I Sold AI Automations for 749 Days: What I Wish I Knew Day 1

i've sold a automations for 749 days and now i make over 170 grand a month here is literally everything that i wish that i knew on day one when i got started i've made basically every mistake under the sun and my hope is by doing so you guys aren't going to have to so i'm going to deliver this blackboard style in the way that i normally do let's start with the biggest which is the reality of ai and automation and automation sounds really fancy it sounds really new it sounds very special has the word ai

and automation in it how cool but the reality is ai automation is just a business the exact same rules apply to an automation that apply to literally any other business out there whether it's a plumber whether it's your aunt's flower shop down the street whether it's nasa you know whatever it is the same rules are going to apply you're going to have some sort of lead genen at the top end okay then you're going to have some sort of sales to convert those leads then you're going to have some sort of fulfillment to fulfill the

promises that you made during the sale then finally hopefully you'll have some sort of mechanism to retain people and once they retain people you'll either cycle them to um sales or you'll go right back to fulfillment eliminating that step completely so this isn't just ai and automation this is any business model the only thing that's really unique about ai and automation is this part right over here this fulfillment step is usually you know the building of systems that solve particular business problems okay i've said this in a number of my videos but i think it's

really important because there's so many people getting into the space nowadays this is just a business like any other business it's just a specific sort of thing that we're selling so everything that you've been able to learn about other businesses applies here as well the only thing that it doesn't apply to is this section okay so anything you've ever learned about lead genen you you can leverage it in a automation anything you've ever learned about sales you can leverage it anything you want ever learned about retention you can leverage it the only real thing that's

a little bit different here is just the way that you build systems relative to the fulfillment of some other service let's say marketing or or websites or something okay that's the biggest thing so just to get that out of the way now that that's good we can actually talk um real things that you know i i wish that i i actually knew on on day one and the first is that business value is a lot more important than like the the technical value of the solution most clients don't actually care about the systems i deliver

it's really interesting because i i brand myself uh as like a systems person but the reality is most clients don't actually care about systems right they couldn't be damned whether you're building a cool ai automated system to do it or you're sending it to some offshore agency to have it done for you the only thing they really care about are the results okay they care about the results uh they care about the cost in order to deliver those results basically if you look at these two they they care about the return on investment so whether

you do it through some fancy ai and automated system or you do it yourself working 45hour days somehow or you you know have some some blend of both human and automated means in order to fulfill something customers don't actually care about the system that you built um your make.com or n automation is awesome but like nobody actually really gives a if i'm being real what they care about is they care about the return on investment if they spend $1,000 with you how much money are they going to make right if they invest $10,000 on the

system are they going to make over $80,000 or whatever their their roi threshold is so i'm saying this because i've had so many situations in my life where i have frontloaded the technical aspect of it and i've just talked a tech all day cool system cool model here's what the flow is going to look like here's what all this stuff does they don't actually care about that right when you're selling a service to a business b2b you're selling to another business and businesses really talk just in terms of of dollars and return next focus on

fundamentals not fancy tech i can't tell you how many months of my life i spent chasing down various rabbit holes to learn new technologies can't tell you how many months of my life i spent learning a specific tool stack cuz i thought the specific tool stack was going to be amazing the reality is any noode or any automation or hell even any like programming platform cursor or vs code or whatever the these all do the same thing okay these allow you to build systems in the cloud for the most part that accomplish some sort of

customer problem so all you need to do is just learn one of them they're all the same at the end of the day sure some will allow you to do things easier some will allow you to do things for a little bit less money some allow you to do things faster that's totally understandable right naden versus make versus zapier lindy all those other platforms they all have their pros and cons but all you really need to do in order to check off that little box of the um business side of things that we talked about

here this fulfillment stuff all you need to do to check this is you just need to learn one so if you really want to make money with this stuff do not bounce around every new fancy drop okay just focus on mastering one platform or one solution get really good at it spend three whole months in it pre-commit 90 full days i promise you uh you won't regret it when you get really good at that one thing you use that for all the subsequent builds you'll be faster more efficient um the client will be happier and

you'll be able to focus again on the things that actually matter which is your ability to drive business value not technicals in a similar vein clients care about results they don't care about how you got there so this is really interesting to me because i used to get in the habit of trying to like justify all the work that i was doing to clients and this is a really big problem when i was starting out you know like i would feel like a client wasn't really paying me enough money i thought you know well i

did way more work than $500 worth of a project i want to get paid more for it the reality is uh it doesn't matter how much work i put in to get something done what matters is what we agreed on initially and then the value that i drive if i'm not driving value because i took a very circuitous pathway to get to the system i built for a client and it doesn't matter client doesn't care clients again they care about dollars for the most part they care about the deliverables there's a difference between applied systems

and academic systems so a lot of people get into ai automation thinking that they're going to learn a lot about artificial intelligence they're going to get to play around with like models they're going to get to play around with training the unfortunate reality is um what we are we're basically applying systems that other people have built we're not building the ai we're not building the super the super cool chat gbt consumer model we're taking these technologies that other people have basically you know spent their entire lives theorizing and writing on you know uh chalkboards about

and doing all this complicated math over and then we are asking ourselves how can we apply this technology into a business and actually have that produce a demonstrable roi for the business you know if you really want to make a ton of money with the services model i'm showing you guys and a bunch of other people on youtube are showing you guys it's not actually about like developing some cool proprietary new system that has nothing to do with it it's just how can we take systems that already exist or how can we take tools that

already exist and incorporate them into systems that solve a particular customer problem finally you just sell solutions you don't sell tech so you solution obviously begs the question in order for there to be solution there has to be a problem so if you get good at selling solutions not technology you know just a wider answer to somebody's prayers you will virtually always guarantee yourself an income source you don't have to worry about any of that i'm going to show you guys two paths that i see some new ai automation agencies go down okay um basically

the first path focuses on tech and the second path focuses on business so if you focus on tech like i see a lot of people that enter my communities and my programs and leave comments on my youtube videos do unfortunately um you know you're going to be delivering extraordinarily complex solutions these complex solutions are going to take a lot more time for you to deliver and then people are going to subjectively see them as a lot less valuable so it's going to be more time it's going to be less pay you're going to spend your

time working on these academic systems or trying to like build something really cool that doesn't really matter anyway you're going to spend a bunch of time trying to make it technically perfect which the clients don't care about and you're going to grow really slowly and you're going to scale in a very limited capacity instead if you take a business focus like i recommend you do not the tech focus you're going to focus on simple solutions that work you're going to focus on literally taking automations from my channel maybe a couple of other people's channels that

talk about using this stuff specifically for business purposes where you're going to you know browse through templates and and look for ways to solve problems using the templates not look for templates and then try and figure out the problems afterwards you're going to find simple solutions that work that aren't freaking rocket science okay then you're going to apply them to real businesses you're going to focus on client results what's the deliverable they get what's the roi then ultimately you're going to grow a lot faster and scale your business like this as opposed to something like

this so be blue blue is where we're at blue is what i want you guys to be that's sort of number one number two is a big mindset shift that i had about halfway through running my automation business because listen i'm not like a mindset or like a belief guru really i focus just on how do we strategically and tactically implement systems like this into businesses and then how do we make money selling those things right but i think there is something to be said about mindsets and how they help you do that so i

had a big mindset shift basically i've come to realize that your beliefs determine your ceiling okay i used to think that was your inherent capability that determine your ceiling and i thought there are some people out there that are just better they're faster they're more efficient they're more intelligent they have more business experience they have more connections they have more of all this stuff okay what i've unfortunately had to realize um and that i wish i had internalized earlier is that stuff it's just like if you're lining up in a marathon and you know somebody

fires the gun so everybody starts all of those things that i talked about are advantages that will buy that person an additional 0.5 seconds off the start line that's it that doesn't mean anything okay 5 seconds in a marathon means absolutely nothing sure it'll help them get going from their perspective they're going to be ahead of you for a real long time i guess you know half a whole second or whatever but the people that actually make it the ceiling of how fast you go or how far you can run is entirely based off your

beliefs if you believe that making a $10,000 a month revenue or income or whatever is very difficult or it's impossible or or whatever it is going to be very difficult or near damn right impossible to do so if you believe that dragging and drop modules across a screen and working from your laptop in i don't know bali or indonesia or thailand or australia where wherever the heck you are australians probably don't want to work in australia but you guys get my point then it's going to be very difficult to make money dragging and dropping modules

across the screen and working from your laptop but if you treat it as no big deal if you see that there are thousands if not millions of other people out there that are doing the exact same thing and if you can find a way to convince yourself that it's not a big deal really to be making a ton of money or to be reaching a lot of people or to be implementing cool technologies and cool businesses then the likelihood that you actually achieve that thing is so much higher okay i see this at basically every

top performer in their field whether it's a politician or it's an athlete or it's a business person the work that they do they see as just really objectively not a big deal ever since i adopted this i started being like well what am i really doing at the end of the day i'm doing some lead genen activities i'm doing some sales calls i'm not like hitting the pipeline you know what i mean i'm not like hustling my ass off in order to do this i'm like working essentially like a desk job that i built for

myself here the second that i started doing that my income shot through the roof cuz my belief was hey this is no big deal and so if you really just want that sort of unflapable unfasable confidence rewire your brain to think that what you're doing is just not really a big deal cuz objectively it isn't we're not exactly hunting tigers in the savannah anymore right we're sitting down we're trying to take tools that other people that are extraordinarily intelligent and driven and motivated have have have built and sweat and and bled over okay and then

and then take those and implement them into businesses and actually just produce an roi what we're doing is really not that incredible or amazing or whatever um and and the amazing thing is if you think about it from that perspective you can still build the best lifestyle on planet earth for yourself despite the fact that it's nothing super special which which is you know what i think is actually special okay next big thing is to focus on revenue generating activities not busy work i spent the big bulk of my first few months as an ai

automation agency focusing on busy work i focused on stuff like hey i got to get the perfect website hey i need to print out business cards hey i need to uh post on facebook hey i need to show activity on instagram and linkedin hey i need to go to um i don't know networking events or something okay and i guess what i'm trying to say is i was um i was spending time on literally everything except for work um you know i was trying to make my stuff look pretty i was trying to make myself

look legitimate and professional um but actually the more that you the more time that you spend trying to look legitimate and professional the less likely you're actually to be legitimate and professional actually the guys that end up being legitimate and professional they always start not looking legitimate and professional at all because they just get going and then they start they have like a cardboard box for an office and they they start talking to homeless people on the street to try and sell them services do you know what i mean like like that's the way that

you make it okay if you have that sort of mindset if you focus on revenue generating activities a read talking to customers here instead of busy work it is inevitable that given enough time you will make it uh on that note most revenue does not come from glamorous activities i used to think that you know the best and coolest companies on the planet earth had the most amazing and intricate sales funnels my salesunnel here is the simplest legitimately it was cold email upwork i did a little bit of community posting i did some like cold

dms okay that's it you just do the most boring unsexy unglamorous activities just repeatedly for a long enough period of time and then you make it so if i just focused on that literally from day one instead of day 100 like i eventually realized i would have been so much further ahead it would be crazy on that note you know we talked about doing things a really long time successful automation entrepreneurs aren't special they're consistent so just repeat after me humans are persistence hunters this is really the one thing that makes us stand out okay

when we have a goal it is not our ability to sprint at the goal that makes us really good at achieving the goal it's just the ability to dog after it for long enough even if you're walking or jogging or going really slowly or or from your perspective things are barely changing if you just continue doing it for long enough you continue doing those boring unglamorous unsexy lead generation activities for 2 years you'll eventually make it yeah on that note what i've come to realize is that in order to really crush it i've needed to

treat business like a game with specific levers to pull now i make a ton of analogies i used to play a lot of runescape as a kid or like maple story i used to play like obviously a lot of competitive shooters like call of duty and stuff like that like i think a large portion of my audience which is primarily male and between 20 and and age 40 probably understands these video games have ways to be exploited they are exploitable you if you're playing super smash brothers with your friend or whatever or some arcade fighter

you know street fighter or tekken or whatever if you press a certain combination of buttons in rapid succession it's kind of like an exploit it's like a hack you know like the enemy can't react because they're just too busy getting hit with the fastest little tiny punch all day i forget the character uh who is it like i don't know falcon punch guy uh the point i'm trying to make is there's like a certain combination of moves that just make you extraordinarily likely to beat your enemy and everybody on planet earth just says "well that's

cheating." well that's exactly what you need to do in business if you want to get ahead you need to do those sets of moves that everybody else is like "a thanks you're cheating man what are you going to do you're going to make an upwork profile that's a that's not a business what are you talking about?" you need to take the lowest hanging fruit and you just need to attack it consistently and systematically you just need to spam the a button or the x button or whatever controller you're playing on or you know my other

analogy is a casino if you wander into a casino and you see a slot machine and every time you pull this little lever it just goes 777 and you're like "oh my god i'm rich i won." but then you know instead of you giving a getting a million dollars what you do is you make $1 okay it's not exactly glamorous okay you made a dollar but what if this this machine's rigged and every time you pull you make a dollar wouldn't you despite how much money i mean you know if you're a quadrillionaire probably not

but for for most reasonable people wouldn't you just sit there and just pull that lever all day like even if it just makes you a dollar and i mean you know your arm's getting kind of tired i mean it's pretty consistent right like it's boring and it's like i could do here i could do this for 17 hours and you know i'd just be looking at the same screen all day going 777 but you know how much money you'd make by the end of that day assuming you pull that lever every 10 seconds or whatever

you'd be insane so this is basically the way that business works cuz you will find a slot machine with like a broken lever that just rings 777 makes you win every time and and it pays a slight little bit more money than all of the other slot machines that's what you do so just treat it like a game treat it like super smash bros or call of duty go spawn camping you know treat it like runescape right like fish for the lobsters in the specific optimized way and you will win personally i think that a

big issue that a lot of people have with businesses is that they focus too much on like the intentionality and their mission and the values at the start line before they've even like played the game for a little bit and like when you're they're they're trying to like design the perfect life before they even know what it is that they can do and what they can't do right within the constraints of the game so i was kind of like that i started to really take off the second that i just zoomed out and was like

"wait a second why don't i play the game a little bit and then i'll kind of feel out what i want my perfect life to look like after doing that for a bit." um so go figure okay so real success usually looks really boring from the outside now i kind of touched on that with the consistency aspect and like the 777 but it does look pretty boring from the outside and then small consistent actions are way more powerful than spread dy heroic efforts so i meant to write sporadic so is what it is can't win

them all if this is your starting point you guys are right over here and you guys kind of want to run through and determine what are some of these revenue generating activities i guess what i'm trying to say is when i build these out i basically say what are two possible universes or futures if you focus on non-revenue activities or you focus on revenue activities if you focus on non-revenue activities you're going to spend years working on the perfect landing page you're going to spend months telling all your friends about what an amazing business opportunity

this is and about all your ideas for this angle and how we're going to implement x y and z and do this amazing market okay nothing's ever going to come out of it you're going to be busy as hell 247 you're not going to get any results because you're just afraid to like bend over and pick up the dime you see on the street because you think it's not worth your time or you feel afraid to sign up to the freelance platform that everybody looks down upon or you feel afraid to to pull the lever

you know a bunch even though everybody's like "well that only gives you a dollar right?" these are all self-reinforcing limiting beliefs if you think something is hard it's more likely to be hard and it'll force you to stagnate and if you contrast that with revenue based activities like talking to potential clients so you know i mentioned a bunch here but like cold email is really big right now which i'll touch on a little bit more later obviously upwork is one of my faves but you know there are a bunch of other ones fiverr top and

so on and so forth this is a really cool one in europe that is starting to pick up some traction i think it's called malt malt yeah malt.com so if you just get on these things that a lot of people don't consider real businesses just talk to enough customers you kind of figure it all out later same thing with community posting then you'll get a bunch of real feedback and opportunities and then you'll be able to kind of start that cycle that feedback loop that eventually just makes you better and better and better and then

even if you had limiting beliefs by doing this over and over and over again you basically get to collect what are called like reference experience you get a big list of wins basically and then the way that your mind works is every time you're contemplating making a decision it just looks at the total number of wins versus failures when you've tried to do that thing and you know how intensely you felt those then if you have more wins than you have failures it'll be like "all right well it's really not that big of a deal."

so you'll actually be able to convince yourself of something just through pure action even if you didn't believe in it begins uh at the beginning anyway that's how you get your mindset shift started you then consistently start executing our revenue based activities you compound results and then yeah that's how you essentially establish new belief systems so there's only so much like soul surgery you could do just talking to yourself in your room alone or writing your your teenth journal entry talk you know about all the things that you want out of life a lot of

the time you really just want to like make something happen you just have to start and you have to not know exactly where you're going but you just have to believe and trust that you are the sort of person that can take feedback and then iterate and improve your strategy your angle of attack and i think that really at the core is what confidence is it's the ability to say "hey i don't actually know what the right answer is right now but i'm confident that if i just do this for long enough i'll eventually figure

it out." couple unnecessary evils that i wish that i knew a little bit about before and the biggest one for me at least for ai automation agencies was custom projects so i know previously we were talking about mindset and before that we were talking about general business well now we're really diving into like what is specifics about an ai and automation agency that i wish i knew we got we got some funny memes in here what is a custom project basically a custom project is one where there is a custom scope so if you guys

have ever worked on any sort of freelance platforms before you'll know that a lot of the time it's like "hey i'm looking for a freelance that can help me do x y and z." and x y and z is like this thing that they want done right this is in contrast to templated projects where you've actually built out the thing before okay and then somebody says "hey i want a sales system." and you're like "oh okay well here is a sales system right?" obviously templated projects are a lot easier to scale because you don't have

to do any work but custom projects are a lot easier to sell because you can do specifically what it is the customer is asking for okay so yeah um custom projects are custom scope they're usually kind of like long kind of like arduous affairs they require a lot more client management because you know you have to go back and forth with a client there's usually some sort of like revision period or something like that involved and basically like this is what it is to be like a you know if you think about it like a

service business you are servicing a client and usually a lot of the time when you do custom project it's a different route every time you start here and this is a goal the first time that you do it you might go like this the second time that you take this path you might go like this the third time you try and deliver some project maybe you i don't know takes you a lot longer than you thought it would and then eventually you get to it um so because of this now that we're all on the

same page a lot of people think that custom products suck and that you should never do custom products so a big recommendation in a automation generally if you go on a lot of other people's um channels and stuff like that they say you should never ever do custom projects custom projects are unscalable and never make it with custom project uh but i always disagree custom projects are like training wheels when you get started with something you have to make it as easy as humanly possible for somebody to say yes to you because you have no

experience no credibility no real skill you're probably not the best automator um you basically just have to make it as easy as possible for somebody to say yes to you so you can at least get that flywheel that we started talking about in the last section started right and custom projects are the simplest and most straightforward way to do that so despite the fact that it's not scalable and it's kind of like eating a twinkie diet for the rest of your life you know it's like if you're in a bind um custom projects are the

best way to get started then you can worry about scaling and doing like the hyperoptimized business model after you hit that inflection point and actually like see a little bit of growth okay so yeah the danger is that they're time inensive they have very unpredictable scopes a lot of people think that they create revenue plateaus and burnout and they definitely do if you just do your custom projects all day you won't be able to scale past maybe like 15 or 20k a month hell some people 5k right it really depends on your own productivity and

the sorts of products to take on but they become really accessible to beginners so you should just take them really quickly and then their real value is they just help you pay your knowledge debt down quickly i'll talk about debt a little bit later but basically when everybody's at the start line of a business they they and start line of anything they just have all these debts that they don't you know really realize exist they have like skill debt knowledge debt they have client management debt they have like i don't know limiting belief debt they

have confidence debt they have a bunch of debt and the easiest and quickest way to pay down that debt is just to get started even if you don't really know what you're doing so what i recommend you do with custom projects is i actually recommend that your first step is like i got to go custom okay i got to go custom and i just got to like build stuff out for people because it's going to maximize the surface area it's going to maximize the amount of experience you get in the shortest possible time is it

going to maximize the money that you make in the shortest possible time no but it's going to maximize the experience which when you zoom out will eventually maximize the amount of money you make so use custom products to learn and then you basically like kind of graduate to productized services or templated services like i was talking about earlier usually the best timeline looks like 0 to 3 months kind of focused mostly on custom projects then after you spend some time productizing then after that you actually like scale this little section here with the custom projects

this is a graph of your revenue over time you know like at the beginning you're probably not going to be making a lot of money you're going to like shoot up every time you get a project and you'll make like zero the next time and then maybe the next project's a little bit bigger but it's not very scalable and predictable eventually you'll get over to the point at which you're actually productizing and you have enough money and then it's usually like a lot more linear from there so yeah that's my recommendation for you guys just

start with custom projects try and do them within the first 3 months or so if you find yourself doing custom projects after 3 months or maybe between 5 to 10k in revenue the likelihood is you're probably going to plateau but uh yeah looking back i i definitely would have done more custom projects if i could i tried to you know productize or template a little bit too early before i really knew enough about the problem i was trying to solve to do so and that yielded a plateau for me right around $15ish,000 for 3 or

4 months that we did not effectively break through until i did a bunch more custom projects i remember me and my business partner i should say landed one that was just about $10,000 and it was in working through that custom project that i learned enough about how a and automation works in general and the problems that my audience was suffering from that i could actually take that next step start templating and then start spiking my rev we got two paths here right if you go custom products forever you are going to have short-term revenue spikes

with long fulfillment periods you're you're plateauing and then you're going to burn out and probably stagnate and go back to square one um but if you do it for you know zero to three months then right after you're done you can start productizing really quickly create templates and systems using all that knowledge that you just built and then grow consistently with a scalable business all right next i want to talk about some unsexy lead genen that actually works so if i had just taken into account the various unsexy ways to make money when i was

at the start line of my business i'd probably be a lot further ahead than i am right now but again i was kind of focused on the sexy ones right like i spent a lot of time dabbling in paperclick ads because i thought paperclick ads were just really sexy i thought that like okay if i want to be a successful business i need to run ads because that's what all other successful businesses do but i didn't actually stop and ask myself why like i just kind of tried to pattern match what they were doing and

pattern matching is okay but you know it's a very big business usually that's running ads or they they've worked through some funnel or they spent a lot of money and it's usually different from like a beginner who doesn't have any money they don't have any experience they don't know what their their offer is they don't know product market fit so yeah as i mentioned before best lead genen always unsexy go for the unsexy ones if i had two lead genen approaches here okay one was sexy and one was unsexy and that was all that i

knew about them literally there was nothing like one just looked really cool and it was all futuristic and automated whatever and the other was like boring and lame and it's like you could have been doing that for the last 50 years i would actually choose the unsexy one every time because odds are that would be the higher roi producing one versus the sexy one everybody wants to do the sexy stuff right and so because everybody floods over to the sexy side the unsexy side usually ends up being the the hidden gem and then eventually the

unsexy side becomes sexy and then we you know find a new unsexy lead genen approach but yeah so you know when you have people avoiding a platform for instance like upwork or fiverr or toptal or malt or whatnot because of some preconceived notions about profitability you know obviously there's there's less competition and there's a lot more opportunity okay i'll run you through some upwork success strategies i've recorded a bunch of videos on exactly how to get up and running with upwork so i'd recommend if you really want to learn a little bit more about how

upwork works definitely check those videos out and get that deep dive but just as like a you know from a bird's eye view a lot of other people for instance are really hesitant to make like custom videos so i just did custom videos on upwork i recorded a custom video solving a person's problem and i did that every day and i did like 10 of those every day for a very long time eventually i'd sent you know a couple thousand of these and because the custom videos had such a high return on investment when somebody

actually watched my video they were so much more likely to convert i was able to take a platform that most people think you can't make more than like $500 on per project and i was able to routinely get clients that were over $15,000 in clv that's pretty wild right like that's a 30x on people's beliefs versus what i actually did variety of other success strategies by optimizing my profile and by figuring out what the actual problem is that i was solving and by doing some some pointed copyrightiting and by making minor tweaks to my profile

photos and so on and so forth i was able to just crush it and take kind of like an engine that a lot of people might have just walked by at some junk heep and be like "hey you know what there's actually a lot of value in that engine i can actually tune that puppy up and slap it in a car and maybe it's not the newest and most amazing engine but i can make that thing go way faster with a proper tuneup." i'm not a car guy if you guys could tell uh anyway yeah

there are a lot of psychological barriers that stop people from using these methods so as long as you're just the sort of person that cares more about the return on investment than anything else then you'll be just fine another big thing that i'll talk about in a second is cold email so variety cold email approaches that generate 2 to 5% reply rates you really don't need more than a two to 5% reply rate to crush it right you send like 500 emails a day hypothetically even if you received a 5% reply rate on the 500

emails a day that's 25 replies if even five of those are positive you can convert like one of those um to a meeting a day so you have like one meeting a day basically do you know how many companies out there have one meeting a day like no companies have one meeting a day it's crazy how few businesses have the ability to have one meeting a month okay vast majority of services businesses out there only get their business through referrals which means they get one in a blue moon and they will hound that one customer

to the ends of the earth and try and do the best and most amazing job ever so the please sir may i have a referral um thing actually happens for them but that's so unstable right i mean month by month they're they're all over the place if you could build a consistent lead generation strategy that gets you one meeting a day okay and you can actually do that with a 5% you know hell even with like a 2% repier you can probably get a meeting a day if you send enough emails with just doing the

same thing all day you do that for like two or three hundred bucks a month realistically with carrying costs like you're in like the top.1% of businesses already just do that for a year you'll be you'll be making $50 $100,000 a month assuming you play your cards right yeah there's another big model called communities which i wish that i had known a lot more about earlier i mean now obviously i run communities so i can actually firsthand see the value and the power that they had but communities were just getting started right around the time

when i was getting started with my automation agency like i joined a couple of communities a really cool one that i was in was called demand curve and because i was in this community i basically you know there were people that previously would have been so inaccessible to me to to to even be able to talk to they were like up there shrouded and in light you know it's like they had freaking halos on and i was like down here and you know there's like 20 layers of people in between us just in terms of

skill and capability and execution potential and stuff um but in a community um they kind of flatten all of that right like you're just a member just like basically everybody else so even if there's people out there that are like extraordinarily rich and powerful if they're in the same community as you you could literally just shoot them over a message and like connect with somebody that you might have otherwise never been able to so anyway the reason i bring that up is because i wish that i had known about communities way earlier i think it

would have made a lot more money highly recommend that you guys do not sleep on communities because they are blowing up right now and it's a great opportunity to get into a bunch of communities for either very low amount of money or for free and then use the relationships that you create in those communities now even if it's just 10 minutes of checking your posts on your top three communities a day and responding to them building like a digital reputation a digital presence and then in a few months using that to just like build a

sales empire and then yeah focus on the roi not how cool the method seems so okay there's some sexy um lead genen approaches and then there's some unsexy ones so let's look at the sexy ones some really sexy ones are content okay so like youtube that's super sexy right now everybody's talking about youtube everybody's like "man nick uh should i make a youtube channel nick please should i you know make a youtube like you because your youtube's so great and you're making a ton of money off it and stuff." um the reality of the situation

is if you try and start a youtube channel right now you have no experience no skills no nothing you're just doing the ads thing all over again you're just copying a successful creator like myself but you don't really know what goes into it you're just trying to like copy the i don't know like the the the the form of it not necessarily the function of it so content's really sexy and very few people actually make money with content i want to say like 99.9% of people will like spend all their lives trying to produce content

they never make a dollar from it don't don't focus on content look sexy it's nice you get tons of followers everything's cool um you don't really see the the reality that goes into it don't focus on things that are really high effort don't focus on things like ads for instance okay um and don't focus you know stay away from things that have long times to roi instead focus on the unsexy boring stuff like direct outreach that's by far the least sexy and most boring thing here but it works you just send people dms and you

just send people cold emails day in and day out for a very very long period of time here are three upwork you get direct access to buyers that are actually looking for people to solve specific problems for them they've already done all the work sourcing the people they're on their hands and knees salivating waiting for you to give them a treat they spend some poulry sum maybe a couple bucks in order to make the connection request or reply but these are real customers how many connects do you actually have to spend in order to like

talk to somebody that you otherwise would have never been able to talk to really just a few dollars treat it that way and i think you'll see there's a very large return on your investment same thing with um you know cold email platforms like instantly and then communities like school right none of these are very sexy i'm not going to lie a lot of people look down on them a lot of people are going to think "oh you do cold email no way you're a spammer." it's like "well that's what you think." when i was

in college and um you know i was trying to throw it was an event management company in college i was doing a bunch of promoting for one of my parties and we were trying to like fill the joint up this bar that we were throwing our party at had like never seen more than like 50 people in it at one time so we we were committed and proven to trying to get more than 50 people in one of the most viral and simplest marketing strategies for us you know what it was we would print out

a bunch of posters then we just go into the bathrooms above the urinals for the guys or at the backs of the bathroom stall doors for the girls and we would just have people either myself you know for the guys or we pay a girl to do it or just you know a girl was part of our friend group she'd go do it um and just and just paste them in the bathrooms so when people were taking a piss they just looked at our freaking posters all day that is probably the least sexy marketing method

ever but we had like 400 people at that event and that was like the primary way that we did it aside from some facebook marketing as well that lineup was out the freaking you know almost down the mountain i went to university in a freaking mountain like crazy stuff the least sexy marketing opportunity ever it's funny every time i tell that story people are like "really people actually go?" because and i'm like "yeah cuz nobody else was doing it man you have i don't know how many people go to my university but a lot of

people probably 50,000 people saw that while idally taking a piss and being like "all right well yeah i'm going to be up there anyway i might as well drop by you know i mean i go to the bar every now and then why don't i just go at that specific time?" the these these unsexy marketing methods just crush okay and when it comes to ai automation agencies upwork is one instantly is one school's another one and these are the ones that i'd recommend that you do okay here are a couple other things that i wish

i knew more about early on and that's the idea of daily systems so i'll give you a quick story i remember one time we were scraping some leads or something and we had to run some campaign and we had to send it and we had to do it very very quickly there's some opportunity out there some piece of news that like recently hit and we want to capitalize on it and i was chatting with somebody i was working with at the time and we needed to like scrape 500 emails i remember telling him like "hey

like okay if you do 250 i do 250 we could probably do this in the next couple hours right?" and he's like "well dude i'm not going to like scrape emails." like come on man that's like a that's like an assistance job let's just get let's just get one of our assistants to do it while uh you know we focus on more important things but this is the rate limiting step this is the most important step in order for us to send emails we need to have the emails right so i was like "no dude

like we should do this ourselves this is really boring and i know it's annoying but we got to do this ourselves." and you know the guy was working with us was just like "ah i don't really want to do it." anyway i tell you this because what i've come to realize is that throughout my entire business career i have always been the bottleneck so if i can get better at doing something then the entire rest of my business usually increases at least a proportionate amount if i am the bottleneck okay then i get 50% faster

at scraping leads or something like that or i get 50% uh more more accountable or 50% more committed my business will grow at least by 50% so it's like a direct one-to-one relationship between myself and then the company and companies that i run so i don't know if this is just me i personally think a lot of entrepreneurs like this the best way that i have come to massively increase my potential and my capability is by building daily systems that stick and just doing a lot of very small boring things like i don't know scraping

leads for instance or whatever every day for a very long period of time if you can just get into the habit of building super simple systems i don't mean automations i mean like your own systems i wake up i go to my coffee machine i make coffee while the coffee is steeping i dripping right while the coffee is dripping i open up my laptop and i respond to three emails and then i go back get my coffee cup pound it back respond to another three legitimately if you could just build a simple system like that

that might make you 10% more effective your revenue might go from $100,000 to $110,000 in 3 months i know it sounds really simple and i know it sounds really dumb but we are the bottlenecks in our companies so if we can just become a little bit faster and a little bit better the potential is is insane so systems beat motivation and they beat willpower every time essentially and the systems don't have to be complicated they can be boring and unsexy like i was talking about earlier another one of my systems is my daily community management

right now so i went from not knowing anything about communities um a year ago to being i think i'm top three or top four by revenue on school right now school being the largest community platform on planet earth so i went from like being nobody and not knowing anything to like being one of the top ones do you know what the simple system that enabled me to do that was when i wake up my laptop is usually on my nightstand i will roll over all crusty head and i'll grab my laptop and as i wake

up i will go through and just respond to all of the community posts and leave a comment on everybody uh because i save you know 15 or 20 minutes like slowly waking up when i do this um and because it's the very first thing that i do i knock it out before i do anything else that simple system has enabled me to build a suite of information products that now generate me over $100,000 a month sounds simple but again it's boring it's unsexy and it works so anyway focus on revenue generating activities when i say

revenue generating activities i mean talking to customers i mean setting aside 15 minutes every morning to go through and do three upwork applications i mean setting aside 30 minutes every morning to respond to a bunch of community posts or dm five people on your school community that you find interesting or send cold dms with a video breaking down 10 people's instagram profiles and just do that every day for like a year structure your environment to make important work inevitable i was talking about rolling over and getting my laptop i think that's a really good example

but some other examples are you know make your workplace a little bit more effective or a little bit more efficient to work in if you are working on a really crappy computer right now and it like negatively impacts your ability to do some sort of custom loom video or whatever like invest a little bit of your money into like a nice computer so you have like an easier experience if you find yourself hating your work because your back hurts after a while like invest in like a nice chair structure environment to basically make important work

not only inevitable but i think more importantly enjoyable as well and then yeah you know i've gotten more accomplished in one or two hours of consistent daily action every day i don't know how many hours realistically i'm spending on all of this combined now i think it's like three or four so maybe not just one or two i've gotten more done in that time period and i'll usually like you know i finish with my most important daily actions by 9 or 10 a.m than most people will do all the way up till you know 5

6 7 8:00 p.m and that's just because i frontload the most important stuff and i do it in order to do this obviously you need to identify your lever so in my case right now because i'm um shifting primarily to information products for instance like coaching and youtube and stuff like that my lever the most important thing for me to press is content and so what have i been doing every single day i've been publishing a video and i've done this now for the last couple weeks and my engagement's through the roof i'm making more

money now than i ever had before you know another one might be communities for me okay when the vast majority of my revenue was uh from my agency offerings okay every morning what did what did i do i did cold email 30 minutes i would go through my cold email stack i would make one tiny change one improvement to every cold email campaign that i have i'd do some copyrightiting i'd analyze the replies i'd think about better ways to do it i'd build systems that enable me to do it better i would do upwork okay

and i would do um between i mean some days i did 20 but at least 10 applications a day for a very long period of time i would do this just immediately the second i woke up why these are my levers right i'd send emails i'd send cold outreach to people that i found important i would have certain numbers i need to hit and i would just do them the shape of that is going to change you know depending on the sort of business model that you're doing at the end of the day the system

of just doing the most important thing immediately does not i'm big on streaks i uh believe strongly in streaks the power of streaks for me is immense i don't want to lose a day not doing my outreach because i you know see it in my calendar i've gotten 29 days the 30 days of the month i really don't want to lose that last one so i call this whole idea momentum and you only build momentum through consecutive days of action um so for me you know i focus on momentum i focus on streaks if i

just build up enough momentum over a long enough period of time i basically inevitably become unstoppable and i didn't know that when i started which is really unfortunate and i think i could have been a lot better had i learned that earlier i have a couple of example stories that i could throw at you guys but i think i'll i think i'll leave it there i know the video is getting a little bit long and then yeah um i touched on this but design your lifestyle to minimize friction for important work okay so if you

guys want to like do this really efficiently here's my recommendation when you start okay you want to build an a automation business the very first thing you do is you identify your revenue generating levers you list them out you itemize you're like "okay my revenue generating lever right you know right now is this and then this and then you know after that it's this." okay and then it's like all right so how do i structure my environment in such a way that i could do these three things every day for a full year that's my

litmus test right so it's like okay maybe i restructure where my computer is hm maybe i wake up at a different time so i can record my stuff or send my my outreach or do stuff like uninterrupted or hm maybe i block my phone or i i put my phone in my car before i start my work or something design your environment to minimize the friction set some minimums for these so maybe this is 10 maybe this is i don't know 30 minutes it's tough to quantify this because obviously it depends on the systems you

have then maybe this is another 15 minutes okay set your timers build your daily minimum viable action then just build some accountability structure it's like okay like by the end of the day at 11:59 p.m i need to have these three things done if not i'll text three people and tell them i'm a i'm a loser and buy them all coffee or something right if you just do that every day for 30 days you will crush and it doesn't have to be for 30 days but i do like the finality of a month i think

a month is very powerful so yeah you know if you guys can just follow that i think regardless of what business model you're using whether it's a automation or whether it's something else you guys are inevitably going to crush another big thing i want to talk about is client psychology what actually matters so we've touched on this initially we got to focus on results here not implementation so i don't actually talk about software and systems unless somebody asks me i will say hey i can totally do what you're asking for for context last month i

built a really similar system for somebody else and that enabled them to achieve an additional $25,000 a month in monthly recurring revenue we did this through this cool mechanism but i'm not telling them about the software i'm not telling them about any of this stuff until somebody asks me the vast majority of the time when i say stuff like this people are just like "that sounds awesome." okay great just do that just do whatever you just told me and that's that's awesome like unless somebody specifically says "hey so what is the system that you're going

to be using in order to build this what tools are you going to be using what no code tools are you going to be using what programming wires scripts servers all this stuff how are you going to do it?" i don't i don't even tell them anymore when i started i told them everything but what i've come to realize is clients actually prefer the simplicity of like a blackbox system what is a blackbox system it's something that they can put money into and then get a lot more money out of and a client doesn't actually

care about this they don't care all they care about is that this works so if they can see that they put in this and then they get that they'll be very happy and they don't ever need to peer inside of this opaque black box the behind the scenes journey is invisible to the client and should be a couple other little tips i want to give you guys right off the top of my head prioritize the first demo experience above all so like i don't mean demo as demo like don't don't brand or pitch it as

a demo but like the first time you demo a thing uh the first time you show them a service the first time you show them the money that you've been able to generate for somebody else like actually think really deeply about how you want to construct that experience cuz first impressions matter a lot like i think just pound for pound they're probably like four to five times as valuable as like subsequent second third and impressions so um you should spend you know four to five times the time to to really nail that first one i

would say so yeah speak their language business um don't speak yours technical and then if you have to spend a ton of effort and time on something do it on the stuff that's visible for the client okay don't do it on the stuff that like they can't really see so what i mean by this is like hm you know well should we spend 800 hours trying to make this system work for all sorts of data under the sun for hexadesimal inputs and binary inputs and like fourth number system inputs and fifth and sixth and seventh

and whatever uh no nobody cares about like you mastering every single edge case so don't worry about all that stuff the client's never actually going to enter in as an input to your form or your flow instead it's like what should you actually be spending an extreme amount of effort on this is going to sound dumb but it's like if your system generates an email or something make the email really pretty you know if your system generates a google doc make the font nice on the google doc make the colors cool look a little bit

into design and aesthetics the stuff that the customer actually sees is oftentimes much more important than all the work that went into producing it believe it or not we are entering an era where it's like form over function in many in many cases so design and presentation matter a lot more than uh than you think so you know your actual work might actually be you know you have a bunch of technical challenges tons of implementation details you have to pick the software you have to do tons of bug fixes you have to make all these

architecture decisions the reality is client doesn't care about any of this stuff it's irrelevant to whether or not they're going to want to pay you or or get you on for a follow-up project you know what the client actually sees they see that initial um showcase where you run them through the system they see the uh quality of the interface like what do the emails look like they see whether or not it solves their problem wow man this sol this is exactly what i want this i was totally struggling with this for a while and

also most importantly was it on time you know he told me tuesday it's thursday people are going to think less of you for that you know deliver stuff on time it doesn't have to be difficult um but if you focus on client satisfaction and things that impact client satisfaction instead of stuff that makes you happy okay you're going to get some follow-up work and that's where the that's where the money is we make money on follow-up work and and retaining our customers next up i want to talk a little bit about leverage so leverage is

the idea that you can produce a greater output from a smaller input the idea about leverage is kind of where the name comes from is the idea of a lever okay and a lever just to make a long story short is kind of like if you have a big rock over here this is a boulder and it's 10 lb the distance between this point where the boulder is and then this um thing called a fulcrum you know this is just like x i know we're doing math right now but bear with me in order to

lift this up what you need to do is you need to apply the same amount of weight that that thing is just on the other side at the same distance from the fulcrum okay so you have kind of a couple options to lift this thing up basically you could you could provide 10 pounds of force here but what if you go further along the line okay if you're at 2x believe it or not actually just mathematically in order to lift this 10-lb boulder you only need to put 5 lbs of force in here the place

at which you choose to apply force is very important is basically the metaphor i don't know if it was archimedes or or one of the the old greek guys but he said "give me a lever long enough and i will move the world." the idea being that like you know if we if we can just stretch this puppy out really really long and eventually we can go i don't know like a like a 100x you could literally have a gust of wind applied to this thing and that gust of wind would be enough to lift

this 10 pound rock i should have made this a,000 pounds or something but hopefully you guys can see my point so now that we're done with the physics stuff uh what is leverage it's just more output from less input and the way you do it is you do it by applying force in a very particular place this is at the definition of why automation is great actually the whole the whole industry is all about leverage you can make systems that apply pressure at a specific point well then you can massively improve the profitability of a

system itself so anyway the first thing i do nowadays i calculate the roi before i do any sort of automation how much money is the customer currently making on their time okay okay and then i lay things out as like a pipeline left to right and then once i see this pipeline left to right i'm like "okay what are they currently doing hm i wonder what points there are that i could apply a little bit of pressure by building an automated system that would massively increase leverage so templates are your biggest leverage point when you're

building a system for a customer because it kind of lets you start at 80% complete uh you know instead of you having to spend a month building a solution and like working through all the weeds or whatever you can actually get something that works pretty good in like 5 minutes and then you just make a couple of fine tweaks to the blueprint or template and then you upload it to the no code tool these are personal leverage systems this is about you right but you know if you find a way to use templates what you

could do is you could massively improve or increase their results by putting a tiny bit of force up at like the specific points that that matter in a templates case that might be you could tell a client hey i'm going to deliver this for you in 72 hours i don't actually recommend delivering projects much faster than that because the longer you take a project to fulfill a project usually it's correlated with the client thinking that you had to do more work in order to do so and they're willing to compensate a little bit more for

it but you know you could have that be one of like your your benefits and you could use templates in order to like significantly out compete everybody else that's pitching them at like 3 or 4 weeks get that initial business and then you know have your company scale from there you can spend less time on it you could do a lot of things but that's just one simple example of leverage i personally don't believe in automating high value client touch points i don't automate anything in my community for instance because there's a lot of perceived

value in just you talking to me why would i automate that i mean why would i give anybody the impression that i am not personally the one talking to you what are highv value client touch points in the agency space um it's like your initial call your initial contact i see so many people out there they're like "hm what if i create an ai voice caller and have my ai voice caller close the client?" it's like clients don't care about that clients definitely don't want that do not have the first point of contact with you

which is a very high leverage point of contact be an automated system that kind of screws up half the time right so it's about just choosing picking and choosing where you apply that force i mentioned this previously but design matters just as much as function some tasks are actually worth doing manually forever so i check my bank balance every morning takes me five minutes i copy over some transactions between accounts and stuff like that and i have like a record of all the money that i've spent the last 24 hours i do that manually it's

actually worth me doing it manually because it takes me 5 minutes and then i know exactly how much money went into my account yesterday exactly how much money is going out which is very very powerful to have as a business owner anyway the point i'm basically making is lay out the system from start to finish okay just on paper this is a client system you know this is um this is sort of the first thing that happens this is the second thing that happens the third thing that happens the fourth thing that happens and this

fifth thing that happens once you have it on paper then you get just lay it out in front of you then you can choose what points you should build systems for hm i can really automate four and if i automate four the whole throughput of the pipeline is going to go up the customer will be able to make a lot more money or maybe i'll do one and four but i'm not going to touch two three and five cuz they're they're okay right now so once you've systematized first you've identified the points of high leverage

then you can go ahead and build systems that scale up here's like a quick little flowchart or decision tree basically of how exactly to go about employing this process so is it a high leverage activity if yes is it client facing if yes is personal touch critical if yes you should do manually okay you should do manually 100% manually there should be no robots involved in the process you should create templates and sops then you should revisit this periodically just in case and then grow your business that way if it is not a high leverage

activity then very easily consider automating or delegating that build systems that enable you to you know achieve 80% of it with like 20% of the work if it's worth it for you to build an automation like actually spend the time going through the process of putting together an automation which may realistically take a few hours then you know it's worth it build the automation monitor the effectiveness and then optimize but if it's not worth it then a lot of the time there are a lot of systems that are in my business nowadays they're like i

should not have tried automating initially so i just keep them manually because you know there's some very simple things to do as a person that if you do them yourself will massively improve leverage one thing that i've started well i'm not doing them as much anymore one thing that i started doing after about i think like eight or nine months my agency was i started recording customized videos walking people through a proposal so i had like completely automated my proposal process which is great and i think the proposal generally is fantastic so highly recommend it

this doesn't change um my recommendation to use it but um i found that like when i recorded a custom two-minute video and then i attached it to the proposal and in that video i literally just walked through my proposal top down saying "hey peter how's it going just wanted to record a quick video for you walking through my proposal." my conversion rate went up something like 15% so my conversion rate already was like 15% so i basically doubled my conversion rate for two extra minutes of work super simple super easy why it was the warmth

it's the perceived value of like having a consultant walk you through the thing it's like hm this is really complicated but if i watch that video then i'll i'll know everything that i need to know in 2 minutes and that oh man that nick guy is so nice i like working with him i want to work with professionals like that you know is it fully automated anymore no it's not but i was able to double my conversion rate with just a little bit of manual work i applied at the right place hopefully you guys appreciated

all of the points that i made in this video these are all points that i wish i could write on a letter and bury in a time machine and have go back 30 or 40 years unfortunately i can't so the second best thing i can do is just help as many of you guys avoid making the same mistakes that i did by getting your belief systems right from day one getting the systems right from from day one and just understanding the fundamental concepts of leverage for instance and like the idea of doing some things manually

even though we're an an automation agency really just not different from any other business if i'm real so most of the same tactics and tips that i'm helping you guys apply to your current an automation company will apply for all future businesses if you internalize these early you'll be a lot better off than if you try and sort them out later and yeah i i i really enjoy having the opportunity to do this so if you guys like these sorts of videos definitely drop down a comment um asking for a video on some other subject

if it's a good recommendation or suggestion or question and i haven't actually answered it in a video elsewhere then i will absolutely consider doing it and i get most of my content ideas and rex from you guys at this point not too i run maker school which is the simplest and fastest path to building an ai and automation agency today uh we just crossed 1,900 members as of the time of this recording and i make the price go up every 100 members just to reflect the increased value of the network and the increased value of

the assets if you guys are on the fence about starting an ai and automation agency you have thought about doing one for quite a while and you just made it to the end of this video and found yourself nodding along uh you will really like maker school it'll jump start your ability to to go from zero to one and get that first customer so i'd highly encourage you guys to check it out you guys already have a successful and thriving business check out make moneywithmake.com which is my premier automation community which instead of taking you

from zero to one takes something that works takes some one and then helps you scale it to 100 so this is how you scale your business to $25,000 a month $50,000 a month $100,000 a month and beyond these are all the things that we we talk about in the program all right i think i'll leave you there and cap the ad off really appreciate having all of you guys with me thank you very much like subscribe do all that fun stuff i'll catch you on the next video thanks so much bye