 300:00 and I think, you know, you could be all Mchavelian and be strategic and about it and fine, whatever. But generally speaking, I've bought a lot of goodwill with this approach and it's worked really well for me. So that's what I do. I'll make sure that they have all the creds and everything like that, but after they do, um, then I move into a template. So you can swap out whatever bolded sections you want here. I've actually like included a real one that I sent to somebody and then I just made a few tweaks for anonymity purposes. But, you know, our blank name is ready. So maybe our CRM system is ready. I had a lot of fun working on this and hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Two things. This is where you claim your wins. I
• 300:00 - 300:30 recorded a detailed video breaking the system down that you can use as both documentation and training material. There's a technical section which covers how to modify the system if needed and a more general system to show users on your team how to use it in practice. Number two, I also put together a comprehensive Google doc just so you had something in both video and text format. This is where we're going to be putting our links. By the way, regarding payment, and this is really important, a lot of people forget to ask for money. you should always be asking for money no matter what. Um, even if the system is not entirely what you what you wanted or
• 300:30 - 301:00 doesn't conform to the specifications, you should at least make the ask for the money. Um, otherwise clients aren't going to take it seriously. Nobody's really going to want to make sure that you get paid. So, in this case, this is a project that I did on Upwork. I talk a lot about Upwork on my channel and in my communities because I think it's the easiest way for somebody to get their first two or three customers with zero experience, zero client management skills, zero idea where to start. Um, but back in the day I was using this with an Upwork contract. And one thing that's really important in Upwork is making sure that when you finish a project, you get a high-quality review because that review is basically like
• 301:00 - 301:30 SEO and CRO for your profile. So, regarding payment, I submitted a milestone on Upwork. Please accept after you've had a chance to check it out and then close the contract plus leave a written review if you think I did a good job. This is really important because I'm assuming the win. And that's what this template does. It just assumes that everything is going to be good. I'm going to talk about how to minimize the likelihood of a revision request in the next step, but I find that this in practice is crucial. And then down here is where I make that ask that we talked about um just in that last step. And I cannot for the life of me draw a square.
• 301:30 - 302:00 I think the shape detection even was like, "What the hell are you doing, man?" Okay, there we go. Um this is where I bring up the retainer and this is where I actually talk about ROI. I'll say, "I see no reason why I can't add this much money or more into your margins with a few changes. I need a bit more context, blah blah blah." So, uh, the reason why this is really valuable is because if you think about it, this is a single email that can make me $15,000 more dollars this year. It's a single email that can increase the likelihood of a a retention or something by like four or five times. It's a
• 302:00 - 302:30 single email that essentially takes all of this hard work that I've done, you know, that might this is like the engine of a car, and then it wraps it in the sexiest Ferrari chassis or whatever you've you've ever seen. Do you know what I mean? it. We're buffing the paint here. We're making this look as beautiful as humanly possible. We're squeezing as much value out of the work that we've already done. And that's my approach to this client management stuff. And this is my step-by-step framework all the time. So, yeah, you know, I'll assume the sale all the time. I'll say, you know, we can chat about
• 302:30 - 303:00 this on a call. Let me know if that works. Here's a calendar. If you want me to book on yours, just send it over. Thanks again. Can be posted if you need anything. You guys can copy and paste this. I'm going to include this whimsical link down below. So, you guys could literally just take all of the text that you want here and use it for your own business. Um, feel free. But after that step, uh, we get into probably one of the more important parts of this and one area that I think a lot of beginners struggle with, which is, you know, Nick, what about revisions? What do I do when the client asks for changes? Should I charge them? Should I not charge them? What the hell is the deal here? Well, a truth in any service-based industry is that clients
• 303:00 - 303:30 will almost always want at least one revision. People don't like talking about this because obviously it eats into the perfect view of like, oh, like I I I made $2,000 in five minutes, right? But the truth is clients almost always want some form of revision. I'd say probably over 70% of the time I get a revision request. Like there is the odd situation typically with people that I've worked with for a longer time that you know just get the project and they're like this is amazing. Thank you very much. We're done. Here's $5 million. Uh well I haven't had a situation like that yet. But if you want
• 303:30 - 304:00 to be my first anywh who the other 70% of the time, right? Um yeah. So 30% of the time they say the other 70% of the time they want some type of change. like, "Hey, this is amazing. Just had a quick thought. Do you mind changing this thing to that thing?" Or, you know, like we just over the course of the last couple weeks, we've been changing our file sorting procedures. So, do you mind just updating the Google Drive structure? Or, hey, do you mind changing out this software platform for that software platform? And most of the time, these revisions are pretty minor, right? If the client likes you and if you've just wowed the hell out of them with all
• 304:00 - 304:30 of this like this acts as like a vaccine. It's like inoculation against somebody asking for revisions because they're like, "Jesus Christ, did this guy do a lot of work for me? My god." Meanwhile, you only spend an extra 20, 30 minutes, but they don't know that. So, realistically, it's really not that much work. Um, here are my rules of thumb for revisions. And this is personally what I do to minimize the likelihood of them coming up and to uh, you know, like streamline my project as much as possible. Number one is I'll always take at least 24 hours to deliver. This sounds interesting. The
• 304:30 - 305:00 reason why is because I found that when I did revisions as quickly as possible when I was first starting out, you know, somebody would be like, "Hey, can you change this?" I'd be like, "Oh, sure. Give me 15 minutes." I change it. I hand it back. There was a much higher likelihood that they would ask for another revision afterwards. So, that's that's one thing. The second thing, which I didn't mention here, was a lot of the time clients will have multiple revisions that they want. They'll look at something, they'll be like, "This is a great system, great. I just want one little change. Let me send that off to Nick." and then an hour
• 305:00 - 305:30 later they'll be like, you know what, I had another little change I wanted and then they'll send that off again. So in this way I don't have to change the project, deliver it again, have the revision request come in again, have to change a project, deliver it again, right? I can just batch those two. And again, it's usually like 5 10 15 minute little fix here. And this enables me to to send the stuff back much faster and more efficiently. And then three, the value here is if you do this and it takes a day, you know, clients generally want their systems up and running, right? like you committed to a schedule for a reason. So if you show them that
• 305:30 - 306:00 like, hey, you know, these revisions that you're asking for, they aren't trivial. They take a little bit of time. So, you know, I'll deliver this in like 24 hours or so. I don't say that, but I say, hey, yeah, sure. You know, I'm happy to do this for you. It's going to take me maybe one or two business days to deliver. Um, you know, clients tend to brush off a lot of the smaller they don't really care about and they say, well, you know, I want this business I want the system up and running more than I really want like the font color on this thing changed. So, never mind. It's okay. We'll just move ahead. You can make that change whenever you want. So, that typically helps. Um, and then also, you know, if it takes me a day as opposed to five minutes, right, they're more likely to think, okay,
• 306:00 - 306:30 well, this actually took that actually took a fair amount of time and energy. Like, I can't exactly squeeze Nick like a like a wet rag. Um, yeah. You know, so it it helps. It's a good I guess from both perspectives, both like an ROI perspective for the client, but also like a decency perspective. A lot of the time, you know, they grow to respect you and like you when you know everything about their business and offer real tangible advice. Um, the other big rule of thumb that a lot of people talk about is I will never explicitly ask for um, revision requests. I'll never say, "Hey,
• 306:30 - 307:00 do you have any revision requests?" I think that that's just really silly. Um, it's not because I'm not happy to do the revision. Well, I'm not happy to do the revision requests, first of all. Let's just cut that out. Obviously, I don't want to do revision requests. I mean, I just did the system exactly like you asked and I'm amazing, so it should be great, right? But what I'm trying to say is I'm okay doing them if it leads to a higher likelihood of me getting some retained contract later on and then me making a large multiple of my time. But I don't want to make it really easy for them. I'd prefer to make it a little bit more difficult for them. So instead of me saying, "Hey, how's it going? Um,
• 307:00 - 307:30 do you like the project? Is everything okay?" Right? Like um, you know, can I change anything to make this even better for you? I don't do that. I'll just always assume that it's good. I'll assume that they're willing to pay that invoice. I'm assuming that we're going to wrap everything up. And I'll use language like this. If that sounds good to you, let me know and I'll wrap this one up. Or I'll say, um, you know, if there's nothing else, then let me know if you have any trouble paying the invoice or or something of that nature. So, I will almost never say this because I just don't want them to feel like they have to use the revision privileges. I don't want them to think, well, like, hm, I mean, the system's great. Yeah.
• 307:30 - 308:00 And like I would have been fine with it, but I guess Nick wants me to make a revision request or something. I I don't want any of that. I'd prefer that we just don't do revisions at all if I don't have to, cuz obviously, you know, it's my time that we're talking about. So, that's how I handle revisions. And then uh yeah, that last step here, project delivery, right? If you followed every step that I've talked about here, your service delivery is now better than the overwhelming majority of not just automation agencies, but like any business, right? God, you could apply the same tips that I'm talking about here to like a landscaping company and your landscaping retention, you know, on
• 308:00 - 308:30 future projects and stuff would go way the hell up. Um, you can use this in literally any industry you want and you can crush. And I'm not saying that just to toot my own horn, but because I actually use the same approach in a number of different industries and it has crushed. Sweet. You now have the complete client journey mastered from generating the lead to signing the deal to onboarding them and then delivering flawless projects, which you know, when you do all of this stuff right, maximizes the probability that you'll be able to get somebody on a repeat or recurring subscription. And that's awesome. But this is where most
• 308:30 - 309:00 automation entrepreneurs start hitting a wall. They figure this process out and they start doing it well. And then after that, they think that, okay, great. I've done this, but I can't do any more. I can only handle three or four clients. So, the only way to grow bigger is to hire more people. Then they start hiring people, and then they have to deal with a ton of headaches that come with it. What if I told you there's a better way? You guys can scale to six figures while also staying lean and keeping all your freedom and also avoiding the management nightmare that kills the vast majority of agencies. That's exactly what I'm going to talk about right now. I want to reveal the exact framework that I used to scale my automation business to $72,000 per month as a soloreneur. I had
• 309:00 - 309:30 a VA, but for all intents and purposes, I was doing the vast majority of the fulfillment. I actually think you can squeeze this business model even further, but we'll touch on that in the course. We're going to cover how to productize your services, automate your own business processes, build distribution systems that work while you sleep, and then choose business models that scale without adding staff. Let's do it. In this video, you're going to learn about revenue ceilings and how to maximize revenue per staff member. You're going to learn about productization, including how to break down any deliverable into components and my personal approach for that. I'm going
• 309:30 - 310:00 to teach you automation, how to use machines to do your work instead of people. Then we're going to talk a little bit about distribution or how to multiply your reach per unit time invested. And lastly, I'm going to run you through a few scalable business models, including how to pick ones that naturally let you grow without adding headcount. If that sounds interesting to you guys, stay tuned and let's get into it. All right, couple things I'm going to show you in this video. I have a couple diagrams. I have a slideshow. I'm going to walk you through it step by step. But just before I get into it, I have to add my usual disclaimer. This is just what's worked for me. I'm not necessarily trying to prescribe anything for you. If I was a discerning viewer of
• 310:00 - 310:30 the Nicks arrive cornucopia of YouTube content, I would take whatever makes sense to me and then discard the rest. I'm not going to do any gatekeeping. I'm just going to show you everything that you need in order to do the same that I did. So, how to scale your business without adding staff. I put 100K a month here just cuz it's clickbait. But let's get into it. So, first and foremost, everybody thinks that you need to hire to grow. Uh but my secret sauce is that you don't. The reason why is because we are quickly entering an era where if you properly configure your tools and your business
• 310:30 - 311:00 infrastructure, those alone can do the work of dozens of people without you needing to hire anyone. So, you can absolutely scale your company without adding headcount or by adding a very minimal amount of headcount. In this video, we're going to cover that four-step framework uh that shows you how to do it. I'm going to cover uh revenue ceiling or revenue per staff member first and then I'm going to get into how exactly to go about establishing this framework and then carrying it out. But this is the same framework that is currently being used by thousands of people myself included to build high margin high revenue solo
• 311:00 - 311:30 businesses. Usually in the past you kind of had to pick one, right? Either you were high revenue or you were low revenue high margin. Well, now you can have both and there's no reason why not. So this applies to any digital business. If you're running a physical business, it's a little bit more limited obviously because I don't know if you're some HVAC guy. Uh it's going to be difficult to carry out the step-by-step process that I'm laying out in this video. I'm not necessarily saying that if you run a physical services business or a physical product business that you can't implement these. I think you certainly can. You're just going to have a harder time doing it and it's going to be a little bit less effective. A concept that I want to cover just before we get
• 311:30 - 312:00 into things is that software and artificial intelligence, you can kind of treat these as force multipliers. These are very similar if you guys like think back to uh I don't know if you guys learned this in high school I guess it depends on where you are but like the force multipliers in in engineering like a lever right a lever is a force multiplier or a screw is a force multiplier a wheel is uh in effort in essence some some type of leverage well software and AI do the same thing except instead of it being in the physical world it's kind of in the virtual world and essentially they allow one person to provide the output of many people so
• 312:00 - 312:30 your goal in scaling your business and implementing what I'm about to show you is to increase the ceiling revenue that a single person can manage. What I mean by that is if a single person currently in your business can manage maybe $5,000 or so, if you implement the tips I'm going to show you, we'll be able to get that higher to maybe 25,000, 30,000, 50,000, 100,000. In addition, hiring people includes many hidden costs and risks that usually aren't talked about, right? you have tons of issues with hiring,
• 312:30 - 313:00 especially if you're looking to hire employees, like onshore employees, and especially if you are in places where legislation just just makes that really difficult, right? I don't want to be super evil capitalist or anything like that, but I'm sure most of the people watching this are business owners. So, uh you know, I'm sure you all feel me when you know, you have to deal with like certain probationary periods. Sometimes you have to deal with unions, you have to deal with like termination pay, you have to do onboarding. Uh there's a certain number of sick days you have to take, you have to give to staff members. obviously have some base compensation rules and whatnot. Well,
• 313:00 - 313:30 the really cool thing is software and machines, they don't require any of that and neither does your business infrastructure. So, there's near zero onboarding cost, there's near zero training costs, there's near zero legal costs, right? Uh I mean, aside from clicking a terms and service button and maybe some, I don't know, very unlikely disastrous things that occur with data. Uh realistically, you don't have to deal with 99.9% of the you have to deal with when hiring people. And that's that's my inspiration behind this. That's the inspiration behind the framework and why I'm running my business the way that I am. And then my last point is even if you do eventually have to hire, why not just set your
• 313:30 - 314:00 business up in such a way that enables you to scale as much as you can before you do so. So that when somebody eventually does come in, well, guess what? Now, you know, you don't have to hire 20 people. You can just hire one, right? You can pay a lot less money. That person is hyper leveraged. You can do way more with it. Um, this is more or less my mindset. And the reason why I'm telling this at the beginning of the video is ju just so that we're all on the same page here. here. I don't want anybody being like, "Nick, what the hell? Why wouldn't you hire people? Why would you get a machine to do the work?" Um, well, this is why right here. Okay. So, the very first and probably the most
• 314:00 - 314:30 important concept that we have to learn in order for the rest of this to make sense is the revenue per staff member. I've talked about this before in my videos and I've called this revenue per employee or RP. This is a pretty standard metric in like business analysis. Basically, these analysts and these consultants come in and then they count up your total revenue for the year usually and then the total number of employees at your company and they just divide the total revenue, say million dollars, by the total number of employees, which is, I don't know, 100. And then they figure out the uh I don't
• 314:30 - 315:00 know the revenue per staff member, which is $10,000. $10,000 per year per staff member is And if your company is, you know, an RP of that, then obviously you're doing something wrong. Unless you're at like some I guess startup and you're not making any money, but you're fundraising or whatnot. But I'm I'm I'm assuming none of you guys run startups here. I'm assuming we're all just like bootstrapping agencies or service businesses. So, I'm taking this one step further and I'm calling this a revenue per staff member just because this reflects I think a little bit better the modern hiring environment. We're not all hiring employees anymore. We hire uh
• 315:00 - 315:30 contractors. Sometimes we hire like uh I don't know like flex workers. Sometimes we have VAS and stuff like that. This is just a more comprehensive term that I'm just taking to mean the revenue of your company divided by the total number of people that you interact with on a regular basis. Now, if you're a soloreneur like me, you can also think of this as how much economic value alone can I create, right, with just myself before I add anybody else to my business. And this is important for me because I'm I'm always trying to optimize this. And this is where systems
• 315:30 - 316:00 and tools, artificial intelligence, and the software approaches I'm going to talk about in a minute get into. This is typically the way that most businesses work. Like most people will begin service businesses organically, right? Let's say you start, I don't know, you start like doing some design. You're a great designer. You've worked at a bunch of other agencies or something. You're like, "You know what? I don't get paid enough at this damn company. I'm going to branch out on my own and I'm going to become my own designer and make way more money." So, you're a specialist, right? Naturally, you're going to do the vast majority of the work yourself because that's sort of like your key value prop. It's like, "Hey, I'm amazing at this and I'm going to deal with you personally
• 316:00 - 316:30 and I'm going to take care of it fast. I'm going to have low turnaround times, right?" This is sort of like the way that a freelancer um um starts becoming an agency and scales. So eventually you hit a point where you're juggling so much that you get diminishing returns on any additional time that you spend. So naturally, you know, you see a bunch of business gurus talking about this all the time. They're like, "Hire, hire, hire, delegate, delegate, delegate." You're like, "All right, cool. Well, why don't I delegate my work then? That's kind of the next step that I have to take in order to grow." Now, if you think about it, up until this point, the amount of money that a single specialist
• 316:30 - 317:00 can handle in a company is, and this is a very high estimate here, but maybe it's $15,000 or $20,000 per month. Like, if you got your together, you already understand some of these systems. You lay out your work in like an efficient way. Maybe at the high end, you can make like 15 grand, 20 grand a month. And that's with like great products, great services. And that's also with you working yourself like a dog. This is the definition of working for yourself, being self-employed. you know, you're doing you're doing a ton arduously uh and you're you're working some incredible hours. So, you're at 15. Let's just say you're at $20,000 a month
• 317:00 - 317:30 just for simplicity's purpose, okay? But then you hire somebody and maybe you hire like some designer or something like help you out with some work. Well, now what you've done is you've taken your revenue per staff member which was previously, you know, that $15 to $20,000 and you've divided it by two. Okay? So, now your RPS is half. Now, the reason why you hired is logically you were like, well, I can only do $15 or $20,000 of work myself. So maybe if I hire somebody else, I'll be able to do 30 or $40,000 of work, right? But the unfortunate thing is you are rarely able to scale to twice your size by hiring
• 317:30 - 318:00 twice as many people. And I' I' I'd go as far as to say that's almost like a rule of service businesses. With every individual person you add, and I'm going to show you guys this in a second, but with every individual person you add, your revenue per staff member tends to go down. And there are a couple reasons for that. So, you know, think about it. You scale your agency and now you're making $60,000 a month, right? You got five hires, you got a couple designers, maybe you have some marketing guy to help you out. Maybe you have a salesperson and you know, maybe a few more people than you. And you might be making $60,000 a month. But just do the math. At $60,000 a month, if you divide
• 318:00 - 318:30 that by the total number of people working in your company, well, now the revenue per staff member has gone down from uh you know what it was before, let's say 15 or 20k to $12,000, which is I mean that's almost like half the RPS, right? So the goal here is obviously to maximize our RPS. What's the solution to do it and how can you do so? And I have sort of like a two-pronged approach. The first is is systems and the second is software. And both systems and software laid out intelligently will allow you to increase your revenue ceiling. And then you as an individual before you get to
• 318:30 - 319:00 the point where you're thinking of hiring, right? Instead of you hitting that camp of 15 20k a month, you're making good money, but you're being worked like a dog. Maybe you can make 30 or $40,000 a month. And then maybe instead of you being worked like a dog, you can work at half capacity. If I'm being honest, this is what the vast majority of people that are probably watching my content right now want. You want to have a super high income without necessarily having to compromise on your lifestyle too much. You But you also want to be good at what you do and you want to be able to provide like a a great service, right? You want to be able to provide security for your family. You want to be able to, I don't know, get the latest Apple Watch or
• 319:00 - 319:30 whatever the hell. You don't necessarily want to do so strung out with 20 employees that you're managing, you know, under an incredible amount of stress. So, you know, the solarpreneur lifestyle for me is super high ROI personally. And you know, I I've implemented systems that I'm about to show you that have enabled me to do this. Okay. So, just before we proceed, let me just like kind of let me just show you what the I guess relationship looks like between the size of an agency and then your revenue per staff member generally speaking. So, let's pretend that you are starting at the start line here. Your revenue per staff member is
• 319:30 - 320:00 pretty high. Okay, you are I don't know. Can I draw on this puppy? Oh, hell yeah, I can draw on this puppy. I don't like how this like automatically turns into a circle, though. All right, whatever. Um, anyway, so at the very top here, your revenue per staff member is pretty big, right? The second that you make that first hire, it starts plummeting. The reason why it starts plummeting is, well, now that you have another person, you can't contain all of the work in your head anymore. There's some information that you know that your staff member doesn't know. And so, you need to communicate that. Well,
• 320:00 - 320:30 guess what? Any time spent communicating is time spent not doing the thing. And so, you start accumulating communication costs. That's number one. Number two, because of these communication costs and because of miscommunications, you substantially improve or increase rather uh the number of uh mistakes that you're making. Okay, you're no longer like the sole service professional. This person might not know everything that you know, right? So now you have some mistakes in place. In addition, one thing that I didn't mention here was you also have to do training, right? If you want this
• 320:30 - 321:00 person to learn your process as well as you know it or be able to replicate it to some reasonable percentage maybe 80%. Well you need to train them and any time spent training them is time not spent doing the work right. So uh in addition to that you have like some group think in larger companies larger companies tend to be able to make less ideal decisions simply because of a human bias known as group think where we tend to agree with decisions for appearance more so than for uh you know correctness. Um and then you know there also some social issues. Sometimes Betty at the front desk hates Stephanie in the back or some
• 321:00 - 321:30 or Tom is angry at Jerry. Uh anyway, the point that I'm making is every single additional staff member you hire, you're going to have some issues, right? Um and your RPS is going to go down because less a smaller fraction of the total time of every single person and total mental effort is going to be spent actually delivering the service that provides you money. So I say that it sort of plateaus here. Well, that's just because you know the marginal additional person at the at an agency size of I don't know like 100 plus um you know the effect on your RPS becomes really really small but I don't know
• 321:30 - 322:00 maybe it still goes down just a tiny bit. Um and you can imagine this sort of just proceeding for infinity. So I I show that to you just so you understand the factors at play here and so you understand why we should get away from hiring people being our first solution to you know constraint issues and we should focus instead on this four-step framework. Now, I'm going to start us off with step number one, which is productizing what you can and then noting what you can't. We're going to take the stuff that you can't. We're going to move it to the next step. I've added some revenue ceiling estimates
• 322:00 - 322:30 here. These are totally rough. I mean, you know, these are just based off of my uh experience in agencies. I've worked with obviously several dozen well I guess now over a thousand agencies if you count all my communities. So, I I tend to know what the revenue ceilings of agencies are uh are sort of intuitively. Um, I'm saying 20 to $30,000 a month per person if you productize your operations effectively. And I also I'm going to provide a quick example of businesses that I think have done a really good job of this. Um, and the the business here that I'm going to talk about is Fat Joe. So these guys are like an SEO platform. They provide tons
• 322:30 - 323:00 of services. I mean, if we just go down here, you guys will see link building, digital PR, SEO, content writing, design and video, blogger outreach, PR campaigns, niche ads. Um, I'm friends with the with the founder and essentially the reason I bring this up is because these guys have done a fantastic job at at at building a business around this principle that I'm about to talk about, which is productization. If you want, you know, uh, uh, link building services or SEO services from them, they know in advance exactly what margin, exactly what percentage they're
• 323:00 - 323:30 going to make on this. They have checklists over checklists of every step involved in that link building process and they could basically at this point hand off that job to a monkey and it's so granular and so step by step that that monkey would still probably do a pretty reasonable job. I'm not I'm not saying their staff members are monkeys anything. I'm just saying that they're very very good at designing the infrastructure behind a productized business. So um productization if I just zoom out a little bit is just breaking down what your business does into concrete deliverables. Okay,
• 323:30 - 324:00 deliverables are what the customer or client sees, not necessarily what goes into it, but just like the actual end result. Um, and then what you do is you take these deliverables, then you break those deliverables a little bit further down into the steps needed to produce them. And then once you have those steps, then you can break them further down into little checklist items. Once you have those checklist items, you can break them further down into inputs and outputs. So, here's a quick example of how you might productize a simple marketing services company. Okay? Let's say you run a run-of-the-mill marketing agency. you provide PDFs uh uh I don't know you provide like PPC campaigns uh
• 324:00 - 324:30 you provide like marketing general like a local marketing services you provide some type of like SEO anyway uh what you do is you take those service and you break them down into specific deliverables what is it exactly that the customer is getting a certain number of links probably right just as the fat show example showed a minute ago you're probably giving them some reports you're probably giving them maybe like a website you're spinning up for them maybe you're giving them some PPC campaigns in their Google ads manager right um basically take all of the services that you're providing and then break them down into their specific deliverables. The products that the
• 324:30 - 325:00 customer is basically buying from you. Now, once you have these deliverables, deconstruct each deliverable into its components. Quick example here is let's say PPC campaign is one of your deliverables. This is in one of your packages that you sell. Well, if you think about it logically, like what is a PPC campaign? A PPC campaign is where you take ad copy and then ad creative and then you upload it to I don't know Google Ads Manager or something like that. That's typically like like that's the component that goes into the service
• 325:00 - 325:30 that you're providing, right? So if we just if we just try and get a microscope and we zoom way in on that product, what goes into it are let's say three ad creatives and three ad copy variants hypothetically, right? However many ad creatives or ad copy variants they are. What you do is you repeat this process until you have all of the parts of the entire service suite that you're providing. So if you think about it, you know, your ad copy, right, that deliverable or that component might have a couple components in and of itself. Maybe ad creative or sorry, ad copy is composed of a headline and then it's composed of some body text, right? Um, and each of these may have some
• 325:30 - 326:00 character limits. So if you're doing Google, maybe it's different than Facebook, right? You have to get very granular here in order to productize properly. But the point is you are deconstructing what makes your business or your service tick. Once you've defined all of these explicitly, what you do is you create a step-by-step guide or an SOP, standard operating procedure on how you would define or how you would deliver this thing, assuming that you had no knowledge, assuming that you were basically just starting at the at the very start line. The reason why you do it this way, well, it's twofold. I'll I'll talk about one of the reasons
• 326:00 - 326:30 why, which is because you can start automating it. Um, but the reason why you do it this way is by assuming zero knowledge, you start thinking and explicitly defining all the knowledge that goes into this thing. And the second that you know that you start you basically lay out all the resources that you need uh to automate uh you know to to delegate more effectively to basically turn this whole thing on autopilot. Now is there something that you can't productize? Cuz sometimes there are things that you can't productize. If something does require an incredible amount of knowhow if it's some deep business consultation or something like that if it requires a
• 326:30 - 327:00 laborious number of personal hours. Sometimes you know you can't actually productize a service. And that's okay. All I want you to do is just make a note of what that is. then move on to the next step. So, if you're watching this right now, like I want you to get as much value out of what I'm talking about as humanly possible. So, if you run a business, I highly encourage you to actually pause the video and at least just give it 30 seconds to a minute of thought. Run through the services that you're providing in your company and just say, hm, okay, so I do provide three or four services. How do I break those down into deliverables? Well, I
• 327:00 - 327:30 guess I provide, I don't know, SEO services. So, that includes link building and then that includes some marketing report and then that includes some website CRO. Well, what what what do each of those include? I just want you to do this thought experiment because it's going to make this next step a lot more valuable. If you don't yet run an agency or anything like that, that's okay. We can just move on right away. But just keep this in mind as you are designing your products or services. It's going to make the rest of your life really easy. Like I wish I did this with my first couple agencies. I would have crushed it and I would had to spend way less time and energy in it. So step two is we have all of those productizable,
• 327:30 - 328:00 you know, steps, right? And then we have a couple things that we can't. Step two is well now we can automate all of those things that have those step-by-step guides and that are very clearly definable um and that you can do with zero knowledge and the things that we can't we're going to optimize. Productization by itself is already massive leverage. But if you automate steps within the product and you don't have to automate all of it you can just automate specific steps right like in our ad copy example which I'm going to talk about. Maybe you can't automate the creative because your creative is just it's just a little too high quality for machines right now. But you can
• 328:00 - 328:30 certainly automate your ad copy, right? The only reason why you know that you can do that is because you've since broken everything down into very specific deliverables. Um but now you know if you think about it if ad copy is half the work, ad creatives half the work, you've just automated half of that project, right? You've essentially doubled the leverage. You've doubled the revenue per employee or revenue per staff member by automating 50% of that deliverable. So I talk here about a revenue ceiling. At this point I'm saying it's about $50 to $100,000 per month per person. A good example of this is design joy. Now, Design Joy doesn't
• 328:30 - 329:00 just automate everything. I mean, this is an actual designer, but the way that he automates things, and I think Brett makes like 100 to 140K a month. So, I mean, he's a total solarreneur as well. The way that he does things is his automation is templates. So, he has a massive library of I imagine hundreds of highquality templates of every conceivable variation. And when a client makes a request for a new design, he thinks to himself, hm, what template is closest to what the client wants? you know, I've already spent all the time
• 329:00 - 329:30 and effort building these templates. Their design is really clean. The spacing is perfect. I don't have to like reinvent the freaking wheel here. So, let me just pick something that's really close. Then he picks a really, really high quality template. And the thing about this templating feature is the template is 80% of the way there, right? So, that means that the distance that Brett has to travel between 80% and 100%, that's just 20%. If you think about it, 100% divided by 20%, that's 5x leverage. So he just increased his revenue or his uh his revenue per staff or his leverage by five times by using templates. So you don't necessarily have
• 329:30 - 330:00 to automate things in the traditional term. I know a lot of my viewers are probably automation agencies or automation freelancers. But you know understanding the principles here which is just leverage you know goes a long way. So anyh who, uh, this is Brett's business. As I mentioned, he does a ton of money, and the guy's pretty funny to follow on Twitter, although I think recently he's gotten into some spats, which I may have had to temporarily mute him for, but uh, you can make a fair amount of money, and your revenue sinking can be pretty high if you follow what I'm about to show you. So, here's another example of how to automate the productized marketing services that we just generated in the previous step.
• 330:00 - 330:30 Number one is we're going to take all the step-by-step guides you created before. And the next thing is we're just going to ask ourselves, can a machine do 80% or more of this if properly instructed? My rule is 80% or more. I never try to do 100% because realistically machines can very rarely do 100% of your job right now. They're quickly getting to the point where they can do 100% of small little things and eventually we'll piece those small little things together and get the big thing. But right now, you know, 80% is sufficient for me and it's personally what I use to make, you know, over 100K
• 330:30 - 331:00 per month. So, if it's good enough to make 100K per month, you want to make 100K per month, then odds are it's probably good enough for you. Now, if you're like most digital businesses, the answer is yes. You can do a ton at that 80% mark. Um, using our ad example, you can totally automate the production of copy. You can totally automate the production of headlines, of body text. You can automate the production of creatives at this point super easily. Whether it's through templating features or whether it's through uh I don't know, like you you you have MidJourney or something spit out some beautiful looking sexy cool gradient that's branded, right? or maybe some assets.
• 331:00 - 331:30 Maybe you create your own uh uh vectors or SVGs or something. The technology exists to do literally everything that I'm talking about here. There might be somebody that's watching this video right now that runs a marketing agency that thinks, "Wait a second. I could automate literally 100% of this and then takes this and then uses it to build a productized service and then starts making a million dollars a month within a few months." Like the technology here is entirely is entirely at the point where you can automate the vast majority of it. Now, it's also possible that, you know, maybe you run a different service or something that's just a little bit more involved. Maybe because you're
• 331:30 - 332:00 doing link building. Uh part of link building involves the creation of a bunch of personal connections and maybe you need to have somebody managing your inbox or something. And even if you use AI to draft up the responses, there still technically needs to be a person there or whatever. That's fine. And that's why we want 80% rather than 100%. Maybe instead of doing the whole thing, they just pre-draft your messaging. Or maybe they do like uh like like like an like like an RD, like a rough draft of your creative. Or maybe they send the first two or three emails in a sequence to your warm network every time you get a new link building opportunity that you
• 332:00 - 332:30 want to, you know, rank somebody on. All of this stuff is still leverage. The point that I'm making is just ask yourself, how much time can I save if I construct the service a little bit differently than what I'm doing right now? you know, if I look at all of these services with a fine-tuned comb, if I peer through every single one, how much further and how much more efficiently can I get? And that's really what this step is for. Um, and if a step is not automatable, then just ask yourself how you might optimize it. Like for instance, you know, I provide consultations and my consultations can be anywhere from like 15 minutes all the
• 332:30 - 333:00 way up to an hour or so. Now, I have been trying to reconstruct my consultations to take me less time and to be a lot more amendable for my customers and my clients because, you know, my calendar's starting to fill up. Um, things are getting a little bit tougher, I think, on on both ends. So, I've started to ask myself, hm, is there a way that I could reconstruct my consultations? The other day, I found a guy called Kristoff Huerman, I don't know how to say his name, who has a completely new take on consultations. And I think this is a very good way for
• 333:00 - 333:30 me to illustrate how even if you can't fully automate something, you can streamline the hell out of it. What this guy does is, you know, he's some advanced tax professional who I found when I was looking for some tax consulting on my own. What he does is he gives people consultations through voice messages. What you do is you book a consultation via one of these purchase buttons. Then you send this guy Kristoff a message on Telegram and then you send him all of your questions in writing. You can ask questions about all
• 333:30 - 334:00 of these. And the idea is, you know, if you really need help but don't have the financial resources to book a consultation for €2,000 or something, you can get 80% of the value there with his voice message package where he just reads your question and then answers it for you via some sort of voicemail. So, you know, like this is a great example of a semi-productized service. Obviously, it still takes Kristoff's time to like take the phone and then and say it. But think about all the problems that he eliminates here. He completely
• 334:00 - 334:30 eliminates uh time synchronicity, like having to be in the same in the same at the same time, calling a person, both of you guys having to be there. I I mean, he could go downstairs and walk to his car while answering a voice message and make €500, right? Uh in I don't know how many minutes. Probably 5 or 10 minutes. The leverage on this is crazy. Sure, this is still requiring his time, but how much more time does it require to actually sit down and have that full hourlong consultation versus what he's doing here? Now, I should note that he also provides full hourlong consultations, but you know, these voice
• 334:30 - 335:00 message packages with, I don't know, extended voice message package for 800 bucks, uh, ultimate voice message package for $9.97 and so on and so forth. These are novel takes on something that people, a lot of people just think that you cannot productize. Well, turns out you can. Um, so I want you to take an approach similar to what Kristoph Huran did here where he asked himself, hm, you know, I'm suffering from these problems. This service that I'm providing makes me money but isn't really scalable. How could I improve my revenue per staff member if I'm doing this solo, right? What if I do messengers? You know, maybe then I can
• 335:00 - 335:30 5x my leverage and then I can make five times more. And instead of me being stuck at 20 to 30k a month, now I can go between 50 to 100K per month. All right. The third step that I'm going to talk about here is building automated distribution systems. And to me, this is a step that I'm currently on. You know, I've followed all of these all of these steps myself, right? I productized, then I automated. Now I'm sort of building automated distribution tests myself. And then eventually, I'll do that fourth one as well. Um, but for me, this is this is hyper relevant because this is what I'm doing. And it's also one of the highest leverage things that you can do. Um,
• 335:30 - 336:00 just look at the revenue multiples here, right? I think a single person can easily get to 100 to 250K per month. A good example of the person that's doing this right now is Justin Welsh. He is leveraging the hell out of automated distribution systems. If you don't know what that means, I'll cover it in a sec. Um, in order to sell, I think he runs like a like a $2 million maybe a three or $4 million a year business now. Um, completely solo, so I think it's somewhere around the 250k month mark. Another example is obviously me um with my automated two of me on the screen simultaneously. That's a little too
• 336:00 - 336:30 much. Um, another good example, this is me with like my automated distribution through my YouTube and so on and so forth. So, the value in automated distribution systems is like if you don't know what distribution is, just take a step back. Distribution is your ability to put your product or service in front of other people. So in a modern digital business, if you want to scale your distribution without necessarily adding staff, that means one of two things. The first is outreach systems. So like automated cold outreach where you distribute to hundreds of thousands of people per day with seemingly customized meth messages without having
• 336:30 - 337:00 to individually go through look the person up, send them an email, right? Um, the value in this is whether you connect with a 100 or 10,000 people, your time investment is going to be the same. This is sort of option one, and this is something I talk about a lot on my channel. But if you think about it, a few months ago when I started my YouTube in earnest, I started posting all the time. What I was really doing was I was doing number two, which is where I was creating content like YouTube videos, SEO articles, and that sort of thing that do the same thing that Cold Outreach does. It's just they allow me
• 337:00 - 337:30 to do it completely on autopilot, which in my opinion is a little bit higher leverage now. So you kind of have two choices here. You can do content systems or you could do outreach. The point is though, any automated distribution system has value because the amount of time it takes to connect to one person or a thousand people is approximately the same. Like if I made this video and I've just been shouting into the void for the last half an hour or something like that and a single person saw it, it would not take me any additional time if instead I had gone viral and 10 million people had saw it. Right? My my my inputs are the same. the outputs are
• 337:30 - 338:00 completely variable and they can scale infinitely until all 8 billion people um you know stare me deep in the eyes and listen to me. Yeah. So yeah, the point that I'm making is if you really want to grow substantially bigger than probably what most people would consider a high income, which is somewhere between like 30 to maybe $50,000 a month. If you want to grow even bigger than that, you basically have to make use of automated distribution systems of some kind. Um those automated distribution systems might also be stuff like uh like like ads, right? Right? I mean, I talk here
• 338:00 - 338:30 about content, but you can also think of this like advertising. Uh, the downside of that is although it is an automated distribution system, you obviously have to make some arbitrage or margin on the on the people that click through your ad and then convert to your offer versus the amount of money you're paying per click. But, you know, you can think of it that way as well. The same sort of idea with cold outreach, right? You are paying a certain amount for the mailboxes, you're paying a certain amount for the leads. The idea is, you know, arbitrageing. Uh, you know, organic content is a little bit different because a lot of the time your investment is not necessarily money. It's more so just the time uh and the knowhow. Um and you know that's that's
• 338:30 - 339:00 what I've chosen to do here. But you can easily scale to $100,000 to $250,000 per month per person. And I firmly believe that like the next soloreneur wave here is or the next wave really in business. You know, we had indie hacking for a little while. We had like build in public is going to be a soloreneur wave of people making over six figure monthly revenues um through approaches like what I've talked about here. It's going to be people that have productized their businesses like I have. people that have automated what they can and optimized what they haven't been able to and then people that build automated distribution systems that sort of just sell for them,
• 339:00 - 339:30 you know, while they sleep. Like I will wake up a lot of the time to like Stripe notifications saying people have purchased my product or service. Um you're very unlikely to get that without some sort of automated outreach system or some sort of content or advertising funnel. All right. So, this next step here, I'm keeping purposefully vague because I have yet to get there and I don't consult with many people at this level myself, but it's purposefully picking a scalable business model. I know that you're probably thinking, Nick, why the hell are you putting this at the end as opposed to at the
• 339:30 - 340:00 beginning? And the reason why is because don't put the cart before the horse, if that makes sense. Don't, you know, forget what you're doing this for. Odds are if you want to run a business and you're watching my content to help you do so, you're doing it because you don't want to build the next Uber or necessarily fire up the next rocket ship SpaceX competitor to get to Uranus or something. I could have picked Mars. I picked Uranus. Uh you know, you just you again, you want a sufficient amount of security. You want to be able to uh you know, enjoy various luxuries of life. You want not to have to worry about like
• 340:00 - 340:30 uh various inflation numbers or world events or anything like that. And so if you if you started by picking a scalable business model, the likelihood that you actually hit that level of wealth is a lot lower than if you pick something like a service agency. Um simply because there's a trade-off all the time. And I think this is a good opportunity for me to whip open the whimsical. The trade-off is basically, you know, if this is our little thing, um, scalability and short-term revenue are
• 340:30 - 341:00 both at odds. So, if you pick a business model that allows you to scale very big, it will likely be more difficult for you to make short-term revenue as a result. Let me reconstruct this and make this sideways instead. And then let's put short-term revenue over here. And then scalability over here. And let's just look at some candidate business models. Okay. Uh one candidate business model um that maximizes your short-term revenue might
• 341:00 - 341:30 be what we're doing here like freelancing. You know, agencies is another one, right? Probably somewhere right around here. Um some type of like B2B managed service. Uh you know, as as we scale, obviously things change a little bit. For B2B managed service, maybe go to like B2B hightouch SAS. Maybe after B2B hight touch SAS we go like low touch SAS and then maybe you know all the way on the right hand side we have some sort of like actually I think low touch SAS and info product are probably pretty
• 341:30 - 342:00 similar maybe info products actually a little bit um lower than than low touch SAS. So this is where like your I don't know and then uh finally actually let me do one more uh we'll do sort of like PAS that stands for platform as a service. This is like basically Uber and whatnot. So, you know, if I just move this around so that it's a little bit prettier, you can see on the left hand side here, if all you want to do is you want to make money today and you want to make $10,000 as quickly as humanly possible. You know, starting with the next Uber is not
• 342:00 - 342:30 going to help you accomplish that mission. Why? Because if you want to build a platform, obviously you need to invest a ton of time, energy, and infrastructure. You got to hire engineers or you have to be a fantastic engineer. You have to build something uh of worth. You have to build distribution channels. You have to have distribution channels. you know, you're not making a ton of money per deal. I mean, even with like Uber, what what are the margins on a single deal? If I try and take an Uber to downtown, how much is Uber really profiting from that? Probably a few bucks, right? Versus, let's say, a freelance deal where you can sign like a three, four, $5,000 deal, like literally
• 342:30 - 343:00 in your first day freelancing, you know, if you if you play your cards right. So, same thing with agencies, right? One of the reasons why I came into freelancing in agencies is because they are the fastest way to get short-term revenue. And then, if you think about it logically, right? If I were to take a freelancing or agency outfit and then if I were to productize it, automate it, optimize it, automate the distribution of it, I basically now have like leveraged agency and a leveraged agency I would wager, you know, has all of the benefits of the short-term revenue um on the left hand
• 343:00 - 343:30 side, but also a lot of the benefits of the scalability of like the hight touch SAS, info products, low touch SAS, and platforms as a service. So, you know, as you go to the right of this graph, you make less money up front and then you make more money um total. Now, the reason why that's important is because, you know, you kind of have to know what you want if you wanted to start that rocket company or something like that. Well, you know, you sort of have to accept the fact that you're probably not going to be making a lot of money in the short term. Um, so I guess this is my longass justification for why I put this thing last. I didn't really need to do
• 343:30 - 344:00 that, but uh whatever. So, if you've exhausted everything in this list and you're still not happy with your revenue ceiling, let's say you've been doing this uh for a few years and you're making like $100,000 a month as a solarreneur, similar level to me, and you're like, "Shit, you know, I'm still not really happy with how much money I'm making." There are certain business models that inherently let you scale further. The con is that they take way more in the way of resources set up, and if you miscalibrate, you can waste it all. How many horror stories have you heard of the next big thing that's completely tanked and lost investors?
• 344:00 - 344:30 hundreds of millions of dollars. They're the Silicon Valley graveyard. That's the trade-off, right? Scalability versus short-term revenue. So, I have some examples here of scalable things. Information products tend to be scalable. Um, software products tend to be scalable. Affiliate advertising is one thing that I didn't really touch on that tends to be scalable as well, although you do have to know what you're doing and you do have to be open to some level of risk. Typically, you know, if you're doing affiliate, you're either organically ranking pages on Google or some other search engine and then having some percentage of the revenue that you
• 344:30 - 345:00 generate per lead or you are creating some type of paid advertising that refers somebody to a funnel um or maybe you make the funnel yourself and then you know your your whole gambit is okay like is the amount of money I spent to acquire one new customer times whatever the small percentages that I get is that less than the amount of money that I made off of that deal essentially. So, you know, these are these are purposefully scalable business models that, you know, people pick when like they're trying to, I don't know, disrupt an industry or whatnot. Um, but I put
• 345:00 - 345:30 these here at the end just because that is sort of the next step. If you get to maybe $250,000 a month per person, $300,000 a month per person, and you start plateauing and you're like, well, you know, I need to hire. If you are dead set on being a soloreneur, you can absolutely uh start a business either solo or with a founder, you know, that makes substantially more money than that. I forget exactly how much money. I think it was Tinder, you know, that uh the dating app that had like nine you uh software engineers or something and I think they had like over a billion dollar valuation. Like if you think about the leverage on each of those people, that's a ton, right? Um and
• 345:30 - 346:00 that's really what I'm getting at here with these scalable business models. So in short, we have four main concepts that I want you guys to think deeply about. We have the revenue selling, but then we have thinking about your business in terms of economic productivity. You have productizing, you have automating, and then you have distributing. Um, and at the end there, you know, assuming that you are unhappy with being able to make $250,000 per month per person with extraordinarily high margins, you lunatic, then you also have the ability to pivot and pick a more scalable business model. And there's nothing necessarily wrong with that. But if you want to do that, I'd
• 346:00 - 346:30 highly encourage you guys to at least get your bag first. Congratulations. You just completed the most comprehensive AI agency business masterass on the internet. He went from somebody that maybe had no idea how to start an A automation business to somebody who now has the complete and utter technical roadmap from the technical foundations to six figure scaling strategies. That is no small feat. At this point, you are no longer just a beginner dreaming about starting an AI venture. You are actually equipped with everything that you guys need to build a thriving automation business. Remember, you guys can reference any part of this master class
• 346:30 - 347:00 just using those timestamps below. So, bookmark the video, come back anytime you want to brush up on these skills. And as you guys have probably learned over the last few hours, ultimately at the end of the day, all of this knowledge is worthless without action to go alongside it. The gap between people who understand a automation and then people who actually make money with the stuff isn't actually technical knowledge, right? It's execution. It's uh accountability. It's having the right support system. And that's exactly where Maker School comes in. I purposefully built this program to fill in the gaps that simply watching YouTube videos does
• 347:00 - 347:30 not provide you. Mika School, just for reference, is my 90-day accountability program geared towards getting you your very first AI automation customer guaranteed or your money back. It includes copy and paste templates for outreach for sales and proposals and all of the stuff that's helping people close deals right now. It also includes a library of proven automation blueprints in both make and nad that you guys can use immediately, including uh niche packs, which is a new offering of automations that are purpose-built for specific high-paying niches that you guys can literally just wrangle up and start selling on day one. It also includes live coaching calls where I
• 347:30 - 348:00 answer your guys' specific questions. And plus, I'm there every day. This isn't a community where I pass you off to some manager and then disappear. I'm legitimately the most active member of Maker School. I show up every single day and I respond to the vast majority of posts. The biggest challenge with AI automation isn't learning what you guys have to do. You guys already know that. Just knowing what to prioritize every day and then staying consistent with your actions. So instead of wondering what should I work on today or am I focusing on the right things, with Maker School, you just go in every single day and know exactly what to focus on. There's no decision fatigue. There's no overthinking, no getting stuck, just a big list of clear daily actions and then
• 348:00 - 348:30 a bunch of people that are doing the same thing as you and that can support you and help you towards the ends that you want to achieve. Ultimately, the results speak for themselves. Lots of members come in and legitimately land their first few client within a few hours of starting lead generation. It's insane. Many have also scaled to $10,000 per month in revenue using the exact systems from this master class. So, yeah, this is your moment. You guys have the knowledge. You guys have the road map. Now, you just need to take action. Whether or not you're going to come into Maker School, although I highly recommend it, join tens of thousands of other people that have started an AI automation business and turned all the
• 348:30 - 349:00 skills that you know now into a life-changing income course. Thank you very much for completing this master class. Do me a solid, hit the like button, subscribe to the channel, do all that fun YouTube stuff that makes my algorithm love me, and I'll catch you on the next video. See you.