How To Build An Automation Business In 30 Days For $396

hey everybody Nick here I made over 100 Grand last month with AI and Automation and in this video I want to show you how you can do it too I'm going to run through the fastest no way to build a thriving automation agency in just 30 days for less than $396 you're going to learn all about the agency life cycle and then I'm going to show you how you can copy and paste systems that work into your own business so you can start selling them immediately we're going to cover three simple Revenue generating activities for

you to do every day and lastly I'm going to show you how to consistently deliver high quality projects if that sounds like something you guys want to get into and learn how to do for yourself then this is the video for you all right the very first and probably the most important step is going to be learning the agency life cycle what is the agency life cycle well if I could put it simply agencies haven't changed much over the course of the last 50 or 60 years since the Mad Men era Dawn Draper days agencies

have basically functioned more or less similarly I mean we've swapped a couple of things out typically we don't meet people in person anymore a lot of the time our work is done over the phone or maybe through a video call but agencies by and large have functioned according to the following six steps that I'm about to show you so if you're looking to start an agency to get into you know service implementations the quickest way for you to move forward is just understanding a little bit about what you what each of these steps entail now

I've laid the steps out as follows Marketing sales onboarding fulfillment delivery and retention I name these as I've named them here but I want you to know that depending on where you're from depending on the local business environment that you've come from uh you may name these steps differently maybe instead of marketing it's lead gen maybe instead of onboarding it's uh I don't know client activation or something the point isn't what these steps are called the point is how they work and what they do so let's get into the concepts essentially at the very beginning

of our flow on the left hand side here we need a way to generate a lead we need a way to get somebody from not knowing about our business to knowing about our business and so this is where the marketing step comes from you spend money on either advertising or Outreach and that's basically the two things that you're limited to to book a sales meeting with your prospect now if you don't know what I mean by sales meeting this is the traditional agency sales system you start by generating the lead up here with marketing and

you can do so through a variety of means cold email PPC ads SEO social media upwork communities LinkedIn Twitter Outreach Tik toks like whatever the hell you want the point is this isn't an exhaustive list I just want you to notice how they all into this meeting booked shape so you funnel all of these people into a sales meeting in agency parland we typically call this a disco call Discovery call the next step is the actual sales call itself and on this call your job is basically just to convince the prospect to want to work

with you so you do that on the call you elucidate the benefits you press their pain points I like uh doing consultative sales myself which is typically more question based if you're interested in a good resource for that check out Chris voss's book never split the the difference but essentially after all this happens you will send over a proposal or a contract of some kind and this represents the transformation there's like the pre-signing and then there's the post signing when they do the actual signing and the the giving you of the money they turn from

a prospect into a client now once they're a client they enter the onboarding phase after signing you basically kick the project off by welcoming them you give them a little bit of peace of mind and then you take everything you need in order to make the project successful and you give them everything that they need in order to monitor the project stay up to date with the details of the project you give them ways to like make change request revisions that sort of stuff again nothing in this process has changed over the course of the

last 60 years this is basically how they always uh how agency uh projects have always worked the next is fulfillment this is where you actually deliver on the thing that you promised that you were going to do and here you provide regular updates to the client while completing their project if there are any requirements or additional pieces of information you need you deal with it here the last second last step I should say is delivery where you actually deliver the project this means typically you have some sort of revision period or revision room a lot

of marketing agencies for instance have a specified number of revisions you know maybe one or two revisions included in your package and then if you want any more you got to pay extra but delivery is the actual Pro process of saying hey here's your project here's how all this stuff works thanks so much for you know getting on board with us here's the process if you want something changed and then that last step is called retention and the purpose of retention is basically to regularly follow up with a customer or a client and then attempt

to get them in your door again so this retention could take a number of different ways you could uh you know send them some sort of like regularly templated follow-up maybe once a month or something like that you could work with them on retainer essentially um this is the the best form of retention because you're retaining them every single month you're receiving some sort of regular money from them and that's basically the point of agencies you get people in at the left hand side here through marketing then sales onboarding fulfillment delivery retention and then after

you kind of come back and it's just a little Loop between retention onboarding fulfillment delivery retention on boarding fulfillment delivery so the fact that you understand this and that we've spent a solid few minutes on this topic now means that you are substantially more prepared to take the next step in your business journey and that's understanding a little bit about bottlenecks and what they mean now I'm a big fan of this process called the theory of constraints the theory of constraints involves looking in that pipeline that I showed you that life cycle and then finding

what you think is the bottleneck that's preventing your business from functioning let me explain what I mean if you're a new agency okay you have all the time and energy in the world for onboarding fulfillment delivery and retention I mean you're basically just sitting on your hands waiting for a customer to come to you right so none of these are the bottlenecks none of these are stopping you from being able to move forward what is the bottleneck for a new agency is going to be your marketing and your sales it's going to be really the

marketing at the beginning and then eventually the sales as you start like not being able to convert opportunities because I don't know you just lack the skills or something so um that is basically always the bottleneck the fact that you don't have client your constraint is almost always sales and marketing and if you really want to crush it in the agency space you need to understand this um if you don't solve sales and marketing your business will basically never go anywhere so from there you know the second that you solve sales and marketing you can

basically turn a tap on or off that delivers uh interested parties to your front door well now you can worry about other steps now you can actually start optim in for onboarding fulfillment delivery or retention but the idea is you don't you don't cross that bridge until you get to it otherwise you're wasting a ton of time and energy and I know that there are tons of these courses and accelerators out there that talk you know wax poetic about how you need to have all your systems set up before you start the reality is you

don't at least not for uh the project sizes that you probably care about right now which are I don't know anywhere from like $1,000 maybe up to $5,000 or so until you make your first $10,000 with your agency don't worry about any of those other steps anybody can do this as long as are consistent and apply themselves so yeah you'll eventually have to optimize onboarding fulfillment delivery retention Etc not yet the most important parts of a of a new agency are going to be your marketing and your sales and that's naturally what I'm going to

be spending a lot of time talking about now if you want to crush it in the automation space the simplest way to do it is not actually to build everything yourself from scratch uh you just copy things that already work and then you sell them so this is Step number two in my process uh you can break the rules just break them after you've learned them inside and out don't try innovating or building something completely new until you know what works you know what the customer uh Market that you're tackling has a demand for and

that sort of stuff and so what I've done here is I've just taken a screenshot from my own gumroad gumroad is where I host all of my Blueprints and I give them all away for free that's why it say 0 so if you want to look into them I'm just head over to I think it's gumroad.com left clicker or something or no left clicker.com road.com you'll see just a giant list and the reason why I bring this up is because I want you to copy them I want you to go through this whole thing and

if you're unfamiliar with how automation Works literally just copy all of the systems here that you think are valuable I mean I you know I need to change my thumbnail photos for some of these but uh go through this and just just take whatever you think is valuable the reason why is because this is going to save you weeks or months I mean I run several automation communities at this point where I show people how to build businesses very quickly and reliably and one of the biggest issues I see with new automation companies is that

they rush to innovate they rush to rebuild but the reality is if you haven't even made five grand with your agency innovating is the last of your concerns instead you should do what other agencies do then just do it a little bit better so these are all things that I myself have sold I validated that there is demand for these products or Services um what you should do is you should just copy these from me or maybe another YouTuber or another content creator out there make a couple of tweaks if you have to um and

then just start selling after you learn the rules after you you learn a lot of what you don't know by selling these systems then you can can start optimizing and fixing and making them better and that sort of thing so my steps here are to copy three systems for me or another Builder on YouTube Don't rebuild the Wheel from scratch I mean there are so many resources like mine available to you that you just be wasting uh you know breath otherwise for instance you can copy my proposal generator system maybe you want to copy my

content repurposing system then maybe you want to copy my clickup CRM and then just take these three systems and then that is what you're going to be selling you don't even have to build anything on your own the most important part here is sales and we just want to get you up and running to the point where you're able to sell and sell consistently before we worry about you optimizing anything else like you're fulfill on your delivery remember so once you have that create templates or blueprints Etc around these systems you just copy mine as

I mentioned and that's sufficient become an expert in these highly specific automations and domains this is really only going to take you a few hours you just sort of open up each of these if you're doing this in make.com like I am you would literally just look at every module and just understand what every module does and then when you get an off for a system whether it's that exact same system or related system which I'm going to show you how to do in a few minutes you're going to know how to get 80% of

the way there super easily and then all you have to do is just make a couple little tweaks as the client requested in order for you to get that job done so you know I'm saying if you get 80% of the way there through a template what you've effectively done um logically is you've 5x your leverage you basically decreased the amount of time it takes for you to deliver this project you've also decreased the number of mistakes that you could make delivering this project by five which is huge in addition don't rush to innovate you

know much more about this than most businesses already you just don't know that um and so your goal here isn't to build an eth wonder of the world your goal is to just sell numbers one to seven first then once you've sold numbers one to seven then you can worry about making something new and you know starting to to get out there and innovate so step number three is and I'm going to get a lot of flack for this I'm sure but no fancy website no ideal customer Persona no market research none of that just

sell you're only focused here is on Revenue generating activities so the cost to this step as opposed to the other steps were $0 is $396 this is where you're going to be spending all of the money to actually go out there and acquire customers and this is also the most important step so logically this is the step that you should be spending your money on now there's a lot of noise at the start line of any agency or really any business um improving systems exciting automations right you have all these products that you could design

you could touch up your business cards almost none of that matters and if you spend time doing this you'll be spending time uh basically like pressing buttons that don't do anything imagine if you were at an arcade and you wandered up to a video game machine and you know you just started pressing buttons and none of those buttons did anything why in God's name would you keep on pressing those buttons if you wanted to play the game right why not walk to an arcade and press the button that actually makes the game start um this

doesn't make the game start what makes the game start our Revenue gener gener ating activities so let me explain the only thing that matters when you're starting a business is spending time on Revenue generating activities and the only things that are really Revenue generating activities that are worth doing are interfacing with the market so interfacing with the market means talking to customers means dming customers it means uh emailing customers it means recording videos for customers it means getting on video calls with customers talking to them over the phone uh sure if you're running some local

agency it might mean like going into their office shaking their hands might mean cold calling uh you know door too whatever it is but the most important thing for you now that you're at the start line and that you understand that sales and marketing are your bottleneck bottlenecks I should say is interfacing with the market as much as possible and just putting yourself out there as much as you can because these are Revenue generating activities these are things that allow you to to really move forward these are the buttons that you know change the way

that your screen looks for instance the reason why is because every time you interface with the market what you're really doing under the hood is you're learning what works and you're learning what doesn't you as a business owner especially probably a new one have a ton of probably invalid opinions um you have things that you know you've learned from your family you've had things that you've learned from other businesses or maybe other verticals or maybe influencers or or content creators or TV or news media or whatever and it sucks for me to say but a

lot of these opinions are invalid all that you should really be doing the only people you should really be forming opinions um from are customers because customers are the ones that are going to be paying you money at the end of the day and so so all you basically should be doing is looking at and talking to and dealing with real customers as often as possible because real customers will reset all of that in your head it's about as true and objective a data source as humanly possible your only uh you know your only mental

calculus should be you know hey if I do this customers like it hey if I do this customers don't like it so I should do more of that first thing and less of that second thing and this is what this step does and this is really what I talk mostly about in most of my automation programs because it's as I mentioned bottleneck for the vast majority of people so there is so much that we don't know that we don't know interfacing with customers solves that it's kind of like riding a bike if somebody asks you

hey Peter how do you ride a bike you just say well you kind of just get on there and then you balance right customers and client management and all that jazz it's very similar in nature when you put yourself in front of customers when you ride that bike as often as possible you tend to pick up a lot of it intuitively very quickly so because this is really the sauce here this is the meal deal that cost $396 what I'm going to do next is I'm going to focus on three affordable High leverage Revenue generating

activities that you can do every day to build a thriving and successful automation agency these are steps that I do myself these are steps that tons of people in my communities do I'm going to run you through some I guess examples and some case studies and I'm actually going to show you exactly how you can do them yourself too the most powerful Revenue generating activity that you can do today is cold email as of the time of this recording which which is November the 6th at 3:35 p.m. there is no lead generation method that is

more affordable and more accessible you can generate leads you can have booked appointments in your calendar for something like a A fifth or a sixth of the cost of anything else you can also write now like in the next hour assuming you wanted to and assuming you were willing to spend the money connect with over 500 people from the comfort of your chair in your pajamas back in the day I used to go cold calling and door knocking I would be lucky if I got 70ish people a day if you do the math you can

literally connect with seven times as many people that I would have spent in an entire week and receive very similar quality results with what I'm about to show you and I don't just want you to take my word for it I mean I have uh basically dozens of case studies from people across all of my communities that just start with cold email and they just start absolutely crushing it um I'm not going to go super into detail about any of these but uh yeah people are just printing money with cold email it's not very hard

I think this guy generated a lead Within sevenes minutes which is crazy this guy made 3.5k this guy signed a $2,200 50 deal um and so on and so forth the point that I'm making is there's a lot of Leverage in cold email and a lot of people don't really believe that it's possible to send a cold email and have somebody actually respond to you but like you know I made $100,000 last month I get cold emails all the time and if the cold emails are good I will literally respond to that cold email despite

the fact that there are a million things buying for my attention um basically every business owner is the same so emails are a direct line into your prospect's brain basically you should take advantage of it so what I'm going to show you here is some pretty conservative math um these can improve substantially depending on your copy my best performing campaign has a reply rate that is six or seven times this about 20% or so um that's not super realistic to be honest you need a very particular set of circumstances to get a reply rate that

good but um I just want you to know that I'm being extraordinarily conservative here and all the numbers that I'm showing you you have the power to do substantially better so I always recommend signing up for nine mailboxes using instantly the costs about 15 bucks a domain you need three domains for that so 45 bucks plus five bucks a mailbox you need nine mailbox that's another 45 bucks plus um 97 bucks a month I use instantly you don't have to spend 97 bucks a month for this you can also find ways to get all of

these things cheaper um so that's $187 is the most money that you'll pay if you want to be a little more reasonable maybe you'll spend like a hundred bucks or something then you scrape a bunch of leads I'm going to do 3,000 just cuz um my program here the one that I'm laying out in front of you involves emailing something like 135 new people a day times 24 days so scrape 300 leads using leads rapidly it's a new service where you can pump in an Apollo um search URL into uh this service that will then

scrape the leads off Apollo for you and give them to you at like 1/ 100th of the cost or something ludicrous like that that'll cost you n bucks collectively it's $196 and then here's the math like when I when I consult with automation agencies and really any any sort of business I will almost always do math that is very similar to what I'm about to show you here so if this is the first time you're hear ing this sort of math I recommend you guys uh you know pay attention and try and try and understand

where I'm coming from here with this estimation if you have nine mailboxes and you're contacting 15 New Leads a day because that's about how many we're going to contact in like a two email sequence if it's 30 emails a day per mailbox but you have you have to send out two emails you can only do 15 right then that's 135 leads a day if you do 135 leads a day and you send 24 days I do Monday to Saturday then that's 3,240 leads a month it's actually a little bit more than that but let's go

with 3,240 assuming you get a 3% reply range is very doable especially if you use AI customization that's 97 replies and assuming that a third of those replies are positive that's over 32 booked appointments the per appointment cost using this method is 196 divided 32 $612 if anybody here is in PPC you know if you've ever tried acquiring client through I don't know like Google ads or Facebook ads or something especially for a service that is over $1,000 which a lot of automation projects can be $612 is pretty freaking ludicrous um you know most people

will spend 5 10 15 20 times that you know I think personal injury law uh PPC campaigns and granted you know they can they can pay out a ton of money uh but you know they're willing to spend hundreds of dollars for a single uh for for a single meeting we're talking like three four $500 you're getting this for $612 if you do the math and you say I don't know I have a conversion rate of 20% that means I need five appointments per close that means that to close a deal the money that's flowing

out of your pocket is $30 assuming a customer lifetime value even a th000 bucks which is an underestimate I've had customer lifetime values of upwards of 167,000 well actually realistically I think my highest one's over $50,000 now but maybe you know5 $116,000 i' say that's a 33 times Roi on a th000 bucks if you just do the math and it's 2,000 then that's a 66 times Roi like are you going to get 66 times Roi on the market no obviously this is like actively managed but this is basically you know I don't want to type

it up too much but the way that I see it is cold email is like a money printer as long as you know a couple of the inputs and the outputs and if you can do this intelligently you can generate much more than that 33 times rois on your marketing spend um so i' highly recommend that if you know y'all aren't taking cold email seriously that you start pretty soon okay so how do you actually go out and do cold emails I should have wrote manage not right here um the reality is you don't need

to be a copyrighting God to make this work I wasn't when I started I think I've become a little bit closer to that since but uh you just need to put yourself in your prospect shoes when you're writing and creating your campaigns what would you actually respond to a lot of the time I see people write way too formally they'll say hello dear hello uh sir hello Madam um you know dear Peter right I think if people see that they basically instantly exit out of any email they instantly Mark you a Spam because that's just

not how people realistically talk what you want to do is you want to talk to them as if they're like a friend of yours or something you want to talk to them as if you're texting your buddy across the the seat at the bar so right short and Punchy try and make your whole excuse me email fit into a phone screen that's really the rule of thumb avoid any sort of formality in your copyrighting um you know use contractions wherever possible I can say can sorry that's not what I meant to say cannot say can't

uh you know basically just just try and cut down your email as much as humanly possible I have a whole copyrighting and offer guide by the way that you guys can check out um because I don't have the time to do this whole topic Justice in this video so if you guys want to like really really Master cold email I definitely recommend you check it out just Google like nixer have cold offers or something then use plausible deniability don't say you know I see people lying all the time when they do cold emails don't say

hey Sam I walked by your business yesterday and I was looking through your storefront I loved what I saw um that stuff's and if anybody ever calls you out and it you basically just like burned that Prospect for life so just use plausible deniability um you know imply that you have some sort of relation to them but don't explicitly say that you do build an offer give something away for free guarantee them results Etc if you are emailing a person cold and they've never talked to you before in their life you do not by default

have their respect you don't even by default have any of their time you need to earn it and the only way that you earn it is by giving them something you essentially have to buy seconds and the way that you do this is you give them something for free and you guarantee the hell out of it a good example is I will book you 10 uh sales appointments in your calendar in the next 30 days or you don't pay a cent I guarantee you that you're going to have 10 booked sales appointments in your calendar

in the next 30 days that's huge right logically if your service is just a few thousand but 10 Book Sales appointments of them are worth like $50,000 like a lot of businesses are they're going to say yeah that sounds great let's do it you need to make it so logical that they just can't say no you don't just sell them emotionally but you just sort of lay it out in front of them and you're like well like what could possibly go wrong get in the habit of guaranteeing stuff get in the habit of guaranteeing I

will build a a worldclass clickup CRM and install it in your business in the next 48 hours and if you don't absolutely fall in love with it you don't pay me a cent um when you start getting into that language you start making multiples um on you know your positive reply rates and that's what really crushes it in cold email and the last thing I'll mention is just respond to all positive inquiries in under five minutes make that your rule of thumb just set up notifications set up a slack set up all this stuff if

you don't it's going to be a lot tougher for you um to to succeed and this is another one of those really low hanging fruit that I see people consistently failing at they respond to cold emails like a day after I'm sorry man if I'm talking to somebody totally cold and I don't respond to them in 5 minutes I basically consider that lead lost for the better yeah I want to say not not like 90% chance they're going to be lost but probably like 30% chance that I'm losing them if I don't respond to them

in five minutes um so you can just massively improve your conversion rate just by having notifs on your phone having response templates and that sort of stuff all things that instantly in other cold email providers give you right off the bat all right so the second lead generation method the one that usually gets me a couple of people turning up their noses and saying this guys full of is uh upwork I made over well I made almost $500,000 in earnings on my upwork profile uh the marginal cost per closed deal is similar to email it's

definitely more but because of Pride and ego I find that many good business people avoid it um because many good business people avoid it that is actually your opportunity I've had many contracts that have turned in projects worth over $10,000 I have a bunch of just case studies here uh you know through maker school and through makemoney withth make.com with people just making a ton of money getting their first client using upwork reaching out and making I don't know $700 $800 in their first day or something like that um booking their first uperk client in

12 days making you know their first $1,000 through the platform and and that sort of stuff so there's a lot that you can do on uper very quickly and easily um I'm going to run you into the math again but I want you to know that this is very dependable you can wake up every day and do five or 10 of these my recommendation is five and if you stick to my program this is going to cost you somewhere in the neighborhood of another $200 in your first month so my program is to send five

customer applications per day your cost comes out to about $2 per app you have to spend money on upw workk in order to actually send the application and they usually take about 5 minutes of your time when I say custom application I mean literally record a video of you solving the customer problem for them I mean literally say hey how's it going my name's Nick um I just wanted to spend a couple of minutes and see if I could solve your problem right now over video and then just work through it with them it's very

high Roi if you end up getting the job you can repurpose the work that you did during that 5 minutes then if anybody clicks on your proposal in all likelihood they'll be wowed because very few people do stuff like this on this platform this makes the $2 that you spend much more worth it so mathematically five applications time 20 days is about 100 applications per month right I'm assuming you're going to send Monday to Friday with a 20% reply rate that 100 applications is 20 leads I'm assuming half of them book because the the the

booking to reply rate is a lot higher on upwork um that's 10 appointments if you get a third of those appointments sign that's three projects and assuming that customer lifetime value is a th000 bucks that's about a 15 times Roi on marketing closed deal cost you 66 bucks I think if you're still with me at this point in the video you're probably now understanding how I do these cost benefit calculations um obviously there's only so much that you could know ahead of time but these numbers tend to be reasonably accurate I want to say for

uh beginners or near beginners as I mentioned these substantially improve depending on your copy and these substantially improve depending on your profile my stats personally are about double this well it's not double the half booking rate that would be a full booking rate but I think you guys get my point so how do you do well on upwork well of whole Litany of uh of ways I need to find my upwork okay let's just go upwork Nix have here I bet you I'm somewhere here uh that is not me maybe I need to actually pull

open another tab so why don't we do that so how do how do you actually do well on upwork well I have a simple four or five step process to doing so um I'm just going to see the public view just as if I was um you know considering working with me upwork is sort of like a search engine right it's like Google and so just like you do SEO on Google to do well you kind of need to do SEO on upwork too it's also like a landing page and so just like you need

to do cro on your landing pages you need to do cro on upwork the thing is they only give you a few different ways to do the cro in the SEO and you just need to make as much use of them as you possibly can it's just a game at the end of the day right you're just playing a game with five or six different buttons so one button is your profile this right here um I chose this bright yellow color because I wanted to stand out from the background and the reason why is because

I've hired on upwork before I know how many applications the average gets and the vast majority of eyes will just glaze over until they find one that just stands out so I picked a color that you just do not see in nature made that in my background um I look reasonably business casual I think I'd be better if I was looking in the camera honestly I just haven't had time to get new photos um but yeah uh you know little tiny hack might improve your proposal to reply rate by like 2% or something the next

one is uh your rate I never do like a flat rate I'm never like 50 bucks I'm like 5250 5389 whatever um the third is your title you know you want your title to be optimized you want it to be as similar to the keywords the jobs that you're applying for as possible so just scroll through 10 or 15 jobs make a list of keywords and put those keywords in your title the next is you know the way that upwork works is you have an above the fold and you have a below the fold right

the vast majority of people will like it's crazy they will stuff all of the important below the fold but the reality is nobody looks below the fold they only look above the fold they make the determination of whether or not to keep looking at your profile through above the fold so what you want to do is you just want to shove as much Social proof in there as seemingly possible Right my work is 50 million reads I've written for insert all these big companies here I've been featured in Popular Mechanics and Apple news right the

point that I'm making is you just want to frontload your social proof and this works with anything this doesn't work just work with automation it works with all platforms um sorry all all sorts of jobs uh and all sorts of Industries the next is you want to make sure this online for messages badge is on the reason why is because upwork is a very short-term hiring platform and you know people are going to want to get hired uh people are going to want to hire and then get hired very fast so you need to play

the game and you need to have like a little tab open somewhere on your computer basically um and then just alt tab back and forth through it every couple of hours if you just do these very silly sounding steps that again these aren't magic these definitely don't sound effective but they are effective uh you can print money on upwork you can make a ton so yeah I talk about these tips here and I'm going to leave it at that um but the last thing I'll mention is that in your customized video proposal either answer their

question or give them something for free just say you know hey I'd love to build this out for you at no cost and only if you love it do you actually have to end up paying me we can set this up on upwork right now and I can start building the next 48 hours you know you have to build a couple reviews you have to get some status under your belt of course like any other platform but if you do this and if you do this consistently and if you send a five a day for

the next 30 days or so um like mathematically you're almost guaranteed to succeed now the next uh you know simple lead generation method that I want to talk about is communities communities also offer a ridiculous Roi especially right now since Alex hosi threw his hat into school with Sam ens millions of people are joining communities I should know I run communities and they're also an extraordinarily lowcost way of connecting with uh people in your target market in like a safe way where they don't really feel threatened by you and you guys can actually sit down

and have a conversation they they tend to be pretty insular so here's my recommendation here's the math join a bunch of free or lowcost communities that Target your market for instance videography companies then read through every one of these communities literally scroll all the way down to the very bottom of the of the whole search right it might take you hours but then just make a note of all of the problems that you've identified in said Community you know are people complaining about a particular software platform in your Niche are they talking about how they

wish that this software platform did this are they talking about how ah customers have gotten so expensive recently or you know customers are so cheap right note down these problems the vast majority will have to do with not getting enough leads or not closing enough deals or some client management issues or some simple Software System issues and that's fine but just note them all down and then what you do is you just post in the community every single day when you create the post you solve a problem that the community members are struggling with and

then you just give that away for free and you're not really giving it away for free what you're doing is you're giving something away in exchange for reputation and that reputation will help you later on down the line this is what I've done with my own YouTube uh it took me to be honest like several months before I started making any money any meaningful money aside from like a few little um uh you know pennies worth of AD Revenue but what I was doing was I was building my reputation to the point where it was

sort of like a powder keg that was ready to explode and this is how I see communities as well people that do this tend to do quite well um what you do next is everybody that's reacted or responded to your post you send them a DM and in your DM you offer to help them a little bit further you say hey how's it going you know I noticed that you sent me a DM are you currently working on this right now if so like I'm more than happy to walk you through what it looks like

do you want me to send a video and then mathematically if you created 20 posts per month and each post is an average of even five engagements you're getting DMS if out of those 100 DMS you book 10% of those you get 10 meetings and assuming you close 20% that's two deals and the only thing you're paying for for this is time although certainly some communities can cost money to join you don't have to do any sort of paid Community to make this work we have tons of people that are crushing it with communities in

my groups and in other groups too so how do you actually do well with us communities are less rigid than other methods a lot of communities are just building relationships and then seeing where like the business Serendipity takes you but there are some things you can do to improve the percent chance of a conversion and here is what I personally recommend the first is don't just create top level posts if you're going to do this do it right spend maybe 20 minutes a day responding to comments read through the threads that are posted engage with

people ask them where they're from what they want to do send DMS say hey I thought the post that you made last week was really interesting here's why um you know a lot of it is relationship based and you want people to like you so that they also engage with your post and bump you to the top of the feet the second is to give everything away in your post gatekeep nothing if you start gatekeeping things in a Clos Community um I find that just tanks your reputation when you DM keep it light as well

um you know the purpose of a community is not to be sold like you don't want to sell to people in the community or make them feel threatened by it um so just offer to show them or talk to them more about your Solution on a call don't necessarily push the sale we've seen band results from that and then the last is and this is sort of a sneaky hormos level technique is when you're on the call ask them in instead of like asking them hey do you want to buy my product or service when

you explain how your solution works or whatever it is that you know you guys were T chatting about all you do is you just ask them if they know anybody who'd be interested in your services this sidesteps the issue of any sort of hard sales it preserves your reputation in the community and allows you to do this like clockwork all the time the reason why is because if they're not interested then they might find some people and then refer them over to you or they'll just say on you know sorry I don't know anybody at

the top of my head but if they are interested they'll say well I'm interested in this service and then voila you've got yourself people um that you can very easily convert into paying customers so sort of a logistic thing sort of a social cuy thing I think you sort of just have to be in enough communities to understand what the dynamic is there uh but I personally have seen great results with this method tons of people in my communities have seen great results with this method so I recommend it step number four is to go

above and beyond as often as possible the cost for this is z dollar unsurprisingly now this is particularly important in your first few weeks building an automation agency the reason why is because it helps you get referrals which are substantially easier to both acquire and manage than cold leads logically if you get A A customer from completely cold sources you basically done the hardest thing ever you have literally done the hardest thing that you will ever have to do on the lead acquisition side of business you should be very proud of yourself indeed that means

that anything that you do from then and out will be easier it's one of the reasons why I'm actually really thankful that I spent all my time going door Todo um because it taught me basically the hardest lead method that gave me the fewest results and because I was able to succeed with that I'm obviously able to succeed with anything else right but the thing about referrals are you know what most service providers think is that you know I don't really want to go above and beyond on this project like should I really make that

extra video should I really add that extra feature it's like no because it'll just kind of reduce my Roi if I make $1,000 and I spend a couple extra hours to do so well my hourly rate just went down so that's pointless I want to be efficient and optimal with my time and I understand the idea here I understand you wed to optimize your Roi and your return on rate and I think that's generally positive but you're not losing that time in reality if you spend more time on a project and if you go above

and beyond and you add some additional features or you just go way past the scope then like a sizable percentage of the people you deal with are going to work with you again and they're going to give you more money for more services they're literally going to probably like 25 30 40 50% more often give you like a follow-up job Andor a referral and or a five-star review the moment that you get one of these you've just acquired a client for free which is about the most valuable thing anybody can do in agencies if I

jump way back here to our system this retention step if you can find a way to retain or get referrals then you'll do two things the first is that you're going to lower your cost per acquisition let's say that you know we just retained a customer for another ,000 project and we did uh we we acquired them through cold email right so we spent $30.60 and we made $2,000 on that project well now if you do the math your return on marketing spend for that customer was 66 times which is even more ludicrous in addition

to that you don't just make more money uh you don't just make a higher return on marketing because your cost per acquisition is lower you tend to be able to get more money out of these people too so the math gets even better if you do a great job for somebody for $1,000 they're much more likely to the next project to say well you know what why don't we do this $2,000 project instead sure it's twice the size but now I trust you and I know you deliver good work and that's where you start getting

into the crazy leverage with an agency whatever agency it is not just automation agencies but that's where you start getting into you know like the 300 times uh return on marketing spend and then you know a lot of these people tend to refer you to other people in their networks this is really where things start to multiply for you so I highly encourage every job that you do to go above and beyond even if even if you have to spend a little bit of extra time doing it just know that the person that consistently gives

this sort of value is inherently eventually rewarded by the market and really just the universe so some examples and I got a really sneaky one for you um I deliver every project with a custom video I'll actually record documentation I'll be like hey how's it going Nick here this is the project for X Y andz you can use this as training for your team if you want um let's dive into how everything works and then I'll actually run through it all and people really like that because I typically don't always discuss that sometimes I give

them team documentation for free that's like a big Google doc um I add additional features we didn't talk about during the scope features that are most like well you know what I figured it'd be nice for you to have this too so I just threw that in right people love that you want to know a really sneaky thing you can do leave positive reviews in your clients Google my business page without them saying anything next time you start working with somebody even if it's like a small ticket amount just look them up on Google my

business and then leave them a review and say hey how's it going my name's Peter you know I'm a I'm a vendor or I'm A supplier for blank company I just wanted to let you all know that like this guy that I'm working with is killer he's extraordinarily kind and charismatic he's very communicative um just as a character reference I think that Peter is one of the best guys that you could possibly work with I can't tell you how many people I've done this on that have later just sent me an email or during a

call been like by the way did you leave a review for me last week I'm like yeah I did and then that ends up Landing me the job so just go above and beyond as often as possible treat this as a step that you can optimize for um and you'll start getting substantially more referrals eventually you're not going to have to rely on these lead generation methods that I talk about although I believe you should certainly always be doing them regardless the last thing that I'll talk about is consistency and I'm I'm going to end

this with this platitude because it is very important uh if you want to succeed in the agency space I should note that it doesn't actually require hard work and you don't have to be intelligent there are many people that work way less than you are probably willing to and there are many people that are probably way dumber than you the person watching this video is right now because it doesn't require hardw work intelligence it requires consistent work a good example I always like providing is building muscle at the gym now as we know I'm extraordinarily

muscular and well-developed uh just about everywhere and uh you know if if I wanted to make my shoulders even bigger let's I had two options the first is I could either out for 15 hours today or I could spend 1 hour working out every other day by the end of the month I'll have spent the same amount of time in both cases well in which case do you think I'll have grown uh even sexier more Rippling shoulders uh obviously the second the reason why I'm going to get in trouble for that the reason why is

because like anything you know building muscle takes time there are processes that need to occur in your body your body has to repair your muscle fibers synthesize new proteins has to digest your food and all that right the body is exactly the sorry the market is exactly the same as the body there are there is an inherent lag to processes in the market and the economy people take time to get back to you they take time to Maul over things they take time to respond to your cold emails or proposals and if you're not consistent

if you instead just say well screw it I'm just going to send a million upwork applications and cold email today and and you know it's the same amount so maybe it'll work out regardless if you just do that you're not allowing the market to let you win you're not allowing the market to reward you for that consistency even if I work my ass off for those 15 hours in the gym and then you know in the other alternative I just like sort of half ass it and I work an hour every day I'm going to

get way more results doing that hour every day than I ever would being like Arnold Schwarzenegger reborn or something like that for 15 hours okay so all you do is you just show up consistently for long enough if you can send more than five or 10 upwork applications a day or whatever I mean do it sure be consistent about it even if you cut that down to one or two or something if you are consistent about this for long enough eventually you will win this is just compounding over time and this is like one of

the core fundamental rules of business time in the market beats time timing the market essentially all right I have one more step that I didn't talk about before and this is my thoughts on hiring no uh I guess journey to build an agency would be complete without this topic well here are my thoughts on it hiring for an agency is actually completely optional um you don't have to hire for an agency I think like a lot of people believe that successful agencies require a lot of people uh like require a lot of Staff members and

I guess if you wanted to look at it from like just purely a revenue perspective that might be true but I think if you were to look at it from a profit perspective you'd see that typically bloated agencies don't really make that much in bottom line wise so I like to think that hiring free agency is completely optional especially because we've now seen a Resurgence or I guess a surge in oneman agencies sort of like my own um you can scale to very sizable numbers doing the vast majority of your work yourself or with one

other person and I guess you just have to ask yourself how much money do you really want to make do you want to run a company that does $10 million a year but then you only keep 100 Grand or would you rather run a company that does $1 million a year but you keep 500 Grand I know I would definitely run a company that does the latter so here's some examples um there's myself obviously I scill to $72,000 a month with left click building hands-off grow systems for BB Founders and I want to say 95%

% of that work was just me I did have a virtual assistant who I passed off some work to from time to time Brett at design Joy there's $145,000 a month completely solo he does all of his designs he does all of the agency work he does all the client management totally on his own this group here Nick and Alex at bake design I'm sure Nick is a handsome fella I could tell um they do something like 70 or $80,000 a month and it's just them two them and uh you know it's Nick and his

co-founder Alex again they do designs the point that I'm making is you can do you can make a lot of money you can scale really big without necessarily compromising um on time so long as you set your business up right uh to begin with so the way that I usually recommend going about this is to get your first few customers get your first five or $10,000 in the agency space that's going to teach you a lot of fundamental client management skills that you just don't know that you don't know once you have these fundamental client

management and business management skills then you take a step back and you ask yourself all right cool how can I structure my business in such a way that enables me now not just to hit5 or $10,000 but to hit $50,000 in a month that usually involves some level of productization usually involves some level of templating uh you know using Automation in your business not just selling automations uh and then you know leveraging alternative distribution streams all stuff that I'm going to talk about in uh in my next video that I record so if you do

hire I do recommend doing it last focus on increasing your leverage as much as possible just using systems instead of people because the need and the expertise that human staff members can provide relative to like an AI model is decreasing I think if you were to like zoom in two years into the future or whatever it's the people that learn how to leverage themselves and maybe a small tight-nit team that are going to be the ones crushing in the future not like the big bloated dinosaurs because as we know you know technology is improving to

the point where that will no longer really be possible that's that I hope you guys appreciated the video had a lot of fun putting it together if you guys have any questions about me yammering on for the last 45 minutes or so I think it's been a while uh feel free to leave them down below more than happy to get back to you same if you guys have any content ideas for me otherwise if you guys could do me a solid and if you're not already subscribed sad face emoji uh then do that now and

then like the video to pump to the top of the ago I really appreciate your time have a lovely rest of the day and I'll catch you on the next vid cheers