The Biggest Opportunity Right Now... It's Not SMMA

okay if I was to lose my seven figure agency tomorrow wake up and all of my clients are gone my skill set has disappeared I have no connections no business whatsoever there is only one other model that I would consider starting to get myself off the ground in the shortest time frame possible and maximize my chance of success and I've mentored thousands of agency owners over the past eight years and helped them launch build and scale through many different agency models my agency affluent. is an e-commerce agency we went from zero to multi7 figures and

still run that agency to this day I helped hambi media go from zero to over half a million a month in a creative agency I very recently helped impressive click who's a web development agency hit almost $50,000 a month in Revenue so I'm not emotional or bias over a specific agency model but every single day I am asked what the best model is for beginners to start right now and what I'm going to talk about today is without a shadow of a doubt the best opportunity for beginners coming into 2025 and Beyond but don't take

my word from it I'm just a random guy on the internet right make your own decision I'm going to lay out all of the facts today I'm going to outline what the ideal agency actually looks like as far as criteria and then I'll run you through what this model is and how it works and then you can make your own calculated decision on whether or not this is something you want to do and for the small few of you that do end up starting within this model you're truly going to get ahead of the masses

you are very very early if you're watching this video soon around the release date so the first thing I want want to go through is what the ideal agency actually looks like I've got some slides I'm going to throw them up so we can look at that if we're going to assess what the best model is for beginners we have to consider what the best model even means okay and what we're talking about here is a business model a specific type of agency who are we working with and what are we actually delivering well the

first thing is we want to be going for a broad market and what I mean by that is there needs to be a lot of potential customers in this pool in the agency space many people throw around the term of niching down and niching down means you work with a very specific industry and offer them a very specific service that is a very intelligent thing to do but only when you are more established as a business owner and you have the skill set and knowledge required to actually do this and for most people like if

you're watching this right now if you don't have any unfair advantages if you haven't been in a career already that has exposed you to having very clear knowledge of a specific specific industry or specific service then you don't want to go Niche down you only want to Niche down from the start if you have you've already got a specific skill set that you can use and leverage or you have significant knowledge of a specific industry or a niche which means it makes logical sense for you to work with those guys but for the majority of

you and certainly for me when I first started you want to go what I call scatter gun you want to go Broad and you want to work with a large Market okay and then later down the line we can hone in and we can get we can get more Niche and more niche as our experience grows now the next thing we need is to actually get results it should be pretty obvious for many people work in industries that truly struggle to get results for their clients and as an agency we survive and thrive from the

case studies that we generate and case studies are um are proof that we've generated results for previous clients so testimonials documentation of the results that we've generated and what this allows us to do is Leverage those results show them to other people it's going to increase the amount of clients that we can sign and then our agency starts to snowball over time so the more case studies we get the better our reputation the more inbound clients we get the more referrals we get and hence as you imagine a snowball going down the hill it's getting

bigger and bigger and bigger self- sustaining by itself and so we need to actually get results it also wants to be an in demand service okay now when I first started my agency it was what you would call a tradition smma a social media marketing agency and I was offering organic services to local businesses I signed up a restaurant I signed up a gym I signed up a dentist I signed up a jewelry store okay all local businesses in my local area and the core service was organic social media management so I would manage people's

Instagram pages and post images on their behalf and this was in a time where Instagram and Facebook were very very new to companies you went into a business and you um you expressed the interest to improve their social media presence and this was like wow yes I need to get on Instagram yes we need to get on Facebook it's the new shiny thing and so it was very very easy for me to sign up clients in the early stages because it was a new shiny service that everybody wanted to get on top of okay and

so we have to consider whether or not what we are selling is something that is actually in demand from a cultural perspective based on the latest technology based on Trends based on the news based on the media okay so it is what we're selling something that's actually in demand by people or are we fighting an uphill battle by trying to sell something to people that they don't already have the ingrain desire to actually want okay we need low overhead this is extremely important we don't want to be building a business that means we have to

spend a huge amount of money to actually fulfill these Services now granted if you're watching this right now and you just want to make 10K a month in your business then you can do that with just yourself as a solo business owner if you want to be working let's say 40 hour weeks for example you can definitely make $10,000 a month or £10,000 a month depending on where you're from but if you want to be off the tools and you want to then have time Freedom as well where you're not spending all of your time

you're going to need probably one employee in the business in order to sustain that if you're in a simple agency model now there are some agency models which I'm going to be going through I'm not just going to be going through the best model today I'm going to be outlining other models and in contrast allowing you to make the decision on where which Avenues should take you might choose to go down a route of one of the other models I'm going to talk through there are some models that mean your overheads are going to be

higher your delivery costs are going to be higher and that means your profit margins are lower so we want our profit margins to be as high as possible so we have as much Freedom over our finances as possible and there is as little complexity in the company as possible because the more complexity is there The more stress there's going to be and the more things there are that can go wrong now finally it needs a scalable future okay what do I mean by this it needs to be a service that has future so I'm thinking

creative right now if we think about creative uh especially video creative we're in a Content uh a world which is incredibly content Centric we're only going to be going more and more content Centric podcasts order rage videos order rage uh Instagram reals Tik toks and so and our minds are so optimized around short form quickfire content um that creative is a good example of a scalable future we're only going to get more ingrained in content and it's going to evolve over time AI is another exceptional example of that we are just the infancy of what

is happening in AI right now there is so much future so much potential and so if we're offering a service which is related to AI or content then we have a pretty good stab at the chance that there is a lot of exciting progression on the horizon and that is what that's something that we want in the business we want future we don't want to be in an industry which is slowly declining that has the opportunity to be replaced okay and therefore there is a lack of desire for the service down the line okay so

this is the ideal agency if you think I've missed anything here drop a comment down below this is what we want from an agency it needs to be broad we want to get results it needs to be in demand need to be low overheads and it wants to be scalable okay this is not to be debated okay if you don't have these things in check you're going to be making life harder for yourself and the question would really be why would you start an agency that didn't tick all of these boxes when there are models

factually that exists that do okay we don't actively want to make our life harder than it needs to be if our goal is to start a business because let me be honest with you business is pretty damn difficult if you haven't started a company yet just to prepare you you're probably not sure what you're getting yourself into yet it's a difficult path in life it is life on hard mode is it fulfilling yes are you going to be satisfied yes is it worth every single Challenge and struggle absolutely but it is going to be difficult

so why would you make your life hard for yourself by not having all of these things checked out so let's go through the evolution of an agency I want to kind of go back to when I first started the agency and what how the service model has evolved over time it is vital that you understand this because it will give you a deep understanding of where the agency model is going history gives us Clues on what is going to happen in the future and so if you to watch this video and truly understand why the

model I'm going to reveal today to you is the best model you have to understand what has brought us up to this point in the first place so smma is a acronym social media marketing agency um that was branded by a guy called Ty Lopez in a historic ad here in my garage okay and it was an ad that I saw in 2017 that pequ my interest in starting my business when I was sat in this 9 to5 office thinking I really need to do something from my life and I was just like this agency

thing sounds right to me it was organic social media management and then occasionally we would run some paid ads on Facebook okay back then though they were called boosted posts and we would simply just press a boost button and then just hope some results would be generated uh it was very very primitive so yeah um and also just incredibly easy back then as well so yeah Silver Linings and all that and what happened over the next two years is agency owners owners realized that social media management was a service and I'm talking about organic here

that was very very time consuming to for Phil and um if you were posting Instagram posts and you're writing the captions and you're doing the same on Facebook maybe even LinkedIn sometimes as well you're probably only charging $4 or $500 a month to do do this but it's incredibly difficult to track results and actually it's very hard to get results um which is obviously one of those ticks from the list we want to actually get results and social media management is one of those questionable services at least for local business for larger companies that just

want brand Presence at works and so I think agencies realized that it was diminishing returns they weren't making much money from it it was very timec consuming and so agencies stopped really offering organic social media management and they started focusing on the ads and Facebook ad got more sophisticated and the lead form ad um got created and this is when Facebook allowed you to create a form on the Facebook platform where people could fill in their name email and phone number to submit their details to opt in to a specific offer okay so maybe it

was a dentist and they were offering free teeth cleaning someone could register their interest and then agencies started thinking well why don't we become lead generation agencies why don't we start generating big fat list of leads on behalf of our clients and get rid of the organic side and that's exactly what happened over the next two years many agencies then turned into a lead gen agency where they would run Facebook ads they would generate leads on a lead form and they would send over that list of leads to the client at the end of every

single month in the form of a spreadsheet but what happened is the client struggled to convert those leads and so agencies would find that even even though everything looked great from their end even though they were generating a big list of leads the client would say well the leads aren't good enough okay because the client didn't have a strong enough sales process in order to actually convert the leads and so business owners being business owners we looked for Solutions and what happened was some business owners pivoted some agencies pivoted to models like e-commerce okay um

some agencies pivoted to models like creative okay so they were like well I'm not going to work with these local businesses anymore this lead generation really isn't working well for me let me start working with online companies and so they started working with online stores e-commerce stores and that's actually what I did in my agency I started off as an smma I went to lead generation and then I was like I don't want to deal with all this lead nonsense let me start working with e-commerce Brands and that worked incredibly well for a lot of

people um I start helped someone else started an e-commerce agency guy called olle Hudson and Joe maren two that are in University they started an Ecom agency called saw with us when they're in University they now do three qus of a million dollars every single month they've got an incredible London office just opened a Manchester office massive success in e-commerce space and they pivoted out of lead generation but any who have on the flipsides of that an agency like I mentioned earlier on hambi media who instead of going into e-commerce pivoted into creative they started

video production and this is an agency model that still exists to this day and so people for walked off from lead genen into Ecom into creative all very viable models okay but they I come with their own issues and so we then saw some further Evolution with e-commerce what happened was iOS 14 came along which well Apple introduced a tracking cookie that meant that Facebook just didn't work in the same way it used to okay targeting didn't really work the same way people had to opt in to want to be able to fall into certain

demographics and targeting um options on Facebook and so it used to be that we'd run ads and we'd be focused on the interest and the demographics and so on in end change and to to what it is now where Facebook ad success depend on the creative on the visual elements and so e-commerce agencies including ourselves at affluent. we had to Pivot and evolve into what are now called performance creative agencies and this is the ultimate at least current sophistication of the e-commerce agency market Market this is the market that I'm in this is the market

that s of us are in and many other Ecom agencies we have to offer creative okay so video production static image production Etc as a core service and then we put paid spend behind it in order to increase um revenue on behalf of brands in the lead generation game the guys were innovating so we've always had our affluent Academy program where we've helped thousands of people launch build and scale agencies predominantly most people have started lead generation agencies because it's always been the lowest friction Agency for beginners to start e-commerce requires working with a higher

caliber of business and so it's harder to sign those business owners is also a smaller client pool lead generation has always been my core recommendation to people just starting out and so inside of our community many people are innovating and not taking the complaints uh from the clients that the leads were bad quality and what they started doing was appointment setting on behalf of the client and so they would actually start instead of taking that list of leads and giving them to the client they would call through those leads themselves and they would book appointments

with those leads on behalf of the client so they would call up let's say a list of leads that opted into free teeth cleaning on behalf of a dentist client and they would say hey John I noticed that you opted into our free teeth cleaning coupon I just wanted to see if you're free over the next couple of days to get you booked in for that treatment they get them booked in the client's happy because they're actually converting the leads and the reason why this worked is because the agency broadly is a better salesperson than

the dentist is and they've got more time to actually follow up with those leads appropriately and so on and so forth and this is where if you've heard of go high level the software this is where go high level really came in and uh and started dominating the industry as far as the best agency software because they were the software that everybody used really for the appointment setting side of the service so appointment setting is still a very very viable model for the agency space orbe it there has been an ultimate evolution of that model

which is something I'm going to talk about in a moment now what happened in the creative space well many people started producing high quality creative um so by high quality I'm talking like um filmmaker Style videos um high production product videos kind of all the studio style shots and so on but with the birth of Tik Tok a new creative format was born and it's called ugc or user generated content Tik Tok completely changed the way we look at content and what ugc is is that selfie style iPhone video where someone is talking about their

experience with a product they're demonstrating the value of the product and so on and it took the industry by storm and Broad creative based agencies had to Pivot to at least include a ugc based a ugc based offer some agencies just offered ugc we have an agent that we Mentor called for you advertising that just offer ugc they're a multi7 figer a a multi6 figure a month agency and then you have other agencies like cambi media that offer creative at that high production static and ugc but either way creative agencies had to evolve so what

I'm getting at here by running through this all with you by giving you this history lesson on agencies is how important it is that overtime agencies evolve whatever you decide to do after after you watch this video know that you're getting into this space not to stick at one thing forever you're going to get into this space and commit to evolving with the model that you pick and also know that you don't just have to stick with whatever you choose to start off with I started as an smma I went to lead generation I then

went to Ecom I then went to Performance creative so I our agency has pivoted four times over the past 8 years years of running that business and actually that is a vital part of running any business there is a book I recommend you reading called the infinite game by Simon cynic and within the infinite game one of the rules is remaining liquid and fluid throughout your entire business Journey many people see their business as a finite thing I want to start a company I want to get to 100K a month in revenue and that's my

finite goal but the people that truly succeed are those that remain liquid throughout the entire growth Journey an example of that would be Kodak who used to be the largest camera company in the world they literally invented the personal handheld camera and then Canon came along and introduced the digital camera and Kodak had the opportunity time and time again to introduce their own digital camera but they pivoted way too late and ended up getting replaced by Canon over time due to their inability to look at things from an infinite perspective instead they were so finite

fixated on physical film based cameras but what I'm talking about here is for those of you that don't already have a model outlined you don't already have a very very clear unfair advantage and that Avenue you want to go down because let's be honest the reason why you're watching this video is because you want a model you want to know the most logical path to take as a beginner and that logical path let's say you joined our mentorship program has always been us recommending this horizontal line of we're seeing right now it's smma then it

was lead generation then it was appointment setting over the years has evolved into those things that is the Natural Evolution of the exact same model that's what we have to understand smma and appointment setting is the same model evolved over time but what has happened with an appointment setting is agency owners have realized it's not the perfect solution as it is and as always we're looking for ways to innovate appointment setting is very time consuming we have to call up all of the leads we have to send them SMS and emails and if we've got

10 clients generating 30 leads a month for example that's a lot of work and it's certainly something that we can't do as the business owner so we have to hire someone to do it on our behalf so now it becomes not only time intensive but it's also financially intensive as well what happened in 2024 well AI went parabolic and one of the first practical applications of AI has been AI sales-based agents it's been the ability to pre-program an AI model with a knowledge base so it understands the client and what they do and has access

to their calendar and can now have direct communication via SMS and email on our behalf 24/7 and not only can we do that via SMS and email but we can also now do this via AI phone agents as well so we can outbound call two leads that opt into our ads at any time of the day and someone can have a conversation with the AI and book in a meeting so not only are we now not having to hire appointment Setters so we're saving literally thousands in operational costs and overheads and now just spending a

couple of hundred pound or dollars on software but we're also dramatically increasing the results that we generate and the reason why is because AI is responding 24/7 AI is responding incredibly quickly and it's the speed to contact that is actually the reason that we're able to now get such better results in fact we actually launched a test ourselves first of all we split tested our human appointment sets in an agency called V8 media it's a partner agency of ours the largest agency in South Africa a seven figure agency we split tested an AI appointment setting

bot versus their human appointment Setters double the results on meeting book rate used by by using an AI appointment setting B but what was then even more interesting is we doubled again the the meeting book rate from 4% to 8% meeting book rate being the percentage of people that book a meeting from an initial message from 4% to 8% by changing one thing and that one thing was reducing the response time on the AI sales agent from six minutes to 1 minute how can a human compete with that what are we me to do send

a message to our entire team saying guys you got to respond to everyone now in one minute because it's going to double the results that we generate it's just not happening but that is incredibly exciting and that is why the most logical model to start right now I truly believe without a shadow of a doubt is an AI lead generation agency because we are now able to offer the ultimate sophistication of what the smma model truly wanted to be right from the beginning it's our ability to not only generate new potential customers on behalf of

a client of a business but we're also able to then book those clients in direct with the client so they have the highest chance of actually converting them and getting the sale so we're able to completely overcome the biggest objection that we've dealt with for eight years which is I can't convert the leads and we don't have to spend all this money or all this time in order to to do it because we can use sophisticated AI systems in order to do it on our behalf and the crazy thing about this and why it's so

scalable is we are literally just at the infancy of this industry I don't think you quite understand what this industry is going to turn into the AI industry is set to grow at 38.1% every single year for the next 10 years so almost 50% growth every year for the next 10 years years not even I can imagine what that's going to mean for this model in 5 to 10 years time and if you're watching this right now you're getting in so so early and that to me is just unbelievably exciting it's a very full circle

moment to be recording this video when we finally have a solution in this space or are as close to a solution the perfect solution as possible that solves all of the issu issues that I used to face 8 years ago when I first started my agency so let's just revisit this ideal agency criteria in the context of AI lead generation and then finally I want to revisit this in the context of some other very popular models that we haven't yet gone through today okay so first of all is it a broad Market who could actually

want AI lead generation well the truth is any business that needs to generate leads which is a damn lot of businesses it's like 90% of companies is suitable for AI lead generation so yes it's an incredibly broad Market does it actually get results absolutely I have never seen a service that's able to generate results with such little spend such little investment on from the client I've never seen something that's able to get that return on investment before in anything okay it shits on everything else I know in demand absolutely AI is of course a buzzword

everybody is going Hyster over Ai and um to be perfectly Frank it's not even a household name yet when your mom and dad aren't even talking about AI then you know you are early and so this reminds me very much of what it was like to even say the word the word AI is like the word Facebook when I first started my agency I went into a local business and I say the word Facebook and I Facebook oh my God which is just crazy when you think about that that's what it reminds me of AI

is now that word it like Pricks people's ears up they hear it and they're like oh yeah I need that and there's a fear there's a fomo right now a fear of missing out business owners are afraid that their competitors are going to overtake them everyone is being told by the media that we're about to see the biggest leveling of the playing field in history because of AI and so people are scared right now so they don't want to miss out on it so is it in demand hell yeah low overheads massive this is huge

um the fact now that as a AI Le General generation agency the only team that we need to build is sales and service but the the that I don't think you understand how simple that is one person on the sales side that is is is what's called a sales development representative I'm talking like if you're like a 20 to 50K a month agency you'll have maybe a sales development representative who will be doing some outbound sales and some closing for you you'll then need a media buyer this is someone that runs ads okay um off

the back of that that frees up your time as the business owner your time as a business owner can be spent Building Systems the ultimate sophistication of AI lead generation which some agencies are tapping into already certainly some in our community some aren't quite yet it's not just offering AI appointment setting but it's also then building custom bespoke AI systems to implement on a specific Market you can only really do that to help them with their operations to help them with our CRM to help them with uh just process and time efficiency you can only

really do that when you've got a deep understanding of that specific Niche so that's something you kind of do down the line but you as the business owner will probably be the one playing around with that initially so that's two main team members that you would need to be making between 20 and 50k a month with any agency which is absolutely mental when you compare that to another model to be making 20 to 50K a month as an e-commerce agency okay you need many many team members which is why I've never recommended even though I

own an e-commerce agency I've never recommended other people to start an e-commerce agency from scratch because if you want to work with an Ecom client you're not just running their ads so you don't just need a media buyer but you also need someone who's going to maybe build out landing pages you also need someone who's going to build out the creative it's not just one person that builds creative you need a creative strategist who thinks about the strategy and then you need the actual video videographer and maybe even a graphic designer okay and then we

need someone who's going to manage the account to manage the communication because those clients are incredibly timec consuming to manage maybe someone in operations as well it gets very very messy very very quickly if we look at a creative based agency then we need videographer we need a graphic designer we need a creative strategist those are free people before we've even got started okay we're going to be playing that role as the business owner but as we evolve we need those fre people straight away okay and when by straight away I mean like 10K and

above uh let's explore another model um what about igpa info product growth agency Okay so it's an agency that works with info product businesses that's even more complex what people don't understand about info products is the marketing is just one very small piece of it okay it's about the brand it's about the product especially okay it's about the presence it's about the leverage that they've got so as an agency we're looking to Market them we got to think about the ads we got to think about the landing page but not just the landing page we

got to think about let's say the video sales letter the vsl so we've got to consult on that as well we got to get that edited we got to know the email and SMS flows are going to go alongside that we've got to think about the delivery of the product as well and how that goes hand in hand and any the upsells so there a Consulting element too so we've potentially got lots of different things that we have to do on behalf of that client in order to get them the desired result am I saying

it's a bad model absolutely not it's a great model there are many successful agencies that are very successful in it is it a suitable model for beginners no butu no it's not good for beginners at all you're going to get into the absolute bull pin it's like e-commerce it's the same reason I don't recommend that it's the same reason I don't recommend e-commerce for beginners are they bad models no they're just not suitable for the average Joe who hasn't yet got a depth of experience within that industry but with those models like Ecom and info

products if we get our list back up and we actually see from the ideal Agency for beginners is it a broad Market no it's very very Niche do you actually get results yes you can but if you're good you have to be really really good and you have to be experienced to get results so of course but if you're if you're not as a beginner is it an in demand service yes it is but it's incredibly hard to sign up clients because it's a small market so they're hit very heavily by agencies and there's a

lot of good agencies in the space low overhead no incredibly expensive very low profit margins in those models scalable future yes so what do we got we've got like two and a half out of five of those so is it suitable for beginners absolutely not is it suitable for an established agency yes of course but if we look at AI lead CH we take every single box on this ideal agency criteria so anyway I get asked every day what the best model is for beginners AI lead generation is the best model without a shadow of

a doubt so if you want to learn more I actually created a full video an A toz on this channel where I go through how to find clients how to sign them how to lay your foundations the best sales meeting strategy that you can use to actually get clients over the line and I outline the full service and exactly you want to offer on behalf of your clients I'll put a link in the description if you want you can go check that out you can get a head right now I'll speak to you soon cheers