59 Minutes of Straight AI Automation Advice ($2.3M Earned)

So I started making money with AI automation back in 2019 this is before the term AI automation became common place but at the time I was using a machine learning model to generate a bunch of very convincing anime characters and I had a thought to myself and I said if I could do this with anime characters could I do this with something else so I ended up electing to try making abstract art instead I fed a Couple of models a bunch of abstract paintings and then I went ahead and I TR tried to sell them

as any young man does we always try to make money off things as quickly as possible um I didn't really have much hope that it would succeed but at some point I decided I would try blasting it out on as many marketing platforms as I could so I put it on Hacker News and I went to bed and the next morning I was number one on Hacker News and I had a bunch of news Features and I had essentially gone viral from there I launched a Content writing company that used gpt2 and then gpt3 to

Route requests through Fiverr and I sold those for one cent a word uh when gpt3 came out interesting story I actually had to route my requests through basically a role-play sex spot in order to get gpt3 functionality cuz I didn't have access to it yet um so I hooked up this big script and basically I just monitored the sex spot I don't Talk much about it but it was a pretty interesting time after that initial success I ended up partnering with a good friend of mine and we scaled that approach which I called 1 second

copy to 92,000 bucks a month there a variety of like make.com automations powering the back end some custom scripts I ended up writing an app but essentially AI powered the whole business eventually chat GPT came out which brought to public awareness the fact that you could Use AI to generate a large amount of content pretty quickly so as I'm sure you can imagine demand for a traditional content rating Services started going down through the tubes uh so I had a conversation with that same business partner and we ended up starting an AI automation agency in

2022 that's left click my current company after some trials and some tribulations I scaled that company to $72,000 a month and as I'm sure you can imagine along that Process I learned a ton about what works and what doesn't I've built hundreds if not thousands of automations at this point in time using a variety of no code tools as well as scripts so basically to make a long story short in this video I wanted to compile all of the AI and automation learnings that I've had over the course of Last 5 Years and give them

to you let's get into it so we're going to do this whiteboard style or I guess in my case a Blackboard and the content Of this video is primarily going to be me talking about AI automation as a business model I'm also going to be talking about how to build and maintain good and high quality automations um and really just give you guys my thoughts on the matter the first point I want to make is probably the biggest one and that's that AI automation believe it or not it's just like any other industry AI automation

is not special we tend to think it is because you know we're Developing these really cool Technologies and we're sort of on The Cutting Edge but the reality is the same things that make a you know HVAC company work or a plumbing company work or I don't know an e-commerce company work or uh uh like a SAS company work the same the same characteristics here that do all of this do the exact same thing for our a automation agency and if you're good at running a business okay you'll be good at running an AI uh

a a a as the Acronym is commonly uh commonly written so it's not that AI automation is this fundamentally new game changing groundbreaking thing it's not right all we're doing is we're basically running an agency that sells automations okay that's kind of the main point now as you know you think back a couple minutes ago I mean I was all over the map when it came to Ai and then Automation and sort of weaving the two Together um you can sell a variety of things using AI a aut you could use a automation to make

a product but the AI automation business model is basically just agencies applied to you know this whole Ai and automation um um development so just like you know everything in those businesses I mentioned earlier being able to manage clients being able to sell being able to Market understanding benefits over features understanding social proof all The things that make you a successful business owner in general these are the things that are going to make you a successful AI automation agency owner as well um and it's you know not not any different in that regard so start

there right start with the fundamentals I guess I'm changing my text color the second is um applied systems and academic systems are very different so what is an applied systems An applied system is uh you know like a business automation it's you know a make.com scenario that gets a new email um with a Facebook lead ad uh subject line then it like adds to some CRM and then I don't know it uses AI to draft some email to the lead this is an applied system this is very simple anybody with more than 30 minutes of

knowledge of a no code platform could probably build out something that does this and starts adding value to Companies academic systems are much more complicated and when we talk academic systems a lot of the time we're actually talking about like hosting or running some sort of AI model and these tend to be these giant super scary looking you know neuron Nets and these these two are very different things okay so I mean people use the term systems just because it's convenient and it's vague but I want you guys to know that automations are built for

the most part for Businesses they're not these academic things they don't need to be these perfectly wellth thought out um AI models and odds are you're not really going to be working with that all we're really doing as an AI automation agency and I'm going to say this which may be counter to what a lot of the other people are doing is we're not we're not really innovating we're taking technology that has been you know created or crafted the theory and then You know given to researchers to develop and turn into these great models and

then we're taking these Technologies and then we're just turning them or or applying them to a business in order to improve profit uh increase Topline and so on and so on and so forth so this whole notion of academic systems to me is really important the main reason why is because I think so many people that start this stuff they come from like an academic background and they come from Like a computer science degree computer programming degree they're Engineers working at other companies software developers whatever have you the reason why it's really important to internalize

this that you're not like inventing or or or generating something new if you are T doing this business model is because uh it'll help direct your effort in the direction that produces the highest Roi for you which is you know okay great I have these systems I have These tools and Technologies I have these Lego blocks how do I put these Lego blocks and tools together in a stack or a package that allows me to generate disproportionate returns for an actual business I'm not actually concerned about making sure every Edge case is perfect I'm not

actually concerned about making sure that you know every little checkbox is ticked perfectly or anything the only thing that matters to me at the end of the day Is does this make money for a business and if you can answer that question then you're in a very good spot to start actually producing okay for number three let's go back to this kind of orangey beige color now because this is just like any other business model reactivation AKA follow-ups and so on and so forth is 80% of your money okay for those of you that don't

know reactivation is this concept where um instead of reach okay if this Is you instead of you reaching out to new people okay kind of going forward in that way what you're doing is you're actually reaching back out to people in your past you're reaching out to past clients you're reaching out to I don't know past leads and you're reaching out to people in your network okay especially if you work some corporate job 9 to5 and you're you're Making a push here you usually have a good Network so reactivation in any business is always where

like 80% plus of your money comes from don't sleep on it what do I mean by this I mean like perform regularly scheduled follow-ups okay if you want to make a ton of money here then have some sort of system whether manual or automatic I mean in this case I might even go manual just so that you can customize it as much as possible because of how valuable this is You don't necessarily want to automate things that are are are extraordinarily valuable if you can add a few additional percentage points of conversion rate by by

doing it yourself um you know have your CRM automatically notify you when it's been more than two months since you've talked with a client you know if you haven't messaged a lead and you didn't receive an absolute screw off from them the last time that you did then make sure you message them again I Mean there are all these statistics that are thrown all over the place but it's something like 90% of the money is after the third or the fourth or the fifth touch point right if you're stopping at the first touch point I

mean you know if this is like your your exp bar in a video game or whatever you're basically stopping right over here you're you have 90% of this left to go before you level up so make sure you make sure you actually fill that in and on top of Regularly scheduling follow-ups also make sure you do reactivation campaigns so your network is your net worth right once you assemble a list of people that you've worked with people that have actually paid you money these people have the highest likelihood to pay you money again in the

future if you treat them right and if you do a good job for them in addition if you work with people that you've already worked in the past you Don't have to pay money to a service to ads to cold email you don't have to pay with your time to jump on a sales call you don't to do any of that in order to acquire that client because you've already acquired them all you're doing is you're sending a quick email or maybe doing a quick five minute sort of ping you're sending them over a proposal

for a package or or something of that nature when you reactivate with clients you basically get like the best of five Worlds okay you get like better working conditions because odds are you've already worked with them they know you you know them you guys are you know uh the working relationship is preferable if it's a totally new person where you have to learn all that you get better pay because they're better able to conceptualize the value they trust you you've already delivered something good for them you get longer or what I should say Is higher

customer lifetime value so you're adding customer lifetime value um every time you get paid by a client whether it's on a retainer or subsequent fixed projects or or hourly or whatever the lifetime value of that client is higher and you know what that means that means better margins because instead of you paying let's say on average you spend uh $200 to acquire a $2,000 client right you will only ever make 90% On that deal right because right off the GetGo your marketing cost is $200 you'll only ever make $1,800 well what if you spend the

$200 to acquire them the first time on ads or or software whatever right but then the second time all you do is you send them a quick email and you're like hey do you want another $2,000 project say yes well now your total is $3,800 okay and if you take this as a fraction of you know $200 divided by $3,800 well now this is no longer um 90% that you're making I mean this is 5% technically but you're actually making 95% okay so you just bumped up your margins by 5% because you got a reactivation

so reactivation is where 80 90 I mean you know it's hard for me to say realistically because everybody's all over the map but reactivation is the way to go in this business model and you're definitely going to want to frontload your Reactivation as much as humanly possible all right let's switch colors just continue keeping things interesting the best Legion is always literally always unsexy what do I mean by unsexy uh the best Legion that you will ever find is something that is so boring and so trite so raw and dirty and underhanded and grimy that

nobody else wants to use them And nobody else is nobody else even thinks about them as an option and that's exactly why they work I'll give you guys a quick example um one of my very first businesses before I went into the whole AI automation stuff was back in college where I was throwing parties um for like an event man well it was my own event management company we were throwing parties at our local college and it was amazing right as you can imagine young man in a college with a Bunch of parties uh what

more could you possibly ask for one of our marketing campaigns the one that really solidified us is like the biggest event management company um on campus and um eventually when we went to downtown Vancouver we were one of the the larger ones there as well the thing that solidified us was our ability and our willingness to do pretty dirty I don't want to say dirty things but this is kind of grimy we um one of our marketing Campaigns we went into every bathroom in the university and we put our posters directly above the urinals and

nobody was doing this at the time and maybe people do this now I don't know I mean I think I've seen people do this so you know this was revolutionary to me at the time it wasn't revolutionary everybody but we basically went to every bathroom on campus and we just stuck our posters up we made our posters extraordinarily simple and easy and legible to read we And sometimes made some jokes about peeing or something we um you know because it was just us a group of dudes we paid some girls um that were part of

our business to go into all the women's washrooms and then put it immediately behind the the door closed of like the the bathroom stalls I mean I remember our very first event it it it sold out we had a line going through the main Concourse the university and like I don't know I want to say another 100 Meters past that the school had never seen anything like that before and it was simply because we were ready to use dirty underhanded tactics that nobody else had thought about okay there are so many examples of this um

Nikita beer I don't know if I'm saying his name right but I see him all the all the time on Twitter he runs and launches a bunch of apps that typically cater like a high school audience they have like massive viral potential he doesn't just like go To Facebook ads to advertise a service you know what he does he actually he creates Instagram accounts and then he goes and follows High School Instagram accounts of like 8,000 people with his little gas app or whatever the heck it's called and then he DMS them all and says

hey you know are you on gas app because we I don't know there's something that's happening or some event that's occurring at University right this is this is dirty this is underhanded anybody would Look at that and scoff guess what that guy sold so many Dam bit he's one of the richest people probably on that platform at this point in time you can't really argue with results so when it comes to AI automation um specifically what are some great and unsexy Lead uh gen examples well the big one that I always pitch and you know

that so many people just seem not to understand is upwork right off the getg go right A lot of people think upwork is dirty it's grimy It's a freelance platform man you can't make money off a freelance platform say that to my half a million dollars um you know from upwork if you turn your nose up at every lead genen opportunity you're you're you're going to delay how long it takes you to get started you're probably never actually going to go ahead and and go through with anything if you're that sort of person so don't

say no to things like upwork what's another example of a Leun opportunity that up until quite recently everybody thought was really dirty well I was one of the first people I would say to do this at scale cold email was really big right cold email you mean spamming people it's like no I mean directly putting yourself in front of a person in one of the most private places that they have where they have those thoughts themselves their email inbox a direct line straight to their freaking retinas in their brains if you Can uh I don't

know do do these dirty sort of underhanded campaign right uh you can you can crush it you can do incredibly well now I'm not trying to tell you to be unethical or something but I'll give you a quick example we ran a campaign once for uh a company that I owned last year uh where it it was for one of our clients I should say but um essentially there was a big conference that happened a big educational conference okay and we had procured the List to all of the people that had gone to this educational

conference we procured it by simply asking them to resend us the list or something I think we we implied that we already had it uh something of that nature and then once we had this big list of like I don't know a thousand people that went to this conference we simply said hey you were at that conference you know X Y and Z conference to right insert name asked me to reach out to you insert name was just Some guy in the business like our business so they had no relation to him but we were

so heavy on the implication we said well you know if you went to this conference you probably met a lot of people if you met a lot of people odds are there's some people that you met whose names you probably don't remember and guess what we had a reply rate of over 22% on that campaign it was insane so the best lead gen method is always unsexy you can't play by the Rules if we played by the rules everywhere we went you wouldn't be able to cross a freaking uh you wouldn't be able to walk

across the road unless it was a designated stop sign okay so yeah we have upwork we have cold email the variety of other ones as well um you know like I talk a lot about communities what do I mean by communities I mean you know all those communities that say no self-promotion you're not allowed to self-promote here Well guess what you can self-promote you just have to be smart about it you have to build a ton of value you have to consistently post for a long enough time so that people think you're an authority and

once you're an authority in the space when you make posts people DM you they ask you questions they they they take your word for things it's so easy to then take a conversation like that into a DM and then close them I mean there you know there are hundreds of Other U methods like this there are business incubators there are networking events there are I want to say universes up for grabs for people that have the cleverness and ability to operate off of incomplete information um if you are the sort of person that can take

advantage of platforms like this and you're the sort of person that can take advantage of basically anything and if you look at All of like the great businesses you'll find that in isolation um basically none of them were able to grow without one of these techniques so anyway the fifth point is don't look down on hourly and you know I mean this is sort of related to that upward point that I made a moment ago but really just don't look down on anything you know in in business um the only question you should ask yourself

is does it make money and uh you know obviously don't be total Jackass about it and take everything I'm sing with a grain of salt make sure to maintain a positive reputation and to provide value to people and so on and so on and so forth but if it makes money right then generally speaking it's a positive thing now hourly has a very poor reputation in the industry because if you think about it you know what happens with hourly well if this is the um you know money that you make and then this is the

time that you Put in hourly tends to kind of just go up like this right like basically every unit of time that you spend you are only made I don't know let's say let's say 50 bucks 100 bucks 150 you know this is 1 Hour 2 hours 3 hours so I understand the idea behind you know not to do hourly and that's okay like you know if if hourly is just something that you are so utterly disgusted by or whatnot sure you don't have to do it but I'm trying to tell you don't don't look

down on it Simply by virtue of the fact that it's hourly um when I started my automation agency the vast majority of our contracts were hourly and that was the only way that we got started the most important thing for us at the time was to make money first and then we could figure everything else out afterwards right like you a lot of people they put their nose up against the idea of even making money if it's not as much money as they think they're like like oh that Client's $800 I can't work with an

$800 client it's like well how much money do you actually have you actually made zero right so zero to 800 well at least you're moving in the direction and the unfortunate thing about business that a lot of people don't realize is when you start a new business you have so many different forms of debt that you're paying down that you don't even know your goal is to pay down that debt as quickly as possible horos talks about This idea of like skill debt he talks about um knowledge debt uh uh client management debt and so

on and so forth when you start a new business or you go into a new field you just have so many things that you don't know that you don't know that the only way to pay them down is to start working even if that work is let's say less money than you might previously be comfortable with the unfortunate reality is in in business you're just going to have to do a lot of Things you're probably not going to want to do especially initially and if you do those for long enough you'll eventually be able to

do the things that you do want to do uh and then just do a lot of them okay in the vein of me changing colors every two seconds my next point is to sell before you build not after so I see this a lot in my communities maker School specifically just because a little bit more of a beginner Community but so many people Will try building this amazing thing it's the coolest thing in the whole wide world okay and they take this this product and then they try and sell it and then nobody wants it

so it's much better to go and ask people hey what do you want I'm trying to draw stacks of cash I don't think I can draw stacks of cash I'm not good enough to draw stacks of cash no but anyway it's much better to um get people to say yes to something And then once you know what it is that they want then you can go and you can build the cool fancy product but if you start building before you know what the hell you're doing you're just you're just going to waste your time you're

going to build some big long shapely thing that nobody ever gives a crap about you know don't spend months of your life doing something unless you know the market wants it what are some quick and easy ways to know if The market wants something well look at what's working so literally go and see hey what are other people doing what are other people selling how are other people making money well odds are if they're making money with it then there's an opportunity for me to make money too there's nothing wrong about this you don't have

to invent a wheel every time you want to start a business or make cash if everybody did that then there' Basically be no businesses the risk would be way too high of course iterate on somebody else's business model just copy them uh like I've seen a lot of but uh you know the second that you can start adding value um you're you're good the second is look for competition right don't go away from competition if you have a niche that's like super mega saturated there's like a million in one people in there that's actually really

good for you because you Know that there's a million and one people making money sure maybe not a lot of money but it's still money and again you know going from Z to one is much much easier and more um realistic than trying to go from zero to like 100 right off the bat okay so sell before you build not after this is just how business Works in 2020 in like the 2020s um there's no need to try and and and make the most amazing product ever um you're you're not like an artist I mean

You may be an artist I don't know your whole background maybe you're an artist and a business owner but the purpose of this is not to paint an amazing painting Straight From the Heart and you know uh make sure that aligns with your mission and your values and so on and so forth to be honest that the reason why you're in business is probably to make money and knowing that the AI automation agency is a business model like basically any others just use what is Tried and true first before you try innovating okay the next

big point is clients don't care oh I had to learn this one the hard way about implementation they don't actually care how you did the project okay so um let me give you a quick example here using another way of thinking about this let's say the goal okay so this is this is you and this is the goal of the Project let's say in order to get to the project you had to take a very circuitous path okay and it was filled with a bunch of BS and tons of random left turns use the wrong

software platforms whatever but at the end of the day you still got there the client doesn't actually care they don't care about this big Journey that you took you know what they're going to see behind the scenes all they're going to see is this they're just going to know that you Went from where you were before to the goal which was finishing the project so from the client perspective none of the intervening Parts matter let me give you some concrete examples here clients don't care about the software generally speaking clients don't care about your system

they don't care about your scenario they don't really care about Ops cost I mean some of them do but Ops cost is usually so small um in n terms maybe this is like Executions they don't really care about like the technical efficiency they don't really care about whether it works with all edge cases they don't care if you had problems during the development okay they don't care about any of that stuff the only thing they care about is does it work and what does work mean well to be pragmatic it usually means does this Work

when he or she demos it for me when they deliver the project if the answer to that question is yes odds are you're going to get a very good client review and a much higher likelihood of follow-up work now obviously don't just make like a glass house right make sure that it works um make sure that it works like uh after that as well but that that's the most important part of the whole thing right make sure you know if you think about like the pred value it's It's all the way at the top make

sure it looks godamn beautiful at the very beginning make sure everything about that is is gorgeous and amazing and and so on and so forth and then you'll be much more likely um you you'll capitalize on this you'll be much more likely to be able to get follow on projects and so on and so forth so no matter what you do clients don't care about implementation don't talk to them about the implementation unless they ask You a pointed question about it or unless they're hyper technical or they're just that sort of person um don't don't

don't sweat it okay this is one of those unfortunately really hard things for people that are in Ai and automation to learn because we tend to like the technology we tend to be passionate about and we tend to want to talk about all of our cool approaches and how we dragged and dropped all these Lego blocks together or the cool Heroku Server or AWS Lambda script or or what whatever have you I fell into this trap a lot when I started if I could give myself a few pieces of advice this would definitely be on

that list to to transport back in time okay the next big thing I want to talk about right off the get-go and you know this is less of a specific automation thing but I'd say it's more of just like um any any anything in business it's that um people will not Like you so uh a lot of people aren't going to like you a lot of people are going to think that what you're doing is just necessarily bad or not good essentially um when I started my cold email just to give you an example 99%

of the first few responses were you suck I'm reporting you this is super bad you should be embarrassed I was very bad at this maybe Not 99% but I think you guys get my point right the vast majority of the responses that I received were were poor likewise when I even when I you know back in college when I started my my event management company stuff like everybody was just like well dude this sucks you have no idea what you're doing when I launched my first product dude you suck this you have no idea what

you're doing when I launched that painting that I talked to you about Right first couple responses on Hacker News were like dude this sucks nobody cares about this this is weird you're you're stop being weird this sucks so you're going to get a lot of that when you start um because people are uncomfortable with somebody that is you know naturally pushing the boundaries of something uh in business you're going to have a lot of people uncomfortable with your approaches you're going to have a lot of like uncomfortable calls probably AI automation wise just accept that

right now and everything from here on out is going to be a lot easier um but yeah you know people aren't going to like you basically anytime you push the boundaries of what is is possible in a niche they're not going to believe you uh it's that it's that old adage where it's like first they mock you then they ignore you then they I I don't know exactly what it is then they laugh at you and then you win or something then They want to be you I should say anyway that's not the right window

okay great um so moving on uh number nine is related you're going to look stupid so my recommendation for you is just keep it on the DL like keep it um on the down though try not to like I don't know make AI automation your identity to start I know it is really cool technology and stuff like that but the reality is a lot of people are going To think that you look stupid for trying this new business model or posting on LinkedIn or making a Twitter business account or a Tik Tok account and stuff

like that your your family members may try to talk you out of it as mine always did every time I mentioned starting a business um you know a lot a lot of people are just going to think that you're you're you're being moronic and that you should kind of stick to the safer path or maybe more well Established thing if you're coming from a 9 to5 this is definitely the hardest thing to grasp so um you know you're going to get a lot more uh if you're coming from like some other successful business a lot

of people are probably still going to be asking you questions like hey man like why aren't you just doing the thing that you know works right that other thing and that's okay I received a lot of this when I started um left click uh Because it was like hey what about you know one second copy what about the content writing company man like 92 came out D it's making a ton of money you're good you're good you're good you're good and it's like well I believe in this and I could see a future where this

is more important so I'm going to focus on it so if I could just offer another word of advice it just be you know you don't need to scream this from the parapets just uh you know lock in as the kids say Try and get as much done as humanly possible um away from prying eyes uh don't let them demotivate you essentially and then once you have some measure of success then you can start talking about it a lot more okay remember how earlier I said you're going to be in debt so you're basically going

to be in like AI automation debt so you know there's this whole idea um and there I don't think it was horos That came up with it but he probably popularized it and if you don't know who hormos is that's Alex hormos he's one of like the bigger consultants in the space now not the a automation space but just you know entrepreneurship in general the idea is like when you when you start any new business model um you're going to have some debt okay like we all want to start at zero but the reality is

you're actually going to start at like I don't Know this is zero and you're actually going to start at like negative five or something just in terms of like your your skill and this this right here is your debt so you're actually going to start here the the unfortunate thing is um your goal is you got to pay this down as quickly as possible if you don't if you just allow the debt of your skill so maybe your client management debt or your technical debt or um I don't know your inability to use no code

debt or or Whatever um debt compounds really quickly so it'll actually go the opposite direction for you so your goal is basically like hey I need to take whatever I have time energy money and just pay down this debt Gap as much as possible I just need to shoot up and once I'm at zero that's fine I can chill at this zero level as as often as possible um and you know maybe eventually start accumulating stuff but but if you're not um you just you just Tend to grow um there are few things that um

compound in life um debt is unfortunately one of them so if we just flip this graph over hypothetically and this is just like the depth graph instead okay this was zero this was I don't know5 -10 -20 and this is time uh basically you know debt will compound faster and faster and faster and faster the more you leave it so you just have To make sure to pay that down as possible now compounding can be really positive if it's like your net worth right because you have a certain amount of interest but it can also

be really really negative if it's debt and in our case um our our our thing is debt here so basically you have a bunch of things you need to pay down really quickly okay so um here's just a quick list you you have uh let's do technical Debt to start so odds are you're working with new technologies these are like no code tools these are um like AI prompting probably these are things like that essentially software programming you're also going to have um business debt so this is going to be stuff like uh I don't

know like client management skills you know business skill debt basically client management Skills um and even if you've worked with other clients or whatever you still have client management skill debt for this particular industry because it's a little bit different um I don't know like proposals basically admin you're going to have like sales debt right because you've probably not sold this sort of thing before so you're gonna have you're G to have all sorts of debt um you basically just have to knock these out As quickly as possible and how do you knock these out

as quickly as possible you knock these out fast by just accepting projects um and then trading you know even if it's like less money than you're comfortable with or happy with trading a little bit of the money for the ability to pay down these spheres of debt like technical in business so um as long as you go from from 0 to one like if you're the sort of person that just like accumulates small Wins goes from 0 to one in as short a time period as possible um you know your your trajectory is going to

be like this we got a ton of people in my communities right now and I'm seeing this live for myself it's the people that like take the small winds that tend to snowball and accumulate that's really all that you're that's all that you're really focused on so related to that notion is this notion of um of custom projects okay so uh a custom Project is basically this this idea where you're not actually selling a specific system like I'm not selling a cold email system I'm selling uh like my skill as an AI automation person so

on jobs Platforms in particular like like upwork and then typically through through networking you usually end up with people that don't really fully understand the Technologies is playing they don't really know what they want and so when you start talking to them It's like hey I want a system that kind of does this but I'm not entirely sure would you mind helping me out odds are this isn't a system that you built before so because it's not a system you built before you have to customize you have to do something new right you're basically rebuilding

the wheel so these are called custom projects and generally people in the industry admonish custom projects they they hate them because they say well custom projects are a Massive waste of time it's not how you actually grow a business and so on and so forth and the reason you know like it it makes sense right custom projects tend to be very unscalable because you have to do something new every time so let me just give you some pros and cons instead because there are actually many places where you should accept custom projects especially at the

beginning um and I definitely did a lot of custom projects that while they were really Tough um ended up paying down all all of this sort of debt very very quickly okay so the pro the big Pro is it's easy to make money quickly because you know if you think about it when you're competing in a market it's kind of like um supply versus demand right it's the whole like classic economics if Supply is up then demand is down whereas if demand if Supply is down then demand is up more people want your Stuff you

could charge more for it so let's say you're selling like templated cold email systems or something well odds are there are a lot of people that are selling templated cold email systems at this point so what does that mean for the supply it's actually pretty high meaning demand is down so it's actually tougher to sell um one of these templated systems right but how about if somebody wants some custom integration with zapier and Panda do and he wants You to sprinkle on a little bit of deep seek R3 connected to some custom server Rack or

whatever well what's what do you think the supply is for people that sell that exact thing really low right so obviously they are going to be willing to pay a lot more they're going to demand it a lot more so it's a very quick and easy way to make money quickly because because there's just no there's no other competition selling the same thing and so you can typically charge You know I don't know like $223,000 for a project and you can get that you know maybe half up front or trunch in Milestones or whatever so

that's pretty cool um and it's great to pay down other debt because uh on top of the um big cash inflow you're also now working with the client a lot more um you're doing things like a lot more client management you're doing things like Setting expectations doing timelines basically managing custom projects is like uh the the the microcosm of of managing a whole business um you're also solving your technical debt because you're obviously going to be working with technologies that like you're not really templating out okay so it's just a great way to pay down

debt so these are the three pros basically the cons is it's unscalable and if you're doing custom Projects um you cap out pretty quick you have a low ceiling let's say also hiring which you need if you want to scale in AI automation agencies is very hard it's hard to hire well just one of those unfortunate things you need technical people but you also need people that understand like business utility and knowledge and stuff and it's just very unlikely that you get both you need to look really hard So uh really kind of the best

way to do it okay if I just do another one of my famous graphs good God am I just going to be the graph guy um basically the the way to do custom projects is if you think about like the the life cycle of your agency and this is your Revenue my recommendation is do custom projects really quickly initially okay use that to bump up your Revenue after that you know take Um take a little bit of time and sort of like reevaluate what your product is use the custom projects that you just did as

a way to determine um kind of like what the scalable product is kind of take a couple steps back and see you know can I systematize can I find a way to do this sort of thing at scale then once you productized and found something that works then um well you're going to grow a little bit slower than that initial Revenue but it's going to be a lot more Sustainable so I would recommend basically that that white is custom projects this blue is U productizing and then this red I think this is red yes is

you scaling so this is you know one aspect uh of your business right over here one part this is is another part then obviously this is the biggest and the longest one because it goes up the Highest and it's also kind of where you should be spending the bulk of your time you know in my opinion this is sort of like I don't know zero to 3month territory okay this is sort of like I don't know 3 to six month territory and then everything over here is sort of like um just just the rest of

your business and this is like the successful business now many ways to conceptualize this it's not always 0 to three or six so take all that with a Grain of salt but um you know I've just worked with over a thousand automation agencies now and I'm starting to see some Trends okay the next concept that I want to chat about is leverage and if you really want to crush it you should understand leverage you should understand it very deeply so what Leverage is is it's just the The Art of Doing more with less so it

is generating A larger output for Less input the way it works if you guys are familiar with levers is basically if you have a stone okay and the stone here let's just uh let me draw a Little Rock and this this weighs it down with I don't know let's say 100 pound if you wanted to lift up the stone what you would have to do is you would apply 100 lb at exactly the same distance away from the stone on the Other side which would be over here okay but because of how Levers work if

you just go up the lever if you just go over here a little bit then in order to lift the stone up by pushing down over here you might actually only have to do about 30 pounds of force and that's because um this is just a fundamental mechanism or law of physics it's it's the way that Levers work when you have a full Chrome which Is this thing right over here you can apply less Force further away and then in exchange you'll have to move more but this this rock you'll essentially be able to lift

this rock with substantially less um less weight you know I'm sure many of you guys know this is how like Hydraulics work it's how like those little pneumatic or hydraulic door closer and opener things work it's how uh Jacks in your car work right like you can't actually lift up your whole Car but what you can do is you can push over a much longer distance with much less Force to slowly crank up um the other side of it so understanding Leverage is really important you don't need to do it in like a physics sense

but I do think it's a really great mental model to know like if you understand the physic sense behind it uh you know like if this is X and then if like this is X and if like this is 3x then the amount of force is going to be Whatever this is divided by three so it'll actually be 33 right um so you don't you don't have to know this uh from a physics sense but I do recommend you know this from like uh at least like a somewhat intuitive sense the cool thing about automation

is if I just redraw this now um I think about our business model is basically the same thing um if you get in the habit of using uh templates so this is a Client okay normally in order to move a client at the same distance right you'd have to apply I don't know let's just say like 10 hours well if you use templates okay what you can do is you can move this client that that's worth 10 hours and then um I don't know this is like six uh 7 hours you can actually do so

in like 3 hours instead okay this isn't the best diagram but I I think you guys Understand my point so you can apply this concept to basically anything in life whether it's business pleasure personal Romantics I I I don't know um but in the case of automation the cool part about a template is the template already like gets you 80% of the way there instead of you having some big long exp bar like uh back in Pokemon on or something where you have to start from zero and then painstakingly do your Project and go all

the way up to 100% every single time what you do instead is you actually get to start at 80% and so your template's already 80% of the way filled so what do you do all you have to do is just go 80 to 100 which is obviously a lot easier right I'm finding myself using a lot more video game analogies specifically because uh I've had a bunch of people tell me hey man these video game Analogies really make all the stuff make makes sense so if you like the video game analogies let me know if

you if you don't then um leave them down in the comments okay so the next point I want to make is spend an inordinate amount of time on design what is design design is you making stuff look good and feel good if I think about like top three or four skills um design uh for me in my business would be one of them and I Don't necessarily mean you have to be able to like craft an amazing website landing page or something I just mean when you when you work through a project just understand that

the Aesthetics or the the packaging of that project is really important remember how earlier we talked about um making sure that it worked at the first demo this is basically the same thing make sure that the design of the product is very clean and make sure the Aesthetics and the Packaging are very very tight for instance if your automation or AI tool generates an email of some kind don't just write a crappy little prompt and then have it stick out the emails and be like awesome we now generate emails if you're going to spend time

on anything in the business spend time on the thing that the customer is going to be looking at like those emails so like that's actually where you apply your Force that's actually where you spend your Time and energy and if you can figure out um you know the design first and foremost and if you can add that to your templates you get even more leveraged so design is is super super incredible I'm not trying to say that form is over function okay most people see things like this all I'm trying to say is that nowadays

it's more like let start with form actually it's not it's not either Of these it's kind of like form is equal to function so if you're going to spend you know 50% of the time building the system spend at least that much amount of time making the system look look really pretty or at least making the outputs of the system look pretty because keep in mind systems are um generally speaking just a black box for the customer right like you're going to put some input then you're going to get some sort of Output customer doesn't

really give a crap what's inside of there as we mentioned and as we talked about already so what you want to do instead is when you focus your time you want to focus on making the output just look beautiful and as pretty and as incredible as humanly possible okay okay I got a great tip up next for us overthinkers in the room which I know are many um you know don't automate everything Automate stuff but don't automate everything I used to get in the habit of automating everything because I was like I'm an automation guy

I work with AI of course I'm going to automate everything well in reality nowadays I actually automate a shockingly little of my work like I think most people would probably be surprised to learn just how little of my work that I automate you know just in terms of the way that I spend my time um I I I automate basically nothing of of Note I'll give you a quick example every morning I will go log on to all of my bank accounts and I will count up um all of the the bank transactions and I'll

manually move them over to a spreadsheet I do all this completely manually could I automate it yeah in like 2 seconds it's one of the most basic automations that anybody could build right you watch for a new bank transaction or maybe you pull it once a day then you just pull all new entries into into a sheet I do It manually and the reason why is because I've identified this as a very high leverage way for me to spend my time if I every morning reenter my thoughts back to hey what am I actually doing

this for right money right if I Center my thoughts back to money every morning for 5 or 10 minutes is is there really anything more effective those 5 minutes May influence the decisions that I make over the subsequent 16 hours if I'm thinking about money and return on Investment I know how much money I'm losing on a daily basis how much money I'm making on a daily basis this just makes me substantially more capable and more um I don't know on point I guess as a business person um for for the rest of the day

another example is my communities I I respond to all of my communities manually right A lot of people are like dude you do that yourself what the hell don't you want to hire all these people to do it for you And I'm like no because that has to be the biggest point of Leverage that I have if I respond to something manually people know that I respond to it manually they appreciate that I respond to it manually I mean how much Goodwill am I building in the marketplace how much uh churn am I reducing in

my communities and so on and so forth uh you know when it comes to client management and stuff like I don't have it fully automated I will talk to the Client once a week usually once a week per client as part of my subscription or retainer package um that call is immensely important what's another example um travel I I literally you know after I know a client for certain amount of time even if I'm over here and they're over here and this is like many uh I actually don't know how many kilometers it is many

kilometers away okay I will fly over to them and I will get a hotel a few blocks from their Office and I will pay it all out of pocket and I will spend two or three days in the in the area manual vicinity of their office I will hang out with them I'll come into their business I'll shake hands kiss babies do everything I need to do you know this is the opposite of automation but why do I do it because it's well it's not automation it's leverage if you can get in the habit of

spending the little time that you do have every day on the things that are The most effective well what happens by me doing this I basically secure X months of no churn I secure a better relationship I could like 2x my subscription I don't always 2x my subscription but I can I can you know open up Partnerships I can have much better client relationship for the time that we do spend together the team likes me more right I guess the point I'm making is the time that I do spend tends to be extraordinarily Effective so

um you know a good you know one final example that I mentioned here is a lot of people want to like okay they ask me hey um Can can I automate an email campaign and they say you know I get a lot of positive responses I kind of want to automate these because I get like five a day or something and they're like um can I just feed this into AI I I just want you to think about what you're gaining versus losing if you were to do Something like this and then I want you

to take the same concept and apply to all the other areas in your business so you automating email responses if you get let's say 10 responses a day okay how long is it actually take for you to respond to 10 per day yourself might realistically take you okay 20 minutes well let's just make it really unreasonable and say 30 minutes assuming you're not using any templates or whatever it takes you half an hour every Day to respond to these things right and you're like man I want that half hour back can I automate it okay

so you save 30 minutes a day how many days a week or a month are you doing this you're probably doing this let's just say 30 let's actually say you're doing every single day of the month 30 * 30 minutes is 15 hours okay how much is your time worth let's say your time is worth uh I don't know if you're at the start line of your business might be 50 bucks an Hour if you're at the the middle point of your business something maybe it's 150 bucks let's just cater this towards beginners let's say

it's 100 bucks an hour so what are you actually saving on a monthly basis if you think about it this way well you are saving $1,500 for the month by automating this wow that's great you think I can save $1,500 a month take the opportunity cost and put it on something else right okay Well let's count up the total number of responses in the month let's say you get 300 okay now let's gauge the effectiveness of having AI do it versus you do it let's say when you do it okay you are 90% or something

okay H let's just make it really simple you are 100% effective you are a human being and you're just great at doing what you're doing AI on the other hand is 90% effective so listen It's still really effective okay it's just 10% off of you but what that means is because it's 90% effective if you multiply this by 300 responses what you're doing is you're throwing away 10% which means you only have 270 left so you just lost 30 responses that's minus 30 what if every closed deal is worth $2,000 to you and you close

one in 10 deals these are all very conservative Numbers by the way the reality is a lot higher if you've lost 30 and you closed one in every 10 deals you would have closed three Deals if you would have closed three Deals times $2,000 you would have made 6,000 so what you've done is you've traded $6,000 to get $1,500 okay that means that you're actually in the red or uh yeah in the red here by $4,500 and this is super conservative you'd be surprised at some Of these situations in which people want to automate the

most high leverage part of their business which is like securing leads securing clients it's crazy to me I understand why because you know I sort of wanted to do some of the same stuff way back in the day but when you understand leverage when you understand the point at which you need to press in order to extract maximum value out of a business um stuff like this just ends up being Insane okay I have one more and then it's showtime or maybe go time more leads or actually let's just call it growth more growth solves

everything okay more growth is almost always the answer now I know what you guys are thinking more growth what if I have too much growth believe it or not the answer to Too Much growth is more growth and I say this totally non- factiously if you have a lot of leads It's almost like everything it's almost like you having a lot of leads is like a hammer and it makes everything look like a nail okay so you know this is your super big hammer and because of that all of your problems just turn into Nails

let me give you an example this is uh I don't know project management this is hiring this is I don't know founder chaos where you think everything's chaotic you're going crazy Believe It or Not leads actually solves all of these problems when you have more leads in your business this is why it's like a cure all man it's like Stevia was you know 20 or 30 years ago where it's like oh my God there's zero calories in this thing incredible everything's it's like OIC is now right it's like everything about having more leads is good

because when you have more leads okay even if your project management is is like super Disorganized and you're swimming and work you have no idea what's going on more leads will solve this because it means that in the future you can accept only the jobs that are the simplest and the highest quality the ones that pay you a disproportionate amount of money per unit time okay if you're running into issues with hiring and you're like oh man I I don't have a big enough team to take on all this work more leads will solve this

because more leads means you Will be able to choose the work that requires the fewest people to fulfill you'll be able to specifically sell those product eyes services that we talked about or some variant of them that is hyper templated so that you don't actually need to go and hire well all all you need to do is you need to make more leads okay founder chaos what if you're tearing your hair you're working 16 hours a day you're like I can't have a single more lead in my Business or I'm going to off myself well

more leads solves that because with more leads you get to work with only the clients that you know like and Trust only the clients that for a single unit of time this is a unit deliver you a disproportionate amount of money you will basically have the pick of the litter let's say before you had a lot of leads this is one month okay in one Whole month from start to finish you got I don't know one lead here another lead here another lead here this lead pays you $500 this lead pays you $1,000 and then

this lead pays you $2,000 okay so what are you going to pick well obviously I'm going to pick all three because I only have three clients a whole month of course I'm going to pick all three however um now my total income for the month is 3,500 and maybe you know uh I'm just working out some time metric $3,500 for I don't know maybe 100 hours is now 35 bucks an hour or something okay can now let's pretend hypothetically we have the exact same situation but you have 10 times the leads you're getting so many

opportunities over the course of the month I don't know if I've done 30 I think I've done 30 okay so what if 99 or 90% of these are are like these but then Every once in a while you got a stand out this guy pays you $5,000 this guy is with willing to pay $7,500 this guy is willing to pay $3,500 okay per per some unit of time well now I have so many more opportunities obviously instead of me having to work with three people and spend 100 hours I could just work with one dude

spend maybe 50 hours then make uh more than two times the money you know 7500 divid 50 instead is 150 bucks An hour now what did I have to do do in order to make that happen well I probably need to spend some more money on the front end right but to make $4,000 more in this hypothetical example plus an additional $115 per hour I'm up for that aren't you up for that so if you just sort out your lead gen first okay if you make sure to take care of that first and foremost the

beginning of every day you have some sort of lead gen Actionable maybe if you're uh if you have some inbound Channel like me you're creating content first thing in the morning or or whatever or if you have some sort of outbound Channel cold email those dirty kind of upwork tricks that I was talking about earlier if you do that first thing you frontload your leads all of the rest of your problems in your business just start to disappear and this is specifically relevant to AI automation because of the tendency to Have as many custom projects

and large Scopes and and things like that so you can really start to see there are some massive differences between super custom highly crazy detailed Scopes that pay me little money and then that client over there wants basically the same thing but uh they only want three steps instead of 8,000 and then they're paying me the same amount obviously I'm going to go with them so I hope this gives you guys some context into how I've managed my Own Ai and automation businesses over the course of the last few years specifically my agency as I

know we talked about at the beginning but also just to zoom out a bit and look at the AI and automation landscape more generally like through my uh Painting Company through my content writing company and so on and so forth anybody has any questions about any of the concepts that I talked about just drop them down below I really appreciate all Of your time and the Fantastic feedback I've gotten from youall very recently my Channel's been blowing up it's 100% thanks to everybody especially you that makes it to the end of the video um if

you have any uh thing that you like me to record a video on in the future then please drop that suggestion down below I actually Source the vast majority of my ideas now from you which is fantastic and then if you could do me a big solid and just uh like And subscribe do all That fun stuff to bump me up to the top of the algo check out maker school and make money with make uh do all that fun stuff I'll catch you on the next video thanks so much