The Ultimate AI Agency Masterclass (6+ HOUR FREE COURSE)

Transcript

00:00

By far the easiest business to start right now needs no products, no fancy marketing, and no coding skills. It's not drop shipping, it's not social media marketing, and it's not crypto either.

It's helping normal businesses to understand and use AI tools like CHBT.

00:15

And this is exactly why billionaires like Kevin Oly and Mark Cuban say that it's the first business they would start right now if they were starting again from zero. I think everything is looking at AI now.

I would go to businesses because businesses don't understand AI

00:30

yet. And I know this works because I've done it.

It was two years ago where I was like where many of you are right now, no AI experience, no degree, and just curious about AI and wanting a better life for myself. And since then, I've built multiple different AI businesses that are on track to generate

00:46

$10 million in revenue this year. And I've created at the same time the biggest AI YouTube channel and also the biggest AI business community in the world with over 160,000 members.

And it all started by helping regular businesses to use simple AI tools like Chat GBT, which is exactly what you're

01:02

about to learn. This complete 6-hour AI business masterass gives you my exact blueprint.

It's the same one that thousands of beginners in my community have used to build real AI businesses, helping local businesses to understand and implement AI. So, here's how this video is going to work.

I have put together my best YouTube content over the past few years in the exact order

01:18

that you'll need in order to start your own AI business. In chapter one for the newbies, we'll explore the AI business landscape.

I'm going to be showing you how big this opportunity really is, the types of AI businesses that you can start, and I'll help you overcome the doubts that you're probably having about whether or not you can actually do this

01:34

and whether you can start an AI business. In chapter 2, we're going to focus on actually starting your AI business.

The videos in this section are going to help you to find where to begin your journey. How to build AI skills quickly.

How to choose profitable niches and pick the best one for you and get your first client, price your services,

01:50

and basically everything you need to get your business off the ground and go from zero to one. And finally, in chapter 3, we'll talk about how to scale your AI business.

And I'll be sharing how I scaled my AI businesses from 10K per month all the way to $100,000 per month and beyond. And most importantly, how to avoid the same mistakes that trip myself

02:06

and most others up. So, if you're serious about becoming an AI entrepreneur and building the life of your dreams, then close out all of your tabs right now.

Save this video to your watch later so that you don't forget to come back to it. Grab a notebook and a pen and your drink of choice.

Feel free to skip around this video if you already have an AI business and you're ready to

02:22

sort of jump ahead. But if you're a beginner and just starting off your AI business journey, then buckle up and get ready to discover the amazing future that awaits you in this AI business world.

If you want to learn a little bit more about me and my story, I will link my whole my story video in the description. But without further ado, I'm so excited for you to start this

02:38

journey and I hope to see you in my free community Q&As's very soon. If I was 25 years old today in 2024, what would I do?

What's a good sector to get involved in? What business would I

02:53

get involved in? If I was a 16-year-old kid and I needed to start a side hustle to make some money, I think everything is looking at now in a different way.

As businesses, particularly small to mediumsiz businesses, don't understand yet. The majority of businesses in America, for example, are between 5 and

03:10

500 employees. So, they're small businesses.

They create 62% of the jobs they want to use. And I doesn't matter if I'm 16, I'd be teaching them as well.

Sound complicated? Yes, it is.

But is it lucrative? very much.

So, it's not about how hard you row, it's about what bill

03:26

you're at. It's imaginational and they'll pay you.

Two years ago, I spotted exactly what these billionaires are just now telling everyone to jump into. And back then, people thought I was insane.

And fast forward to today, I've built a multi-million dollar business with over

03:42

40 people based out of our Oakland office here in New Zealand. All because I saw this coming before anyone else did.

In the next 20 minutes, I'm going to show you why this opportunity is so glaringly obvious that these billioners are literally begging people to start these kinds of businesses. And more

03:58

importantly, I'll be breaking down how almost anyone can start one of them. So, what is this no-brainer opportunity that Shark Tanks Kevin Olri and Mark Cuban both say is the first business they would start if they were starting again as an entrepreneur today?

04:14

Let's see if you can figure it out. If I was 25 years old today in 2024, what would I do?

What's a good sector to get involved in? What business would I get involved in?

I think everything is looking at AI now in a different way. And I think AI growth is going to be exponential.

So, anything to do with AI

04:30

now, what could that be? In the simplest form, it's helping people use the technology.

There's going to be a massive amount of people wanting to use it that don't know how to and they're willing to pay to solve that painoint. So, is that consulting?

Not really. is implementation and execution.

And so

04:47

helping a business do that transfer into a world where they're controlling their data and getting information from it. Now, the majority of businesses in America, for example, are between 5 and 500 employees.

So, they're small businesses. They create 62% of the jobs.

05:02

They want to use AI. You should help them solve for that, and they'll pay you.

Did you catch that? Let's see what Mark Cuban has to say as well.

The skills you need for a job today, 10 years, 100 years from now are always the same. You need to be curious because everything's changing.

You need to be agile because everything's changing. And

05:20

you've got to be able to adapt because everything's always changing. I can pretend that I'm going to be able to predict where AI is going and the exact impact on the job market, but I'd be lying.

I have no idea. But I do know that I'm going to pay attention and be agile and be curious and be able to

05:36

adapt. So, if I was a 16-year-old kid and I needed to start a side hustle to make some money, there's a couple things that I would do.

One, I would be all in on large language models like Chat GPT and Gemini, Meta, and the like and learning how to prompt and going to my

05:52

friends and teaching them how to do prompts for all their papers. And then I would go to businesses because businesses, particularly small to medium-sized businesses, don't understand AI yet.

And I doesn't matter if I'm 16, I'd be teaching them as well. Think you got it?

Well, hold that

06:09

thought. And now, let me show you something from nearly two years ago.

AI automation agencies are the next big thing in online business. The AI automation agency model is an online business model focused on helping small to mediumsiz businesses to automate their systems and processes with AI

06:26

technology. What I'm calling an AI automation agency is an online business model where you work with businesses either on a contract or retainer basis to help them apply AI technologies.

That video was filmed in May of 2023. And what I discovered back then through my own business, Morningside AI.

And what

06:42

these billionaires are are really only just catching on to now is that there is an enormous gap between these small to mediumsiz businesses that desperately need AI to stay competitive and their ability to actually implement it. For these businesses to be fully up to date

06:57

with AI, there are many layers of services that they are starving for right now. You've got education about what AI is as a technology and what it can and can't do.

Secondly, they are starving for consulting on the best kinds of AI systems to implement for their business to get some kind of ROI.

07:13

And the final step is building AI systems for them in order to reduce their costs and increase their sales. The businesses that provide these kinds of AI services and what these rich guys keep talking about are called AI automation.

agencies or AAA's for short, which is a term that my team and I

07:29

created to really describe a new business model that we discovered in May of 2023. Now, before you click away thinking that I can't do this, I'm I don't know AI.

I'm not an expert in AI. I'm not qualified.

Give me a second and I will destroy every single excuse and shred of self-doubt that your brain is

07:45

creating right now about this opportunity. In reality, you are so much closer to tapping into this enormous demand for AI services that these billionaires keep talking about than you think.

Starting off with excuse number one, I'm not an AI expert. So, this right here, this belief that you need to

08:02

be some kind of AI expert with a degree or other qualifications is exactly why this opportunity is still so untapped. What most people don't understand about the current AI revolution is that when chat GPD was launched in in the end of 2022, it basically blindsided everyone

08:18

equally, right? So the AI academics, business leaders, even the tech giants like Google, this new wave of AI is so different from what came before it and so transformative that we are all essentially starting from ground zero.

It truly is an even playing field. And

08:34

while universities and traditional education are still scrambling to update their courses and programs, while businesses are still desperate to understand what's possible with this technology, there's been a small group of people that have been stepping up in order to bridge this gap and start to

08:50

tap into this surging demand from businesses all over the world for AI services. And the thing is that they're not AI academics.

The majority of them aren't even developers. that the regular people who saw this opportunity like the billionaires and and myself and and just took action on it.

My point here is that

09:06

the real experts in AI for businesses aren't being created in classrooms. They are being forged in the real world by helping businesses to understand and adopt this technology in a place where we are judged by our results and not by our qualifications.

You don't need to be

09:21

a technical genius to get into AI. Businesses need three things.

They need someone to explain AI to them in simple terms. That's education.

They need someone to show them how and where to use it. That's consulting.

And finally, they need someone to help them implement it into their business. So, you don't

09:36

have to do all three. You can literally just start wherever suits you best depending on your background.

And I'll explain the process for doing this in the last section of this video. But to get started, you could literally just take what you learn in my videos about AI agents, for example.

I did a massive video on that. you could turn that video and the information in it into a

09:52

presentation and start helping businesses to understand AI agents in the future of work uh within the next few days. The bar to get into AI isn't necessarily having all of the answers right away.

It's really just about being one step ahead of the businesses who don't have the time to figure this stuff

10:07

out themselves. Excuse number two is I can't code.

Now, this is the second most common excuse I hear of, I can't get into AI. I don't know how to code.

And I I totally get where this comes from, especially when I talk about AI automation and and building AI systems

10:22

and that stuff really immediately terrifies people and for good reason. But let me share something about what I've learned really firsthand at my agency, Morningside AI.

Before businesses even think of signing off on a $50,000 AI development project, they first need two things solved. They need

10:39

someone to help them understand what AI actually is. and they need someone to show them where AI can drive the biggest ROI within their business.

And so this is great news for you non-coders and people who don't want to be technical. You can always learn, but some people just really don't want to do that.

And I

10:54

get that and understand it. But it's great news for you because there's huge amounts of money to be made in this education and consulting space in the AI services market.

Now, if you don't believe me, don't take my word for it. Just look at what all of the biggest consultings in the world are doing.

You've got McKenzie, which has just

11:10

combined 1,000 AI experts into their new quantum black AI division. Accenture is dropping $3 billion on new staff in order to expand the AI consulting division.

And BCG expects AI consulting to make up almost half of what they do

11:26

by 2026. But while these consulting giants are fighting over these Fortune 500 companies, the businesses that Ori mentioned in the clip I played, the ones that make up 62% of US jobs are being completely ignored.

and they are desperate for guides to help them make this transition into the AI age just as

11:43

much as the big companies. Now, I would be talking out of my ass if I didn't have some good examples of non-coders who had actually transitioned out of their previous career into the AI space.

So, let me introduce you to three very different people who found their lane in the AI space without having a technical background. Firstly, there is Nick.

And

11:59

so, a year ago, he was a successful strategy consultant, but was completely new to AI and had never written a line of code in his life. But like many consultants, he was great at spotting opportunities and explaining complex ideas.

He joined my AAA accelerator program and built up his AI knowledge and started sharing his AI insights on

12:15

LinkedIn, building his personal brand while learning about the space as a whole. Within a few months, he had his own AI automation agency up and running.

Today, he's leading our consulting division at Morningside AI, where we've just completed an 8-week AI audit for a $200 million per year steel company. And

12:31

so Nick's gone from complete AI beginner to closing huge AI consulting deals in just over a year. Then there's Henrik.

And so when he joined my community nearly 2 years ago, he knew nothing about AI or coding, but he was willing to learn. I had to have to give it to him.

He was willing to learn and stick

12:46

it out. And he started with simple no code tools uh for AI automations and he kept pushing himself just a little bit at a time.

And now he's one of the most experienced voice AI developers globally and he's building voice agents for major businesses. And better yet, he's just hit his goal of $15,000 in a single

13:01

month and he's just had a baby. So, massive congrats, Henrik.

It's been awesome to see your growth, man. And finally, there's Isaiah.

And he was one of my earliest community members. And he already had strong relationships in the coaching industry.

And so, instead of trying to learn all the technical stuff himself, he got smart, and he focused on

13:17

what he was actually really good at doing already, which is understanding the market, understanding who he was trying to sell to and selling these solutions to them. And so he found a technical partner to handle the building of the solutions that he sells while he focused on sales.

And now he's doing $25,000 months helping coaches to

13:34

implement AI appointment setting systems into their business without writing a single line of code himself. So three completely different backgrounds, three completely different approaches, but one common thread.

They all found their perfect entry into the AI services space. See, this is the beauty of this

13:49

AI services space is that you can start wherever you're comfortable. Whether it's with education and teaching businesses to understand AI, it's consulting and helping find the best opportunities or yes even development if you're coming with a technical background or you're just really interested and want to learn that side of the business yourself as I've done

14:05

and I really really enjoy getting my hands dirty and building automations myself. But thankfully I do have a team to do it now at scale.

Excuse number three is I've never run a business before. So I'm not going to sugarcoat this.

Starting your first business is always going to be hard. I'm not going to do that to you.

But there is a way to

14:22

essentially game the system. And it all comes down to boats.

Not fishing boats, not sailing boats, but rather a boat or the business vehicle that you choose to get into. This analogy of boats and business vehicles comes directly from the world's greatest investor, Warren

14:38

Buffett. And no one can explain the story better than good old Alexi.

Warren Buffett. Uncle Warren.

He and one of his closest friends graduated Columbia Business School at the same time, same year. and he said that guy was smarter and harder working than him.

They then went their separate ways. Warren ended up getting into investing and his friend

14:54

goes into the steel business. Mind you, this is a guy who was smarter and harder working than him.

He said he did okay. He did pretty well, but not close to what Warren did.

And he said his biggest lesson from that was it's not about how hard you row, it's about what boat you're at. Warren got more out for what he put in than his buddy in the steel

15:10

business because the steel business had a lot of headwinds. And so he had to row harder against the wind than Warren did while riding one of the best growth curves of the US economy overall.

So it's your choice of boat, the industry and the business model that you choose that is the biggest factor in your

15:27

success as an entrepreneur. Let's say you were to start a business right now in the newspaper industry.

You're going to be facing some pretty damn brutal headwinds, right? It's a declining industry.

It's nearly impossible to succeed in that industry, especially if you're coming in as a beginner. But for AI services, not only are you catching

15:43

what Bay & Company reports is going to be an $8 trillion wave of investment in AI and automation over the next decade, which I mean we're already starting to see now in the US, you're also catching this wave right at the beginning where basically all of the money is going to be made. And personally, I learned this

15:59

lesson about picking the right boat the hard way. As uh my first online business was in 2019, I started drop shipping as basically everyone did back then.

and I was pretty late to the party and I really realized quickly that I was fighting over the crumbs left by the other guys. Long story short, it took me 14 months of failure before I made my

16:16

first dollar of profit. Um, I then went on to thankfully make good money in the e-commerce and digital marketing space.

And then in 2023, I decided to switch my efforts into AI and applied the exact same amount of effort and my career has just exploded since. So basically, picking the right boat at the right time

16:32

is a multiplier on the time and effort that you put into it. So starting your first business in this rapidly growing space for AI services and the AI industry as a whole and going with the wind basically allows you to get bigger results faster than normal.

Again, I'm not saying this is going to be dead easy

16:48

or walk in the park, but you will get better results at a faster rate when compared to stagnant and even declining industries. And what's great about the AI services space is that you can start incredibly small.

You can help one business to understand AI tools. You can do it for free at first.

Then you can

17:04

start charging for your time when you do this kind of service. Then you can gradually grow into bigger and bigger projects as your confidence builds.

Then transition into a proper AI automation agency model. And that's basically what I did.

I started here on YouTube making videos because I was interested in the

17:19

space, making like coding tutorials, showing you how I was building these different systems. And then when people started asking for it, I started to offer paid consulting calls and monetized my AI skill set that way first.

Then I started my AI automation agency. Then I built an education business.

And then I built an entire AI

17:35

SAS as well. As you can see, baby steps lead to like rapidly lead to really big outcomes in a growing industry like AI, even if you're new to business.

I'm I've had a few years in the game, thankfully. But this is not to say that you can't achieve similar things, at least on a longer time.

So baby steps can really

17:50

lead to some pretty big outcomes rapidly if you're in a growing industry like AI, even if you're new to business. Excuse number four is that I don't have time.

So 1 hour per day that is it that is all you need to start building your AI knowledge and your skills. That's really the core of getting this thing off the

18:06

ground and any kind of AI services. Now of course if you do more than an hour a day you will get where you want to go faster.

But if you have time constraints this is really all you need. I've got a complete free course on my school community that's 100% free.

Walks you through everything you need to know about AI business from theory to

18:23

building AI automations and agents. So, if you've got a job and or a busy home life, then just chipping away at valuep packed content like this over a month or two or even three will really do wonders.

And before you know it, you're going to know more than the majority of businesses do when it comes to AI. And

18:39

you can start to make money by profiting from that knowledge gap between where you are and where they businesses. And the beauty of this is that you can do it around your current job and lifestyle until you're ready to take it to the next level and go all in.

Excuse number five is I'm too late. I've missed the boat already.

Now, this is the final

18:54

excuse I hear from people after I've taken them through all the stuff I've just done with you. They get to this and they say they point to me and they point to the kind of first generation of these AI service providers and AI automation agency owners who've been we've been really working on this stuff for the past 2 years and they use that as the evidence that they've missed the boat

19:11

and we've just kind of soaked up all the all the market share and that all the easy gains are going to be gone. Um, and you may see the kind of views that I get on my videos and think that the whole globe is all over this opportunity by now.

But in reality, 99, maybe even 99.9% of the people who watch my videos

19:27

don't actually take action. And of those who do, only a fraction of those people actually commit to the process and the grind and the ups and the downs actually needed to see success and build a long-term sustainable agency.

But right now, if you looked at the demand for AI services versus the supply, there would

19:43

be a staggering shortage on the supply side. According to the NICS 2024 data, there are 1.7 million companies in the United States alone with annual revenues between 500,000 and 10 million.

MyA accelerator program has trained 2,000 active agencies, 60% of which are USA

20:00

based. Active meaning that they are basically consistently closing deals and capable of providing quality services.

And when you factor in the older and traditional development agencies that have since seen the AI opportunity and pivoted in into these AI services, we're looking at 1500 or so active AI agencies

20:17

in the USA. That means that for every active AI automation agency in the US, there are 1,133 small businesses needing help with their AI transition.

And that's only for businesses that are doing less than 10 million per year. So to put things in perspective, according to Satista, there

20:32

are approximately 54,220 digital advertising agencies in the United States in 2023. That means that there are 31 small businesses per digital agency in the United States.

So 1,133 to1 in the AI agency space and

20:48

then 31 to1 in the digital marketing space. So when people say SMMA is saturated, like it really really is when you look at these kind of numbers.

And the digital marketing space only really kicked off in the early 2000s when Google released their search ads platform AdSense. So it has taken basically 25 years for it to reach this

21:04

level of saturation. I only created the AI automation agency model and started talking about it in May of 2023.

So even if the space takes off and everyone starts listening to the billionaire's advice, it's at least another five or more years on the conservative side before things become anywhere near as competitive as digital marketing as this

21:22

ratio of agencies to businesses starts to come down. If you start now, by the time we get to that point, you'll have been able to build your skills, build your team, and really become the master of your niche, while the newbies struggle to get in at this later point.

In the final section of this video, I'll break down the process of starting your own AI services business step by step.

21:39

So, in short, we're still so early to this, and AI will continue to change and advance rapidly, meaning that businesses will become more and more dependent on us to help them navigate this long period of transition when there's new technologies coming out here and there. So, what I'm trying to say is there's a long way to go.

By this point, it should

21:55

be pretty clear. The only thing stopping you from transitioning into the AI space is you, right?

The reason we're seeing success stories from such diverse backgrounds is simple. And it goes back to what Warren Buffett said.

It's not about how hard you row. It's about the

22:11

boat you're in. Before I show you exactly how to start one of these businesses and give you all of the resources and help you're going to need along the way, let me prove once and for all why this is by far the best boat on the market right now.

And I'm going to do so with a little help from the

22:26

greatest teacher of all, history. To truly understand why the billionaires are begging you to start AI automation agencies, let me take you back to 1995.

The internet had just become commercially available and most people thought it was a fad. Business

22:42

owners were confused. They were skeptical and many thought that having a website was going to be pointless.

Sound familiar? But just like today with AI, businesses knew something big was coming.

But they had no idea how to take advantage of it. And this created an incredible opportunity for smart

22:59

entrepreneurs to bridge this gap and make ridiculous amounts of money while doing so. Take agency.com for example.

They started pretty simple. They started helping businesses to establish their first web presence, doing basic website design and development and digital

23:16

consulting to basically explain what was possible with the web for a business. As businesses began to understand the web, they expanded into strategic consulting, e-commerce implementation, digital marketing services, etc.

And this company was founded in 1995 in New York

23:32

City. And by 1999, just four years later, they were worth $2 billion and were working with giants like British Airways, Nike, and Sprint.

Or look at Razerfish. They started with just $3,000 in startup capital as basically a small digital design and web development shop,

23:48

but they quickly evolved into something much, much bigger. They helped these traditional businesses to transform for the digital age through things like digital strategy consulting, custom software development, and e-commerce platforms.

At the time, Razer Fish's business grew rapidly from $300,000 in

24:05

revenue in 1995 to $268 million in revenue by 2000, just 5 years later, with over 2,300 employees across nine countries. Now, here's what most people miss about these stories.

It wasn't just that they were early to the web and that's how they made all this money.

24:21

It's that they position themselves as guides helping these confused businesses to navigate this new technology. In 1995, it was what is a website and do I need one?

And 2025, it's what is AI and how can it help my business? But here's

24:37

what makes this opportunity even more incredible. Unlike the '90s when the internet boom was only really accessible to a tiny group of computer enthusiasts who knew how to code at the time, this time around, we have the world's information at our fingertips via

24:52

Google, YouTube, and Chat GBT. We have thriving online communities of people who are building cool stuff with AI and collaborating with each other.

And there are incredible lowcost tools that allow basically anyone to build AI systems and automations without coding. And I mean, if those aren't enough, generative AI

25:09

technology itself is based on something that we all know how to do or can easily learn, which is just writing clear instructions. I mean, that's all AI prompting really is.

It's built on written language. So my question to you is this.

25:24

If not now, then when? If you're not satisfied with your current situation, if you believe deep down that you deserve more from life, what other signs are you waiting for?

I mean, we have billionaires literally saying, "If I was starting over again, this is exactly what I'd be doing." We have mountains of

25:41

data showing that businesses and governments are about to pour trillions and trillions into the AI transition. We've just got a new presidency in America with a very, very pro- AAI administration.

So, we have another four-year runway that's going to be all about AI and and all sort of positive

25:56

wins about our back. We have an industry that is so diverse that whether you want to sell many courses to small businesses and make 20K a month or build seven figure AI automation systems for enterprises.

There's a place for you and there's a place for everyone. And we have proof.

We have thousands of people

26:11

from all walks of life who have made this jump into the AI space and succeeded. I've got them all in my communities.

I've got them here on the channel. Hell, I've even documented my entire journey on this channel from day one from complete beginner to where we are now in order to show you how to do it or at least how it worked for me.

And

26:26

I get passionate about this because AI truly has blessed me beyond my wildest dreams. And that sounds kind of cringe to say, but it seriously allowed me to make more money than I ever ever imagined possible to build an incredible company alongside my best friends to find a way to truly feel like I'm

26:41

impacting the world. And that's why I feel kind of this burning responsibility to grab you by the shoulders and scream like this is it man.

This this is the opportunity that you've been waiting for. If you've ever been praying or whatever religion you believe in asking for something to come and and come your way like this is it.

This is it. I have

26:58

all of my friends who run successful businesses. They talk to me and they say, "Man, I'm so like I just wish I had this kind of I wish that was the vehicle or that was the opportunity that I got into.

It's just I can't shift now, but I wish I wish if in another life I would have done the exact same thing as you. And so if these really successful

27:14

businessmen who are running different businesses looking in at me and other people who do this stuff like me and they are like, "Wow, I wish I had that chance." Then I'm telling you, if you want to get into business, then just just there's something here for you. And this is like why I make these videos just to make a bit of awareness so that

27:30

you have some kind of stimulus to take action on it. Because I promise you, there's something in here for everyone.

And I found mine, I see so many other people do it, too. I just really want to create awareness around this whole thing.

And so, if you are ready to take the first step towards the life that you've always dreamed of, let me show

27:46

you exactly how to get started in this today. Now, for the bit you've all been waiting for.

I've explained the opportunity at hand. I've explained why these billionaires won't shut up about it.

And I've demolished all of your self-doubt and excuses that will stop you and prevent you from taking the

28:02

dive. I've outlined the crystal clear historical pattern that this model is based on and really tried to cut through this AI hype rubbish that we get to like some historical patterns and precedents that we can base it off and be like, "Okay, we can expect something similar here.

I'm trying to make this not some AI fluffy hype stuff, but really really

28:19

databacked for you cuz I know there's a lot of people who need to see that." And most importantly, I've just challenged you to take action because if not now, then when? If you're still here watching this video, then you understand that while this isn't going to be easy, like I said, it's about as easy as it'll ever get, and you're obviously going to be

28:35

ready to put the work in. So, let's get into it.

Now, while everyone's journey into AI is of course different, through my own experience of starting my own AI businesses and helping thousands to do the same through my free and paid communities, I've got enough data on what works and what doesn't. And it's

28:51

basically revealed a sequence of non-negotiable steps in order to be successful in the space. And to give you a clear step-by-step approach to executing on these non-negotiable steps, I've created my most comprehensive free guide on starting an AI business to date, which breaks down this process and

29:07

provides access to all of the my best resources, including those from my paid AAA accelerator program as well. This complete guide is going to be available for free via the first link in the description.

But for the rest of this video, I want to give you a detailed breakdown of each of these non-negotiable steps so that you're ready to take action on that document

29:23

below. So step number one in starting your AI business is finding your unfair advantage.

Business is all about finding your unique edge and playing that advantage fully. After watching thousands of people start their AI journey through my communities, I can tell you that without a doubt, this step

29:40

is what makes or breaks the majority of people's success. It's basically picking the right niche and starting point for their business where they have a natural upper hand.

So, as part of the complete guide in the description, I'm going to be giving you free access to the exact resource that I use for all of my AAA

29:55

accelerator members within my program, which is basically a comprehensive self- audit that uncovers your past experiences, your interests, your connections, your relationships. And from this self- audit, you're able to find a starting point where you have a unique advantage.

I've seen people from every background imaginable succeed.

30:11

from ex-conultants to even miners, but only when they lean into their unique advantages instead of trying to copy someone else's path. Step two is to build your knowledge gap.

Your knowledge gap is your money maker in the AI space or in any space really for that matter. It's

30:28

pretty simple really. Your clients are going to pay you in proportion to how much more you know about AI and its business applications than they do.

So, it's a knowledge gap. They are here.

You are here. The beautiful thing about 2025 is that the knowledge to acquire your

30:43

own knowledge gap is everywhere. You can build this gap through free resources like here on my YouTube channel and my free course on my school community.

Or you can accelerate your learning through paid programs that offer more concentrated and structured information if you have the funds to do so. But in the complete guide below, I've provided you with a list of my best free

30:59

resources in order to rapidly build your own knowledge gap. Step three is finding your first free clients.

So, it's crucial to ease into selling AI services. You can't eat an elephant in one bite, I think, is how they'd probably say it.

But, we aren't

31:14

in a rush here, right? If you start now and take your time focusing on just building your skills and truly satisfying your clients, you'll find your feet and build a solid base to scale from there.

I mean, I see it way too often and people try to jump into this business model and try to deliver

31:30

some $10,000 deal and they just completely butcher it. Maybe often times it's with a a a good friend or a connection that they have and they just butcher the project, which is completely normal.

I mean, your first project is always going to be the hardest, but this experience gives them a bad taste in their mouth and they end up giving up on

31:46

their business model entirely based off this first experience because they bit off more than they could chew. So, I always recommend starting with free clients initially so you can start just restacking small wins and gradually building momentum, building your confidence.

So, by far the best way to get your first free clients and start to

32:03

build this confidence and momentum is by tapping into your warm connection. So, that's your friends, your colleagues, your acquaintances, family, etc.

People that you have some kind of relationship or connection with. In the complete guide I've linked in the description, I've included the exact process again used by my accelerated members to

32:18

systematically reach out to warm connections and the spreadsheets we use to track follow-ups and replies and also to sign deals. Step four is scaling with content or ads.

A key step that many AAA owners stumble at is transitioning from their first few warm connectionsbased projects

32:36

to actually consistently generating leads from other sources. And this is where your business either takes off or it hits a plateau.

So you need a systematic way to attract new clients whether through content marketing like YouTube videos like this or through paid advertising. I mean both approaches

32:51

work. It's about choosing one that aligns with your strengths and your resources.

At Morningside AI, my AI automation agency, we've never had an issue with leads because this channel here gets over a million views per month and brings in many, many times more leads than we can handle. Like, even if

33:06

we tried, which is a massive part of our success as an agency. And so, in the complete guide in the description below, I will provide the step-by-step blueprints for creating your own lead generation machine using the exact content creation strategy that has worked for me and my most successful

33:21

students. Step five is building a team.

So finally, the real key to scale is building an incredible team around you so that you can spend time building the business rather than working on it every day. I could not have achieved a fraction of what I have over the past 2 years without my incredible teams across

33:37

all of my different businesses. There are a few key highs that you make at certain stages of growth in your AI automation agency journey.

From your first virtual assistant to take things off your plate to project managers and key developer roles as well. In the complete guide below, I've broken down in detail exactly when to make these

33:52

hires and provided instructions on how to find and how to hire the best people for these roles. This is basically what transforms your business from a high-paying job into a truly scalable enterprise.

So, that's it. Five steps between you and building your boat

34:09

that's perfectly positioned to ride the waves of this coming decade so that basically at the end of the day, you can get more of what you want out of life. As I said, I have been blessed beyond my wildest dreams by what the AI space has given me and entrepreneurship as a whole.

Not only monetarily, but also the feeling of being at the forefront of the

34:26

most important industry in the world right now and playing a role in how this technology is adopted. Making sure that people like you and I can get in and get a slice of the action and all the money doesn't just go to the big guys.

Making sure that small businesses have access to the AI services that they need in

34:41

order to survive against the big guys and making incredible friends and memories along the way. as corny as it sounds.

So whether you just want to get into the AI space for the money or you want the purpose, the fulfillment, and the excitement that comes along with it, the AI space has something for everyone. There's not enough AI service providers

34:57

to help us make this transition. The world needs you to step up to the plate, and there'll never be a better time to start than now.

I am so excited for you and the journey that you're about to go on. In order to access the complete free guide I've mentioned before and start your AI business and journey today, you

35:13

can click the first link in the description below. And I look forward to seeing you in my community soon.

There are tons of AI opportunities popping up these days and I've pretty much tried all of them personally over the past 2 years. So in this section I'm

35:29

going to be breaking down the top five AI businesses that complete beginners are using right now to launch their careers in the AI space and start making money. So, as I said, over the past 2 years, I've personally run or am still running all five of the business types we're going to cover in this section.

So, I'm going to be giving you the no [ __ ] real world experience and

35:45

insights into the pros and cons of each of them and really how much money you can expect to make from them. And then at the end of the section, I'm going to be recapping things and explain which business is best for you to start.

So, let's dive in. First up, we have AI influencing.

So, here's the deal. People are hungry for simple and easy to

36:02

understand info on AI right now. your job as an AI influencer is to take all of the complicated stuff about AI, like what new tools out there right now and how businesses can use them to benefit from them, and then explain it in a way that anyone can understand.

You can kind of think of it as being a translator for

36:17

AI, but you're on YouTube or social media. And you definitely don't need to be a genius.

You just need to understand a little bit more than the average person or average viewer. And so, you can share your insights through videos like this on YouTube.

You can write posts on Twitter or Medium. And if people like what you're sharing, then

36:32

you can make money from ads, from partnerships, or from promoting other people's products as well. So, I started out my journey as an AI influencer, as a complete newbie to generative AI in January of 2023.

You can even go back and watch all my old videos and see how little I knew about it and how stupid I

36:48

was now that I watch them. It's kind of painful to watch them.

But within 7 months of posting consistently, my YouTube channel hit 100,000 subscribers, which was a shock even to me. But what I learned from my growth is that it's in these new and such hype spaces that's so much easier to grow a large following if your content is actually good.

And yep,

37:04

the AI influencer model does make a bit of money too. You've got ad revenue firstly, which is money from ads that are run on your YouTube video or on your content.

Um, you've also got affiliate marketing, which is when you get paid for sending signups to things like other AI tools that you recommend. And then you've got video sponsorships where

37:19

brands pay you to mention their products. And so you can start making anywhere from $2 to $5,000 per month, even with a small audience.

But you are going to have to work consistently and create highquality content for about 3 to 6 months before you start seeing any meaningful revenue from the business. The pros for this model are that you've

37:35

got super low startup costs, just you and a camera. You've got quick growth if you pick the right topics like I did in the first 7 months, and you only really need a phone and a laptop to get started.

The cons are that it doesn't make the big bucks compared to the other models we're going to touch on later. Plus, getting on the camera can be a

37:50

pain in the ass if it's really not your thing. Um, influencing via YouTube and long form videos like this is by far the best.

So, if you're not willing to be on camera, then you might have to do say writing on Medium or Twitter, and it's not going to get as good results as long form YouTube like this, right? So, next, let's talk AI consulting.

So, this is

38:06

where businesses pay you for advice. They want to know how AI can make their businesses better or what to avoid so that they can survive this AI transition.

Basically, they're going to be paying you to tell them what to do or help them understand the new tools that are coming out and stay up to date. When I was doing this, it felt like I was

38:22

doing AI therapy for some of these businesses who are really stressed out or they see big opportunities and they want to talk to me as kind of an AI therapist to get an expert opinion on things and soo their nerves. To become an AI consultant, you don't need a degree or some fancy qualifications.

You just need to know again a little bit more than the businesses that you're

38:38

helping do and be able to explain it clearly to them. For example, within the first four months of starting my YouTube channel, I was pulling in $4,000 a month.

I think $4,200 in April of 2023 from my consulting calls alone. So, I was charging $300 per call.

And I eventually jacked that up to $997 for a

38:55

45minute session. And yes, people were buying even at that price as well.

So, consulting can be a very natural step from AI influencing as it's a more effective way to monetize your personal brand without having to create your own products or build your own complicated services as well. So, the pros of this model are that it's easy to start.

You

39:12

can scale this quickly by raising your rates as you get more clients. So, I just continually increase my prices as I got more demand.

And it's a great way to build confidence and build real world experience of working with clients and and helping businesses, which is really where the money is in the space right now. The cons for the AI consulting model are that you're still really

39:28

trading your time for money. And while that can be fine at first, it's not a long-term path to wealth.

And you're only going to get paid for your time that you're actually working. And also, I found that consulting wasn't the most exhilarating work.

If I had my whole day booked out with consulting calls, it wasn't like exhilarating. I didn't feel

39:43

excited and jumping out of bed to go and hop on these calls. So, that's another thing to factor in as well.

So, now we're getting into the serious stuff, the AI automation agency or what is known for short as the AAA model. This is where you get businesses to pay you to set up AI tools for them.

And you can kind of think of it like a a website

39:59

design company, but instead of building websites for companies, you are helping businesses to use AI to save time or to make more money. And the best part about this is that while a development background is a nice to have, you don't have to know how to code to get started.

And this is what myself and my team at Morningside figured out in 2023, about

40:15

midway through the year, that we could sell AI solutions using no code and low code tools. And our clients didn't care that it wasn't customcoded.

And since then, we've really mapped out dozens of low code and no code AI tools that allow you to basically drag and drop to create AI solutions for your clients. This means that there's no technical skills

40:31

needed to get started. For example, one of my students, Isaiah, still doesn't know how to code, and he scaled his own AI automation agency to $25,000 per month, selling AI appointment setters to coaches and consultants.

So, I've actually got an interview with him on this channel here. So, I'll put that in the description if you want to check that out.

Personally, I started my AI

40:47

automation agency, Morningside AI, in March of 2023. And with my business partner, we scaled it to over $100,000 per month.

And we got there by landing huge projects. I'm talking our biggest Morningside project being over $15,000 for the initial phase.

And so

41:03

I've done a full breakdown of this project on my channel. So again, I'll put it in the description if you want to check that after.

But while reaching this $100,000 per month uh point wasn't easy, we had a lot of late nights and painful mistakes which I try to help you guys through on this channel. Our success proved that with the right

41:18

marketing and the right team, there's a ton of money to be made with the AAA model. So for the pros of the AAA model, we have low startup costs because you don't need to have a fancy product built first.

You can just start with a few subscriptions to low code and no code tools. Secondly, there's huge demand.

Businesses are desperate for AI systems

41:33

and tools that can help them adapt and be more efficient and make more money. And the AAA model is very scalable, meaning that you can start small and grow fast once you pick up traction.

Now for the cons, I would say that the learning curve of the AI automation agency model is steeper than the AI influencer or AI consultant route. Meaning that it is going to take you

41:49

relatively more time to get the hang of it. But once you do, you're in a great position to make serious money and scale it much more than you'll be able to do with say just AI influencing or an AI consulting business.

So once you've got some experience, you can actually make money by teaching other people about AI. And there's huge demand for this right now.

And this is what we'll call the AI

42:06

education business model. It means creating online courses or ebooks or webinar which are like online classes for people.

For example, you could teach realtors, real estate agents how to use AI to find more clients. Or you could even show show parents how to help their kids use AI for school so they can get

42:22

good grades. You know, there's so much out there you can do right now.

But the catch is you've actually got to know what you're talking about and have discovered something interesting that you can make an education product around. It's not something you can easily fake and you definitely can't fake it over the long term.

So, the best way to actually learn something that you can make an educational product around is by running an AI automation agency

42:39

because by working on real projects with clients, it gives you some real hands-on knowledge that you can then package into a course or a product. So, the pros for the AI education business model are that it can scale like crazy, meaning that you can sell your courses and your books to lots of people without having to do more work each time you sell a new copy.

42:56

And so, you get high profit margins in these businesses because once a course is made, it doesn't cost much to sell it to more customers. And from my experience of running an education business, it feels really good to help people.

And I've built some awesome relationships through the people that have helped in my education business. I even went to the wedding of one of my

43:11

students last month in Italy. I'll put a photo up here of me and Isaiah.

Now, for the cons, of course, it actually takes time to become an expert. You've got to go out and learn something new and actually get results before you can start to teach it.

You can try to do it without doing that, but realistically, you're not going to last that long in the AI education space. And finally, the

43:27

big one, AI SAS, which stands for software as a service. This is where you create a software tool which solves a specific problem typically for businesses using AI.

And instead of doing the work for yourself for a business, you basically build a platform that businesses pay to use. So you can think of it like Netflix, but instead of

43:43

movies, you're selling access to an AI tool that you've built that businesses want to use to make more money or save time, etc. So, in October of 2023, I saw an opportunity to build an AI SAS that would help AI automation agency owners like myself and like many people in my community to put the Open AI GPTs onto

43:59

platforms like WhatsApp, onto websites, Instagram, and more. The videos that I did on these topics got hundreds of thousands of views so that I knew that there was a lot of interest in a solution like this.

And so, now a year later, I've put over $300,000 into this business. We've got over 25,000 users on

44:16

it and we're just starting to make money from it because we're rolling out monetization as we speak. But it took a lot of time and a lot of cash to get here is my point.

So the pros of the AI SAS model are that firstly you get in most cases recurring revenue, meaning you get paid every month from each customer. Secondly, it's very scalable

44:31

if you do it right. Once the software is actually built, you can sell it to lots of people with very little cost of of replication, which is similar to the education product we mentioned.

And of course, if you do it right, you can sell the whole business for a big payout, which is called exiting your company. And for the cons, as I mentioned, it is

44:47

very expensive to set one of these thing up relative to the other business models I've mentioned. You're probably going to need to spend a lot of money before you even start to see a profit from it because you have to build the whole software first and then eventually people come to it and you have to modify it to their needs, basically.

And you have to keep improving it until you get to a point where people are happy to pay

45:02

you money for it. And also because AI and the AI market is changing so fast, your software could become outdated overnight.

So you put in all this effort into building this entire software and then overnight OpenAI releases something or anthropic etc. and your whole SAS is just done and useless.

So big risk of

45:18

that because you're investing a lot of time and energy into doing one thing. So after having those five business models thrown in your face, I bet you're wondering where should I start?

So let me make this very simple. The AI automation agency model is by far the best choice if you want real momentum and to have lots of options later on in

45:35

your AI journey. And so here's why.

Firstly, AI automation agency owners learn the most valuable skills in the AI space. So, with influencing and consulting, they can be good to get you started, but they don't actually teach you the skills that matter the most.

And so, with the AAA, you end up learning how to set up AI tools for businesses.

45:51

You can automate their tasks. You can build systems that actually save time and money.

And these skills are what businesses are willing to pay top dollar for. My success at Morningside and the other guys in the community are a testament to that.

And these businesses will keep coming back for more as the technology continues to improve. and

46:06

they need to keep up. The AI automation skill set that you pick up from being a AAA owner is what will make your future basically bulletproof.

Regardless of what happens to your business, what happens to the economy, there's going to be demand for these AI automation experts who know how to implement AI into businesses to create value for

46:22

them. Secondly, you're going to make more money.

So, while consulting might earn you just a few thousand a month, and influencing can bring in some ad revenue and some sponsorships, they're both still very limited. And with an AI automation agency, you're going to be landing bigger contracts, thousands or tens of thousands or like I have

46:38

hundreds of thousands of dollars per project. And that's exactly how my agency, Morningside AI, hit over $100,000 per month for the first time by stacking projects and building long-term relationships with our clients.

So basically, the earning potential of the AAA model is way higher than the others while also still being accessible to

46:53

beginners to start. And thirdly, the AAA model is the gateway to bigger opportunities in the AI space.

So if you want to create a course or even build a software, then running a AAA successfully gives you the real world experience and results which you can then turn into courses that people will pay for. It's also incredibly useful for

47:08

helping you spot software opportunities like I did when I built my AI SAS. So the AAA model is the only path that naturally opens these doors for you to AI education and to AI SAS as well.

And finally, we are still so early to this. The truth is that most businesses still don't get what AI can do for them.

They

47:25

think it's just some tech buzzword that they might have to pay attention to in a couple of years. But that's where you come in.

Right now, there's a huge chance to become the go-to expert in AI automation in your niche before everyone catches on. It's basically like being one of the first digital marketers back when uh websites were still new.

The

47:42

people who got in then, they made a fortune and the people who came later to things like SMA, they got the crumbs left under the table. So, if you want to start strong and learn the most valuable skills in the AI space and have the most options for the future, the AAA model is by far the best way to go.

And from my

47:58

experience and what I see in my communities as well. Okay.

So, in this video, I'm going to be breaking down the simplest AI offer that you can make to businesses in order to get in the game, get a foot in

48:14

the door, start getting a bit of experience, getting on client calls, start actually delivering something and getting into the game of selling things to businesses. Um, that doesn't require you to have a huge development team or extensive development experience or even experience getting on calls or or

48:29

knowing how to generate leads. This really is the smallest little baby step offer that you can make in order to just start making some progress towards your end goal of being a successful AI automation agency owner or AI entrepreneur.

So, this video is really intended for beginners who are trying to get into the game, but I just feel like

48:44

they have no clue what they should offer. They don't really know how to do market research.

They're having trouble generating leads or knowing what they should niche down to. So, if you are one of these people completely new to the game, this is going to solve a lot of your problems and answer some key questions for you.

So first thing you need to understand about this let's put

49:00

it up here simple sim list best list AI offer. So you need first thing you need to understand is the concept of a knowledge gap which is how we make money in the AI space generally or in any

49:17

industry whatsoever really if it's a service based industry particularly. So if you take say S MMA and digital marketing SMAS social media marketing agencies make money because the owners and the team at the SMMA has a knowledge gap that between themselves and the businesses basically they know more

49:34

about digital marketing and how to get results with it than the business owners do. So the business owners pay them to get that they pay them the difference of that knowledge gap basically.

So let's start off with key concept of knowledge gap. This is going to make sense sense for a

49:50

second and I will be giving you this shortly. I'm not going to drag it out forever.

Um, knowledge gap. So basically um, so here's the continuum of all knowledge.

Um, so here's using May

50:05

example. Here's the business owner.

All right, let's start this. This is zero.

So this is zero. This is maybe 10.

This is maybe a a 65 and this is a 100. So on this knowledge scale say these people are just the this is the best person in

50:20

the world. This is the best agency or the best team the absolute best knowledge and you could say SMA or in this case it's going to be AI as to the expertise available.

So they are really really worth a lot and they they are just own the market running everything

50:35

because they know so much but they're obviously going to be very expensive because they have so much context and understanding. Now if the business owner is here say how do I draw a uh draw a business what's the fire going out so

50:51

this is a business and this is say an agency aa agency this 65 represents the knowledge that maybe the average one has or or a a one that's sort of doing well initially

51:07

but it's yet to sort of scale into later ends of of running an agency successfully. But basically, businesses will come to this agency and they'll be like, "Hey, I need help with this AI thing.

I don't know anything really about the technology. I don't know uh what what use cases are best for my business and I'm really just stuck and

51:23

and I want some help and I'm also going to need your expertise to help me implement this without dozens and dozens of issues by trying to do it myself." So this is how this gap here is where this agency is going to make their money because they have a

51:38

knowledge gap between where what the business knows about AI and what they know about AI and also their capabilities when it comes to the DF team and stuff. Now most of you starting off when you are getting into AI say let's just say the average business owner average is about a 10 on this.

51:54

Most people are trying to jump all the way to this point here and be a a fullyfledged agency and and just sell every the whole nine yards when in reality um or or they think they need to be there immediately until they don't get started with the business or they think, "Oh, it's not for me." In

52:09

reality, you can be at maybe 25 here and have you with your little agency or just just yourself, but you know more than that business and you can still make money in this gap. The question is how and what

52:26

is the offer and that's what I'm going to reveal to you in a second. So, this is very key concept to anything.

This is why you should always be trying to expand either your knowledge and this gap does represent your team as well. So I I talk a lot about it in my uh in my program, but this knowledge gap can be expanded through your team.

It's it's

52:42

kind of the combined of either your brain and then also all of the team that you have with it. So when you make a new hire, suddenly you can jump from 25 to 35 because you brought on a really good AI developer who significantly moves or increases the knowledge gap.

And this can also account factor in things like experience and things you've done before

52:59

that allows you to be more valuable to them because you've done done the same thing before and you're going to get less issues when you do it. So step one, understanding that knowledge gap.

I do have a pretty miserable uh eraser here. Sorry.

So if you give me a second and so you

53:15

understand what knowledge gap is. Tick tick.

Now the question is when you have such a small knowledge gap or even non-existent, maybe you just found my video or found the space as a whole. You're like, "Wow, I want to get into this, but I'm at I I'm like either behind where the average business owner is or I'm about where this where they

53:31

are at the moment. I kind of have a a basic knowledge of it as well.

So, what you need to be looking at is how you can increase that knowledge gap and then make an offer that allows you to sell back down that and profit from that gap. All right.

So, I'm going to introduce you to this concept of um AI

53:49

tools [Music] consulting. Now, what is this?

This is basically the most basic and simple thing that I could possibly come up with for getting into the space where you are essentially a consultant that helps business owners to identify the best AI

54:06

tools to use in your existing processes and and for their for their team currently. Now, the reason this is so great is because it skips the entire step of having to do implementation and own a development team because it's kind of like you're just uh you're selling

54:21

other people's stuff which as a general rule of thumb when you're starting businesses or getting started with running a business or you want to make money online the easiest way to do it and this is something I I wish I could sort of

54:37

learned early in my journey is that it's easy to sell other people's stuff um where they've already got a clearly defined marketing process or they've got a really great product that they spend a lot of money on or the service is really good and there's a killer offer that comes with it. It's easy to sell other people's stuff where they haven't done

54:52

all the hard work on the product or the service than to try and do it all yourself. So when I first started my very first online business through e-commerce and drop shipping, sure I was selling someone else's product, but I was still doing the entire business thing myself.

And when you come from absolutely zero on the entrepreneur

55:07

scale, trying to jump from there to running a whole business and having having a team that you got to manage, managing suppliers, uh managing finances and stuff like this, it's a lot to lot to pick up early on. Um, but if you aren't say fitting in as a salesperson, you're selling someone else's product in

55:22

the framework of their business and they've already got everything dialed in. They've done all the hard work and you get to come along and sell their products and make money.

So, that is something that that as sort of a side note um is a is a good practice. And in this case, we're kind of stealing from from that idea.

We're basically selling other people's tools or selling other

55:39

people's products without having to first build them ourselves. So, I've talked recently in my video about the new kind of AI agency model that's going to going to really surge this year.

Um, and me, myself, and the team at Morningside and Peep Lurch. Um, I've been wearing this a lot.

I don't know why I wasn't wearing this in videos

55:55

more, but um, yeah, we've all been wearing it into the office, so I'll just come back and, uh, here we are. So, um, I'll do a bit more of a spectrum thing again that will also help break this down for you.

So on the furthest end of the spectrum here in terms of like

56:12

difficulty we have implementation by this I mean AI dev services svc services uh

56:29

implementmentation implementation and then we have on this side I I don't know which one you put in front of the other I probably would go actually yeah education first cuz I mean any of you can watch a whole

56:44

bunch of YouTube videos kind of compile it together use AI to help you write a nice script or make it into some some presentation um and then the sort of middle point here I'd probably actually put it sort of more to that side is uh

57:00

consulting which is what you're doing here and this is kind of how I started off I I guess in both these when I started my journey I was making YouTube videos and then I was selling consulting through my YouTube channel and saying, "Hey, if you want to learn more about this AI chatbot I just built. You can book a call with me down below." And that was my original way of monetizing my my skills in the AI space and allowed

57:17

me to build a lot of confidence on my uh on my uh the consulting course that I did. Um and that allowed me to eventually get down to the implementations that providing my own AI automation agency, Morningside AI.

Now, the reason I'm telling you this is because um you don't need to unless you

57:33

really really have either the resources or you want to go all out and and really learn these tools. Um by tools I mean the the service delivery platforms like Forest Flow, Agentive, Make um relevant AI, all these Vappy all these kind of service delivery platforms for AI

57:49

agencies. This is is obviously the skills here are much better and much more valuable.

But if you're just all going to get started, then these are also options for you. But if you're a developer, I'd highly recommend that you do swing that way first because it uses your skills.

But some people are just starting with absolutely nothing. So

58:05

this is a good place to start to just get familiar with the process of AI freelancing and and running your own business. So education, we're not really going to focus on that in this video, but what this offer is is essentially a consulting offer where, and I'm going to give you the process in a second, you are doing these AI tool consults for

58:22

free. initially I'd recommend for businesses and you could you can just continue doing them for free as a lead magnet as we're going to go going to go into in a second but this is so that you don't have to jump immediately to this where either you are deving this stuff yourself and in that case need to spend

58:37

maybe uh not not maybe you definitely need to spend a few months of of learning and spending and spending time consistently practicing and and following tutorials and consuming content on YouTube about the the best use cases and how to build them and then getting to a stage where you're actually able to pitch businesses and you do all

58:53

the lead generation stuff as well. So, there's quite a lot to that and this is definitely a great starting point for people with either business backgrounds and they can hire for developers immediately or for developers who can start doing it themselves.

But some of you with no business experience and even no technical experience as well, this is a better place to start. Um, so let me

59:10

just rub this off. Um, actually I can just jump straight into it.

So basically the AI tools consulting process is it's pretty straightforward. Um what I would recommend you do is firstly create that knowledge gap right so even if you starting at zero on that scale I drew

59:25

before you can um you can number one find tools and I'll explain how you monetize

59:42

this in a second so just just stick with me um it's actually pretty pretty nifty and also how you get clients. I'm going to touch on that briefly here as well.

Um, doesn't need to be something crazy. Uh, but fine tools.

This means you're going to be going on things like YouTube. Now, thankfully, there's people

59:59

like myself and others. I mean, I think by the time this video goes out, I will have just posted one about AI tools that I use in my business.

So, uh, to make quite a lot of money as well. So, I'll put these things up here.

Um, it'll be up there and maybe in the description as well. my recent AI tools video that I

00:16

did. Um, but you can watch a bunch of YouTube videos to find the best tools.

I mean, there's always these videos about I tried a bajillion AI tools and these are the best ones. So, I mean, if these guys are really, they're not lying.

They've done a lot of hard work for you. Um, and you can find some great tools watching these

00:32

videos. Now, my process that I'd recommend is that you watch you find these tools by YouTube videos.

It's probably going to be the best way to do it. Um, and then you go um and make a list.

I'd go put these on a a Google

00:48

sheet or something and just put a whole bunch of links and names and everything and and do a little bit of categorization even. You can say, "Hey, this is a creative thing or an AI image generator or video generator, etc." And then thirdly, I would deep dive.

01:08

So that means on each of these, actually I wouldn't do each of them. I would make sure that this list you kind of narrow it down to a short list of the best ones based off what these guys in these videos are talking about.

Um you maybe pick a bunch in a couple different categories like okay these seemingly the best image generators, the best video

01:23

generators, etc. the best writing tools.

And then you start to you make a short list that you're going to do a deep dive on. Now deep diving means I would then go and go uh YouTube search again and but specifically for that to talk.

01:38

So I would be saying okay let's find say it was runway and you search up runway AI tutorial and you start to go through it and watch you see what people are doing with it and you see best runway AI use cases or best video generation um best AI video generation use cases and

01:55

you find them either on uh YouTube is a great place to do it but some of these tools are so new and so obscure that you won't even find much you might need to go to a Google search even basically do a deep dive and see if anyone has has revealed some cool stuff you can do with this just to build up the context objects that you have on it. And then I would also go and try it

02:16

yourself. And so once you've done that and you've you've had a bit of a play around with it, you've got familiar with it and you're like, "Okay, I know how this works.

I know that I know that Runway has this feature that allows me to go from image to video. Okay, great.

That's now I've sort of pinned that and you're building your knowledge gap just by watching videos and having a play

02:31

around. It's pretty cool." Um, and ultimately number four, I would make like a tools db where uh I'd like you to do this on notion if you not haven't used notion before n o t i o n notion and you can

02:50

create a bit of a tools database. Um, use whatever you feel like really.

You could use Google Docs or you could use pages or or who use pages? Word or or whatever your favorite bloody document processing thing is, but some kind of database where you've gone on these Gives and then you've got runway bam bam

03:06

bam category this this this best uses for this this features this this this and you start to create your own internal database of tools and I would highly recommend you use some kind of like a database feature with a notion. So you can create your own columns and you can add in you can do this in sheets

03:22

as well but notion is a lot easier for filtering etc. Um, and then you can set up filters like, okay, this is a creative tool.

Okay, this is uh could be useful for this specific use case. And you start to build up this internal knowledge base or database of the best tools.

And you've ranked them in in

03:37

certain ways so that when it comes to delivering that service of this AI tools consulting, you can go, okay, well, we're looking for some creative tools. You're on a call with them, as I'm going to break down the process in a second, but you're on a call with them and they say, I we've got a we've got a team who does uh SEO writing for us.

Okay, great.

03:52

Well, um you just go on to your little thing, not probably not on the call, but um uh afterwards or in the in the report making phase, which I'll touch on in a second, and you can quickly pull these up and you've got all this context on it and you can read through it and you go, "Oh, okay. Yeah, I remember that tool now.

Great, great, great. Okay, now I can put that into the recommendations

04:08

list for them." So, that's the process to start. And by this point, if you've got a a tools DB fil thought out with 50 tools and you've done a write up on each of them and you've had a play around with them as well, you've got a significant way down that say most of business are here.

You're now definitely

04:24

moving over this way and you start to know what these tools are good for. And again, you haven't had to go and build all this stuff yourself.

You're purely just recommending things at the at this time. So to break break down what this would actually look like in in reality, I'm probably going to run a whiteboard

04:39

space here, but um the way you'd pitch this is that you have some kind of three-step process or something. So I'd say it's a free and I'll get into how you market it in a second, but free um AI

04:55

tools. I'd probably play around with the naming a bit more um to make it sound a bit more sexy.

Um, but I'm sure you can figure that out with the help of PL with OGBT. But with principle, you say one, we hop on a free

05:10

consult where you ask them a whole bunch of questions and you learn about the business and the different departments and you sort of note it all down. You say, "Okay, great.

Well, after this call, just to make it extra easy for you, I know this is how I would have approached it when how I did approach it when I was doing my consulting calls is

05:26

don't try to put yourself on under the pump to deliver on that call. You are not if you're just starting out, you're not good enough.

You don't know enough and you can't be expected to know enough to just be able to be shooting off tools like like immediately knowing what they should fit into within the different business departments. Maybe if you've

05:41

done enough here, you could do confident to, but just to get started for most of you, I would say do the free console and then say, okay, step two of our process is we'll um match plus find more. So you can say we've got this this

05:57

internal database that we use that's got all the best tools um and we match them up uh internally, but we'll also go out and do a a further deep dive for your business and for your industry specifically. So this way you can handle a lot of different industries and you might be able to come up with some some really cool ones that are specific to

06:13

that industry that you find. Um and here you can use things like um there's an AI for that or or you got future

06:28

tools. So there's these there's an AI for that.

There's a website where you can kind of just search up if there's an AI tool for the thing you need. uh future tools also is similar.

I'll put both those links down below if you want to check those out. But this is step step two where you're matching them with

06:44

your internal ones and also finding morph. And then step three is a report as a report.

So you write up a report for them. You can use like some kind of Canva template or you could just

07:00

use a nice letter head and a bit of branding on your uh Google Docs or you could just just do it blank document. I mean initially just to keep things simple.

Don't let that stuff hold you back from just doing it. Um and you write up a report for them and you hop on another call or you just send that to

07:15

them directly. I probably hop on another call to get to sort of run through that process and get give them the idea and walk them through how you want to do it.

get a bit of feedback cuz all this is going to be helping you to move further down this and just a key part in getting to this point of implementing is getting

07:30

comfortable on those sales calls and being like knowing how to deal with people and you start to realize oh there's all these different characters I can meet and I kind of know how to handle that one per that kind of person now and it's just building up those entrepreneurial and business skills slowly but surely and this this way you

07:47

get two charts so the the free consult and then you break down the report for Now, I know what you're asking, Liam. How do I get clients and how do I make money from this?

Okay. Well, first things first is that with vegan started, money is not really I know it might be

08:02

like, oh, I need I need to pay my bills and stuff, but you should not be starting one of these businesses. If you're in a position where you are like, okay, I need to I need to pay my bills next week with this.

That is it's not going to work. maybe one in a 100.

Some of them will just finesse and like hustle their way to making money, but

08:18

for the most part, you are going to need to give this a significant amount of time to get up and running. And that means taking on free clients and building up your skills slowly but surely and your confidence.

You might be doing these free consults for for one or two months even if you depending on the volume of

08:34

them you do until you're really really good at it and people are are really happy with this the end result. So this is really the key you think.

are they happy afterwards? So getting feedback on that call or even getting feedback after by email is essential.

Checking in with them maybe a week or two after they have

08:50

implemented them or probably a week or two is about a good good amount of time. And if they're not saying, "Wow, yeah, this this has really been massively helpful," then you need to work work more on this um in your matching process.

But going back to getting clients and making money, as I said, first off, making money is not the should not be the goal initially. If you

09:07

want to really get to the end and be making a lot of money, you need to take that off your brain initially and just work through the process slowly of getting used to talking on calls and and building a knowledge gap. Um, and this is really that the flywheel for you to do that.

But to give you the the longer

09:22

term uh strategy, the process here is going to be the monetization is from eventually you can use your affiliates

09:37

So, you can get 20 15% uh of the monthly recurring that these companies sign up to. If these are decent sized companies and they're going to be high quality or or long-term users of these apps, then if you do enough of these free audits, you're going to build up some passive income for yourself where you might making a few hundred and eventually a

09:54

few thousand per month, right? So that's really determined by the quality of the people that you're putting through because if you're getting some and also the quality of your matching of the tools um and also the affiliate commission that they pay out but uh you'll see a lot of churn in terms of okay I recommended that but they never

10:09

end they used it for 2 months and they fell off. If you really find a good tool for them then they will continue to use that.

So that really comes down to you but also making sure that the business that you choose is uh is someone who's going to be a long-term user of it and not just kind of jump around either they're too small to really stick with it etc. But the second way, and it's

10:26

probably more of a longer term one that you look to do, is through partners. So, what you're doing here is essentially taking people from being unaware or or or not really implementing AI into their business or being familiar with it to the point where they're now

10:42

experimenting with it and they're like, "Oh, well, this is kind of cool. I they start to see the value." And it's like when people first started putting websites up and they started getting the odd call from them.

It's like, "Hey, I just found your website." or they get an email like, "Hey, I just found your website. Was wondering if you could do this." And it's it's they start to see

10:58

it. Okay.

Like now I get this now. I get this web thing.

And in this case, I get this AI thing like these really helpful tools where they can search the whole web and pull things back or write reports for us. Um, but the thing about that is that you've just moved them down closer

11:14

towards the point where they're ready to go to the implementation step. they're ready to maybe hop onto a a a more expensive consulting offer and an AI audit with someone who can really do the entire AI audit process and then stepping through to implementation.

So partners here at Morningside, we have de

11:30

partners because we get so many leads from this awesome channel and and you guys who support us so much because alongside you guys are going to start agencies and a lot of my bigger videos, we get like thousands and thousands thousands of business owners and often and we're seeing more and more like higher tier and high level um business

11:46

owners and larger companies reaching out to us uh because of the size of the channel as as much as it's grown. So that's been awesome.

And we have partnership deals. We have the ex excess leads that we can't really handle or we don't we don't necessarily want to do that kind of project if I'm honest.

Um we have partners who we offer them to and if they close a deal um we get

12:03

anywhere from 10 to 20% uh depending on the partner um and the side of the deal. So you can do the same thing.

There are people who are coming in and they do have this side but they don't want to do this side. And you can find them either in my free community or in paid communities like my accelerator.

Of course, I'm not like I don't want to

12:18

like make this a sales pitch, but if you're looking to find high quality implementation partners, then you may need to spend a bit of money to find get in a group or get in an area or a place online where you can find those dear partners or even look locally. You can go on Google Maps and there might be some AI development shops popping up in your city um and you can get in touch

12:35

with them and say, "Hey, I might have some leads for you. Could we set up a deal here?" So this can be sort of 10 to 20% um of say maybe a five to 10k deal initially.

Um so that's good money. And

12:51

then affiliates, you'll start off a few hundred, maybe like $200 and then get up to maybe $1,000 per month. Um yeah, that's not going to happen overnight, but it's still money and you're still building up your building a bit of momentum with your AI business and in the AI space.

Now, the final step

13:07

is, of course, how do you get clients? How are you going to attract people to this offer of yours?

And I'm glad you asked, cuz I've got a simple solution for you. And this is pretty much what I recommend to uh everyone.

Um, so you need to turn people from these unknown people who don't know about your

13:22

business at all or the offer that you have into people that are booking in these free audits, free tool audits. And the best ways to get people initially to get things off the ground, um, there's a few strategies.

Firstly,

13:39

warm outreach. Alex Mozi has a great one on warm outreach, which I'm not even going to try to try to outdo.

Um, I'm going to put it in the description below for you. Basically, you have a lot of people that you have contact to, either your old

13:54

email contacts, your Facebook friends, your Instagram followers, all the people in your phone contacts. And these are people who either may themselves want this kind of thing and say, "Hey, look, I've I've built this entire database of AI tools.

I've been spending a lot of time working with them. Um, and I'm doing this thing where I'm now helping businesses for free um to do a a

14:12

30-minute AI tools audit. Um, do you know anyone?" Well, this is the pitch in the warm outreach, and this is what's going to be included in that in that podcast from Alex Moz.

It's done part of his 100 billion leads book, but it's the audio version again, 100% free. Um, but that you can ask them if you know anyone

14:28

who would be interested in this kind of offer, right? And they either will know people themselves or know people that would be interested and they say, "Hey, yeah, great.

I can put you in touch." Um, or they may be interested in it themselves, but by not asking them directly, it's not like, "Hey man, can

14:43

you buy my stuff?" or like, "Can I do this for you?" The fact that it's free makes that actually a bit a bit a little less bad. Like, you probably could just ask them directly and say, "Hey, like, do you do you want me to do a free AI?

What if we I know a whole bunch about these things. I just have a quick check over take 30 minutes.

Um so that's str

14:59

one. I'll leave a link to that down below.

Um next strat would be cold email. This one takes a bit more to set up and honestly wouldn't recommend it for beginners, but um if you are familiar with cold email, um you could definitely blast out this kind of offer

15:14

once you test the copy enough um to get them say, "Hey, like yes, sure, I'd be interested." Um depending on the targeting that you do, of course, cold email is a whole whole different box of frogs. Um, a cold email is one because you can reach out to like hundreds of people a day with the same offer and start booking in calls and moving them through that process.

And then of course

15:30

we have organic content. So you can try to on on LinkedIn make social posts and stuff.

I wouldn't I'd probably go the YouTube side personally because then you can make videos like uh best AI tools for for builders or plumber. I keep using

15:47

builders and plumbers example. I think it's such a an interesting idea about AI service providers for these industries.

But making YouTube videos talking about industry by industry the best tools. Um you could even just use chatbt or or 01 or whatever fancy model that you want to use these days to help you think through

16:03

the problems that businesses would face. And then you without even really knowing it, sure you could jump on Reddit, you could jump on YouTube and do a bit of market research about the problems that a different niche would face.

And then you can match up with your tools database. you can go okay well this tool this tool this tool this tool for these different parts of the business that I

16:18

know they have issues with then you can make your video six AI tools relatives or etc and you just kind of go through the list and because those are tagged by the niche that you put in the in the search term it's quite in the title when people are searching for AI stuff realtors there's a chance you're going to pop up and then there's a chance it

16:34

will also book in the free consult with you and in that video you can say like literally just before you get stuck into it or and then probably towards the end as well do two CTAs and that say hey if you're interested in a free AI tools consult for your business. Head down below and book in a call with me.

Bam. And once you've got a good amount of uh

16:51

traffic coming from this, you can actually turn this for free and you can start charging um $100 for it. You know, my my consulting calls started off at I think$150 or 200 bucks.

Jack that up to $300 cuz I getting so many. Jack it up to $500 cuz I was still getting so many

17:07

just like dozens and dozens of calls. Um, and I made $4,300 within my second or third month of doing YouTube and and consulting, right?

And then I put that up to $1,000 and people still paying for that. And I made probably $15,000 off 999 $997 calls um doing consulting.

17:27

there's different people pay for it. If you can get this up and running, that's how you get the money coming.

But through warm outreach, I would recommend that you do it for free. Um, and build up until you're getting these really happy customers and you know that you're actually providing a good service.

Um, so yeah, there's also things like ads, but um, for beginners, I wouldn't

17:43

recommend you trying to own Facebook ads to just try and get some u get some clients. But I hope that makes sense.

Knowledge gap. You're starting way down there.

This is your process to get some kind of knowledge gap. And the way that you monetize this knowledge gap is

17:58

through a kind of offer like this where you're just doing consultations to help them match up the best AI tools. You're selling other people's products.

You're getting compensated through affiliates and then through passing these people off cuz you're doing the hard work of maybe not harder than actual

18:14

implementation, but you're doing some good work here where you're actually you're moving them down from unaware or unfamiliar with AI to being more receptive to implementation. So, we found that if business owners don't understand the tech and understand that why it's good for their business and the

18:30

fact that this what we're going to be building for you is actually really the best play for you right now, then there's no chance that they get to implementation and you can't sell. You can never sell 20, 30, $40,000 worth of AI uh for an AI project if they don't understand all of this stuff.

So, you're

18:45

doing a key part of the process and you can compensated by passing that off to people once they're ready. And of course, over time, you will build up more skills and you build up more experience.

You may want to go into charging directly for this. Once you've got a better lead generation system, you can start charging for it.

Maybe you put

19:00

up a little education product as a lead magnet instead. You start running some traffic to the, you know, there's all these different players and you try to move down and and expand your offering.

So, I started off I started off on YouTube making YouTube videos talking about the cool AI builds I saw. You can go and look at it on my channel.

I was

19:16

just doing what was interesting to me and building my knowledge gap and putting up coding tutorials and me building these different things. I loved it and and I realized there were lot there was a big market for it as well.

Um and that's how kind of got my channel off the ground and built my knowledge gap and I started consulting. So I was

19:31

technically educating on my channel and I started doing consulting like I said making lots of money off consulting within a few months of starting my YouTube channel. Um, and then I started at Morningside AI, my AI automation agency to do the implementation and basically capture more of the value that's possible within the AI space.

19:48

will come come a long way from me and my spare bedroom. Um, and I'm extremely proud of what we've done and I can't wait to hear about what all of you do.

And I know I know I know it's so difficult to get off the starting box when you feel like you have absolutely no [ __ ] clue what to do. Like I I

20:03

fully understand. I was in your position like six six years ago when I was starting an online business.

I know how that feels and I'm just really trying I hope with this to give you that little nudge and that that small wind and the small steps that you need to start building a bit of momentum and really building your entrepreneurial skill set.

20:20

So that's all for this video guys. If you're looking to use the AI space to build businesses to make money and to change your life generally then this video is probably the most important one you're going to watch this year.

Um because in this video I'm breaking down five different ways that

20:35

you can start an AI business using the same formula that I've used to change my life with it. So if you're not familiar with me or my channel, my name is Lee Mley and about a year and a half ago, I got into the AI space sensing that there was this big opportunity brewing and I've been able to over the past 18 months go from literally zero in AI

20:52

income to multiple six figures per month with me and my team. So, we've been able to come in and learn this AI space rapidly, exactly how I'm going to share with you later on in this video, how to actually learn the stuff you need to build businesses in the AI space.

Going to be teaching that and giving you a crash course and a step-by-step list on

21:08

how to learn the stuff required for five different AI business models, which I'll share at the end. So, very important video.

If you are serious about it, then watch this thing because this is the distillation of a year and a half of my learnings in the space and also the most recent styles of AI agencies, which is

21:24

the model you're going to be learning that are actually working and and people are actually able to to make money with. So, going to start off with a little bit of more background.

So, I'm going to rub this off. Give me a second.

A little bit more background to actually making money with AI in general and how how you're able to do it. So, might people might think you need a an AI SAS, right?

21:42

You're probably thinking, "Oh, I need to have like a really bright idea and I need to go and raise a bunch of money and make make this big thing out of it." Uh, no. We don't really want to do that because that's not accessible to most of us.

I mean, I didn't have like a million dollars just sitting in the in this in the in the safe to to go and throw it at one of these startups or I didn't have

21:58

VC connections to go and get money. So SAS is kind of off the board immediately unless you do the kind of no code SAS route, etc.

But generally, if you're looking to just get started in online business specifically, um it's going to be something closer to agency. And agency is when you're going

22:13

to have clients who come and you pitch them on and say, "Hey, look, I can build that's a it's going to be a hammer. I can build this for you and then they give you money back for it." Right?

So, you don't need any upfront cost. Well, there's some upfront cost for software, etc., but it's nothing like a SAS where

22:28

you need potentially millions of dollars of funding to get it to get it off the ground properly. But agency business model, which I'm sure you're familiar with SMMA and all the all the other agency business models, there's a million of them, you're giving something to your client and they're paying you in return.

So it's just client and and patron to some degree relationship. So

22:46

beyond that, you also have in the AI space, but this is based on top of the need for AI solutions. So all of these business models need to be based on some kind of demand in the AI space and where money can actually be exchanged.

So agency opportunity in the AI space is based on the fact that we have uh

23:03

millions and millions of businesses and companies around the world who have money and they need and they're willing to invest in getting AI solutions for their business so they can out compete their competitors and actually benefit from some of the technologies. This is what the whole AI agency model that I've been talking about for over over a year now is about is this AI solutions demand

23:20

which is is really rapidly growing um throughout the world. So secondly, aside from agency, you also have education.

Now this is a massive need in the AI space right now as well. And if

23:37

you're able to combine agency and education where it's educating your niche, there is so much money to be made collectively from this as well. So what I'm going to teach you is first of all, you can't educate anyone unless you've actually done the thing.

So, I'm going to teach you how to start an agency and get off the ground and learn the stuff

23:52

that will then allow you to also educate people. Uh, but the agency is really where you're going to have to start cuz if you're a LinkedIn AI guru who's all all they ever done is done consulting, no one's you're never going to be able to get paid a lot for that information because you simply don't know your [ __ ] So, uh, when it comes to starting an AI

24:10

business, we don't really want to go the SAS route. We can't jump to consulting or education immediately cuz we don't really know anything.

We haven't got any tangible proof of how we've been able to help businesses with AI and create value. So education you can't go to immediately but generally this is built

24:29

on need for clarity that's a T/ strategy businesses and people all over the world are needing clarity and strategy on the AI space and everything

24:44

that's happening in it. So education is still a massive opportunity for you.

But it has to come down the line. You have to actually learn the thing and do the thing first or you're never going to be much of an educator.

This could be in the real estate niche, could be any niche, you can cut it. There's a need for education.

Whether you're doing like enterprise consulting on how to adapt AI

25:01

to their dev teams, like there's so much there, but you first must start off with an agency, which is what I'm going to be talking about for the rest of this video. Okay?

So we're not going SAS, we're not doing education. You got to start off with an agency.

And now you get the three problems of starting an AI agency which I've painfully learned uh

25:17

through myself and through all all the people in our our broader community. There's three problems that you have to solve when starting one of these agencies.

And this is what exactly what my uh the five different strategies I'm going to give you at the end of this video are going to be based around. So five different types of AI agencies that

25:33

occupy different types of niches and I'm going to give you the blueprint to start them. But you first need to understand that we have three problems when starting an AI agency.

Firstly, you have expertise technical. So somewhere in your agency or your brain needs to be

25:49

some kind of AI expertise. Understanding how to build things, how to use different software and different tools or even code yourself to build systems that create value with AI.

So you have to have some kind of technical expertise and that's what we're going to be the step-by-step strategies that I'm giving

26:05

you after this. That's what they really focus on on building up within a two to three month period.

So, first thing you need expertise uh technical expertise either within your brain as the agency owner when you're starting out or you need to hire it and bring it in as a as a CTO, a lead developer or just as developers in general. Secondly, you

26:22

need lead flow. So, you need some way to generate leads and have them coming across your desk and reaching out to you to ask to work with you um or replying to your emails or however you're generating leads.

And then finally, you need credibility/ authority

26:39

cuz businesses are skeptical about AI right now. And if you can't provide some kind of reason as to why you you're the guy for the job and you can actually deliver what you say, uh they're not going to buy from you.

So, uh you need to figure out a way to either tackle these problems one by one or to tackle

26:55

them all at once, which is the strategy that I recommend and that I'm going to give you now. So, we need to somehow get technical expertise either in our brain or we need to hire it.

We need to find some way of generating leads and bringing people to to in contact with our business and our services. And then we need the credibility and authority to close them.

Like why I can actually do

27:12

what I say I'm going to do. Why I know this is going to help your business and it's not just some AI hype crap that is actually just going to waste your time and money.

So need to achieve all these three. Remember that.

Okay. Now the strategy to solve this for most of you.

So remember we need to solve all three of those problems as quickly and

27:27

efficiently as possible and with the least amount of pain. Um there's always going to be pain, but we're going to try to do it with as little as possible.

This is from my own experience and also from hundreds of people now in the community, broader community, um in the AI agency space, both free and paid community who are using something

27:44

similar to this and were able to see success with it. So strategy revolves around one learn the thing and the thing is the area or specific type of

28:00

narrow expertise that you want to build within your agency first. So we've got I don't know how I'm going to draw this but uh you can have broad broad expertise where you have to know a toz everything about a subject

28:17

and everything in between or you can just say I'm just going to learn this little bit and be an expert at that a lot easier initially it's going to take a lot less time for for in terms of my AI expertise over the past 18

28:33

months I have started initially niche and and an expert in a small area which was originally custom knowledge chat bots if you guys remember that um way back in March last year I was making all these videos about how I can build these custom knowledge chat bots and giving you coding tutorials and all these

28:49

business owners oh yeah can you build one of these for me so I started off niche and then through running my agency and making more videos and getting on calls with consulting calls with people I then slowly broadened my expertise to the point where now when it comes to AI solutions for businesses and and how AI

29:06

can help them, it's a it's a very broad understanding of it. So you can't expect to start off broad, you need to start narrow, which is why I mean when we say learn the thing, when you see the five different niched agency strategies that you're going to get next, it's all about picking one area.

So whether you are starting here and going, okay, I'm going

29:23

to start there or I'm going here and I'm going to start here. We need to start somewhere niche and narrow and we're going to learn the thing.

So that's step one and simultaneously you want to share your

29:39

journey. So as you're learning the thing, you want to be documenting the learning of the thing.

So I did this exact same thing over a year ago now when I started my channel. I came into the space really curious, really motivated, but I didn't have that I mean the LLM technology that like chat GBT is

29:56

based on had only really just come out. And so I was starting at the starting blocks of basically everyone else.

And I was only able to get to this point because of just rapid iteration and and a lot of output within the space. And you can do the exact same thing, but you need to be sharing the learning of this.

So that builds up. So I'm getting a

30:12

little bit ahead of myself, but if we share the journey in step three, we're then going to offer. Sorry, this will make sense in a second.

So sharing your journey can mean

30:30

YouTube, can mean LinkedIn, can mean any kind of medium. We've talked about a lot of these things on the channel.

Uh but sharing the journey in some way is going to be building up a track record of your expertise and growth. And that's going

30:45

to tie into uh I should probably have the the three things expertise um two lead flow and three. So this is the strategy to solve these three problems.

By the way, you probably can't see the green very well, but you know what it says, expertise, lead flow, and authority,

31:02

credibility. So by learning the thing, you can then share your journey of learning the thing on these different platforms.

And then when you offer free consulting calls, the interest that you generate by sharing your journey is going to allow you to convert some of that interest into actual uh buying attention. People are ready to start

31:18

paying for you, paying for your services potentially. So, um, then you can go, uh, close deals, right?

Once you've got people on the phone, you'll find that purely if you do enough of them, there's going to be people who have money and are willing to pay for it. And they'll say, "Hey, look, would you be able to

31:33

build me this? I'm willing to pay you for it." And that's when you can start to monetize on all this stuff here.

So, coming back to the three problems, the expertise comes from learning the thing. The lead flow comes from sharing your journey and also the expertise is something you know you showing that you

31:49

know what you're talking about is going to create that lead flow as well but it's the documenting it on YouTube or LinkedIn exactly how I've done it exactly how hundreds of other people are doing it now and the authority also comes from sharing your journey. So when they look back and you are 3 months down the line and you've been consistently

32:05

posting information about uh one of these niche areas which we're going to go into later whether it's it's text based agents whether it's voice based agents these different areas where you can be an expert within a short space of time in the AI space you can be an expert in literally a month if you pick one specific tool so it's very easy to

32:21

become an an expert you just need to actually put in the effort and and apply yourself for a prolonged period of time um once you've got all of these done you've got the expertise ticked off the default ticked off and the authority then you're able to start to close deals. So this is a way of attacking all

32:36

three of these problems in one go. So within the space of 3 months you will learn the thing share the journey be be likely if you follow the strategy correctly be getting people booking in free consulting calls with you and that sets you up perfectly to be able to start closing deals solving all three of

32:52

these problems. Now there is another way of doing it which we've kind of done as a community collectively over the past year and that's to learn the thing not to share the journey at all but get to 6 months down the line.

Here we are 6 months

33:08

after starting and you've learned the thing but now you've done absolutely nothing to share the thing and so you're at square one when it comes to marketing yourself and getting some lead flow which is problem number two. So, I would highly recommend you do these all simultaneously so that you can shortcut

33:23

this thing to about 3 months and you have the attention you need to start closing some kind of deals. Okay.

So, now we're going to get into the actual five different strategies for starting. And so, what these are is a a type of AI agency you can start so that you can have a vehicle

33:39

to learn and get deeper into the AI space. It's really all this stuff is about is making a bet on the AI space generally and just picking the right vehicle or horse within the space so that you can learn faster than everyone else cuz it's simply a level of expertise question.

Who is the smartest

33:57

and who is the most experienced in a certain space within the AI space might be the real estate AI guy. The only way that you're going to become the number one expert is by actually doing some kind of business and being active at the space and the AI agency as a vehicle is what personally what I've used to get

34:14

deeper into the space and learn. And for many of you, it's also going to be the best starting point um before you go on to re-education or whatever you want to do later.

But whether you go into SAS as well, I've got my own AI SAS too, but the AI agency is what set me up for creating the SAS. So it all kind of

34:30

stems from the agency at least in my experience. So you have these five different types and you might be a bit confused but give me a second.

Uh five types of strategies you get the idea. So number one AI

34:45

automation specialist. So we have an AI automation specialist.

Um let me write all of these out here first for you. So then we have two text based agent.

I'm not they were all specialist. I'm not going to write it every time.

Um, three, voice

35:01

agent specialist. Four is Zapia ecosystem specialist.

And I've run out of space here. Number five is chatbot specialist.

So these are five different niched types of remember that

35:17

little diagram I did that you got the broad and then you've got the niched. Now, this isn't this is niching your agency down by solution type, and

35:33

you can always go broader at any point, but the idea is that it's easier to become an expert in a in a narrow area within a short space of time, and therefore be able to charge expert rates um than trying to be broad and taking a lot longer to be kind of a a mid-level intelligence or or understanding of the

35:49

whole field. So, it's better to go deep initially and then over time you can broaden out to different areas.

So these are basically starting blocks that I want to give you and just spoon feed you. I know the hardest thing when you're starting these businesses.

I I started my e-commerce stores like four

36:04

or five years ago and when I was getting started it was purely the analysis paralysis of having so many options and concerns about the sequence in which I should do them. I'm trying to just spoon feed this to you all.

Here's five different ways and I'm going to give you stepby-step instructions so that you

36:19

don't have to use your brain for the next 2 3 months. Learn the stuff.

follow the process of sharing your journey as well and 90 95 90 ideally 100% of you are able to actually put some uh put some rubber to the road and progress in the space by using at least one of

36:35

these. So going through these an AI automation specialist is different from a general AI agency because they're going to be specializing in specifically AI automations on things like make.com and air table.

So this is primarily based around um make.com

36:53

and Air Table. So, these are the only tools you really need to learn to become an AI automation specialist.

Um, and I've got some examples of guys who are successfully running these agencies as well. So, example one is uh Shaz, I'll put them up on screen.

Shaz Matthews,

37:09

great guy. He was out in Dubai with me recently for our recent AI agency mastermind.

Um, Shaz is running a specifically AI automation focused agency. Um, we also have SJ, member of my accelerator, who's recently I had him recently on the channel, so I'll put that up here somewhere as well if you want to learn more about his story, but

37:25

he's come in as a complete non-developer, decided to learnmake.com and is now making a supplementary income to his main job, which is equaling in some months is paying more than his actual job. So, SJ and Sha's two examples of AI automation specialists.

And at the end of this video, I'm going to let you know how you can actually get

37:41

the step by step. So, I've got about 6 to 10 steps in each of these strategies that is available on a document that I'm going to give you at the end.

So, if you want to get that, I'll be letting you know where to get it at the end, but I don't want to give that away too early. Right?

So, each of these has attached to it like a 10step plan. So, if you're

37:57

interested in any of these at any point, then make sure you stick around for for that. textbased agents.

We have um these are a little more complicated but the GPTs if you played around with open AI's chat GPT the GPTs uh feature that they

38:13

released that's a consumerf facing textbased agents uh framework and and platform you also have the assistance API um so this is how you can build GPTs and and use them programmatically across anywhere in the world for to build into applications for your clients. So textbased agents are different from chat

38:28

bots and that they are basically you're building custom chat GBT like experiences for your clients and that's free form that's open-ended that's conversational um you might be using tools you might be using custom knowledge these are like custom versions of chat GBT is the easiest way to think of these um I've actually built my

38:44

software agent on top of this which allows you to make GBTs and put them on WhatsApp put them on websites etc. So I'm very big and also my agency morning side is very big in the check space agent space.

38:59

this is something that I'm I'm really big on. I think this is a great place to start.

Um but you guys can make your choice at the end when you get the when you get the step by step. So textbased agents you're building custom chatbt applications for your clients and putting them on WhatsApp putting them on websites various places and uh your

39:16

buddies software also helps you do that. So, voice space agents, I'm sure you've heard, I've talked about a lot on the channel.

I think the voice AI space is really just getting started and all of the other guys that are in my accelerator and and my close network, they're all making a a [ __ ] ton of money

39:32

right now selling these voice AI solutions. Um, so the space is extremely hot.

It's moving very quickly. If you wanted to jump in and become an expert, I've seen guys go in and be an expert within space of like 1 to 2 months of really applied effort in this.

And if you get in the right circles, I mean,

39:47

all of my friends that are selling these solutions are just freely sharing like, "Oh, this is what's working. This is what people are selling.

Um, this is what people want to buy." So, this is a really good really good space to be in. You've got platforms like um Bland AI.

Shout out the guys at Bland. Uh we've

40:02

got um what is it? Airi.

There's a there's a new one of these every week, so don't uh forgive me if I forget one. Um synth flow.

Synth flow. There's a whole bunch of different platforms, right?

There's a

40:19

VP, heaps of different platforms you can learn. You can basically just pick one, decide to be good at it, and the step-by-step strategy that I I'll give to you has a ton of excellent resources that are all on YouTube.

All the resources that I'm providing, and the step-by-step guides are going to be free. Um, voice based agent space going

40:35

to be huge, really popping off right now. Um, great place to be in in my opinion.

And you have the the Zapia ecosystem. We have some examples actually of these guys.

So we have SHs and SJ we're doing AI automation um agency specifically focused on the AI

40:50

automation space. Then we have myself Morningside.

My agency is primarily focused on this through our own software. Um so we focus on textbased agents primarily.

Also have Isaiah member of my accelerator original

41:08

member of my community. Um, and he's selling textbased agents, AI appointment setters for Instagram DMs.

I've recently done an interview with him on the channel if you want to learn more about how he I think he's making $25,000 a month now on that. And that's soon to be more.

If you want to watch that, there'll be tag somewhere up there.

41:23

Isaia's doing very well. Myself and the team selling agents to Agent doing very very well as well.

Voicebased agents, we have guys like uh Mark and Taha. I've had Mark on the channel um a long time ago, but I'll actually link

41:39

their channels down below if you want to check them out and they're going to be linked all through these documents as well. So, scrap the description.

They're going to be all through these documents, but examples of people who are successfully running these types of agencies are going to be in the document as well. So, Mark and Taha, Giannis, I'll pop him up screen.

You guys might know Jiannis by now, good friend of

41:54

mine, and he's really crushing it in the space using voice agents. Then the Zapia ecosystem is an interesting play because the Zapia ecosystem has got so much to it now.

There's tables, there's uh there's zaps in general, there's canvases, there's chat bots, there's so much crammed into the Zappy ecosystem

42:11

and it's all no code as well. So, if you're looking to just get started in the space and really get eased into AI and automation and and building these agencies, the Zappy ecosystem is a good way to just block out all the [ __ ] and all the noise and just say this place which is very well doumented, huge community, great support, I'm going to

42:28

just focus on this area. So if you're com if you're really concerned about the technical nature of building some of these solutions, voice agents can get a little bit gnarly on the code if you're doing things like Vappy textbased agents uh when you're doing custom integrations to different platforms can get a little bit gnarly.

Um and doing custom

42:43

front-end interfaces AI automation not usually too bad. Um this is probably a good place to start as well if you're bit concerned about that.

But the Zappy ecosystem generally being a like fundamentally no code platform is a great place to get started. So you can

42:59

build um on here automations, chat bots, you can have like data management. So you can integrate AI into

43:17

all of these and be creating value with AI through the through the Zapia platform. So, good place to look into if you're concerned about the the the development or the coding nature of a lot of these solutions.

I I personally, if I was starting off brand new, I would be seriously looking at the Zappy

43:33

ecosystem cuz they're building a lot of cool stuff as well. So, it's good.

It's a good long-term bet. And Zappy has also got Zapia Central, which I talked about on the channel uh Central talked about on the channel recently, and it's their AI hub for creating AI agents through Zappia.

And

43:48

again, all no code. So, it's like this but easier.

So, Zappy is a very good thing to to be looking into if you are concerned about the the uh development side of things. Should probably jump over this way.

Finally, chatbot specialist. So, this is different to textbased agents.

Um, I'm going to make

44:03

a video on the difference between chat bots and agents um soon because I probably should just make that clear. Um, but cliff notes, textbased agents are these chat chatbt style experiences that are open-ended.

You can ask them endless questions. They might have knowledge pulled in.

They might have

44:18

tools pulled in, but it's it's fundamentally an open-ended and conversational interaction. Chatbot building is more so focused on uh things like voice flow.

And I've talked about voice flow for over a year now. And that's my go-to chatbot building platform.

And I differentiate these from

44:34

textbased agents. And that chat bots I need to program and design uh piece by piece.

And I have to build all the logic. If I don't build the logic, it's not going to be there.

So it needs to be like, okay, well, if this comes in and we do something here, Da da da. Okay.

Well, it's either going to go up here or

44:50

it's going to go down here where you've got much more of a structured layout and control over the flow and functionality. So, if you don't build it, it's not going to be in there.

But with textbased agents, you don't need to program. There's no programming like this.

You program it at the prompt level. So, when you write your little prompt for the

45:05

agent, that's the programming of the textbased agent. Here, you actually need to program it by telling them what to do when XYZ happens.

Right? So, these are a little bit different.

They're not worse. they are in some cases you want more control over the solution that you're building and and the functionality

45:21

within it. Sometimes these are a little bit too wild and and unhinged to to get the functionality that your client wants.

Um and also these can include buttons and things like this and buttons make it easier and better to use for your customers in various circumstances. So chatbot specialist still a very valid one to to be looking into.

Um, I think

45:38

the the voice flow to WhatsApp because you can put a WhatsApp app with all these buttons and it can do things. The the automation of all the all a key business's processes with WhatsApp via voice flow I think is is a great stack to get started.

You can look

45:54

at any any business you can basically walk into and go say hi to. You can try to take the core functions of that whether it's booking a table, reserving, meeting the meeting a designer or or meeting the team etc.

can all be put into some kind of voice flow chatbot that you can be then be put on WhatsApp.

46:09

I mean Americans, you're a bit behind on the WhatsApp buzz, but the rest of the world is is very very uh eager to to be adopting things like this. So for chatbot specialists, a great example of this is big man Brendan.

I'll put his channel. You may have seen him.

Brendan

46:25

Jawat, Australian guy, smashing in the space doing some really great tutorials. So if you want to check out his channel, that'll be linked on the uh on the document for this particularly.

Um, but those are the five different types. And again, these are narrow in entry points to the space as a whole.

46:41

So, you might decide, I'm going to master this and this and get really good at it and that's going to be my entry point and I'm going to make those the first solutions that I sell. And over time, you can broaden and take on different challenges.

But you need to start somewhere. And the reason a lot of you aren't starting is because you don't

46:57

have a clear, you aren't able to to cross off the alternatives. You're looking at, oh, voice stuff.

Oh, text stuff. Oh, I need to also do make an make an air table.

I'm trying to give you a focused road map for 2 to 3 months so that you can actually get a start in the space and be able to cross some of these

47:12

alternatives off. So, in order to get the step-by-step guides for each of these, it's between six to 10 steps and resources.

So, it might be free online courses. It might be v videos that I've made or my my friends have made.

some of these guys here. It's going to walk you

47:27

through even free resources from places like make that has the uh that have their ownmies and things like this. So, I've curated over the space of uh like a couple of days the best resources for learning each of these and put them into a sequence for you.

So, all of this is going to be available because I I can't

47:44

really like throw it all at you in the description. I'm going to make a post on my school.

So, I've got a free school community. If you're interested in building AI businesses, then my my school community is kind of the place to be.

Um, I'm in there doing free Q&As's uh once a week and the rest of the

48:00

community are all actively building their own AI agencies, consultancies, uh, SAS's, all of the the good stuff that you want to be around if you're serious about using this this opportunity. So, that's really all it is.

And I'm going to be talking about this a lot more uh on my channel, but

48:16

how I've been able to do some pretty cool stuff with my life since I I got into the space. It's been 18 months and I've I've built quite possibly the the dream life that I' I've always wanted.

I have all of my friends here in Cape Town at the moment. We're all working together.

My whole thing was always just

48:32

cool [ __ ] with cool people and I've been able to achieve that. And the more people that I can get to use this opportunity to achieve that for themselves is uh is the ideal outcome for for me.

And if I can make videos at this and wave my hands around and make that happen in other people's lives, then that's something I'm pretty proud

48:47

of and more than happy to spend an hour waving my hands around in front of a whiteboard for. And of course, there's massive incentives for myself as well.

If I'm able to educate you guys appropriately and get you successful, I also have software. And if you use my

49:02

software to build your agencies, then I can make a lot of money as well. So the whole point is that I introduce you to this stuff.

At some point, you might end up using my software and that'll help you to make more money and then we all win, right? So that's the that's the agreement we

49:18

have on this channel. But if you want to get access to all of this, it is on the school free to join.

It'll be in the description. And if you go to the YouTube resources, um it's a little tab on school.

Once you get in, it should you should get let in within 10 15 minutes or so. There'll be a little tab

49:33

called YouTube resources and you click on that and you find the title of this video. There'll be a whole post and in there I will have linked to all of the resources for all these different strategies.

So, no excuse now. You got to get started.

Um, that's it's it's real. It's it's real.

I'm living proof of it. And

49:50

there are so many other people in the community. I've interviewed ton of them on my channel now.

if you want to use this AI thing for your benefit and to actually not miss like it sounds so cringe and cliche but not to miss this one again like we get these once every 5 10 years right usually 10 and this is

50:06

the one so use it that's all today I wanted to make a quick video breaking down the different phases of scaling your AI automation agency from 0 to $100,000 per month can be broken down

50:21

into five different stages I've made a nice little presentation here for you to walk through through and it's more so for talking about okay what are the problems you're facing and where should your focus be on at each of these different phases and what kind of team and hiring requirements are needed at each phase. So I'm basically going to break down what your team should look like at each stage say 0 to 5k or 10 to

50:39

20k and also the tech stack you're going to be using. I'm going to be covering everything at each of these different phases because I know I get a lot of questions about, okay, I'm how do I get to the next phase?

What am I missing? Like, what's the main blocker in my business?

And I've been through this process of of scaling from 0 to 100,000 and more a month. And I'm going to break

50:55

down what's been super helpful for me. This is going to be more so focused on a general agency.

Um, so this is assuming that you're just doing purely custom AI development as an AI automation agency for your clients. Um, there are changes that occur if you move to a more niched model, but I'm just going to keep it pretty clearcut with this and just say

51:11

if you're doing all general development, this is what it's going to look like. So, there's five different stages.

We can jump into it here. The first phase is called startup.

Um, and that's from 0 to $5,000 per month. Um, so your team in this case is going to be, if you're a non-technical founder, we're going to split this into two, especially in these

51:27

early phases. Um, a nontechnical founder starting an AI automation agency is a bit of a different route to a technical founder.

So you can see here if you are a non-technical founder as in you're someone who's coming into the AI field wanting to build a business but you don't have the technical background you're not a developer and we get a lot

51:44

of developers coming into the field trying to start these as well. So I want to make sure I'm addressing both sides of this.

If you're non-technical then your first team or the first person that you're going to hire in this case you're going to be using a a contractor will be a freelance AI developer and this will be at a revenue share basis or you can

52:00

either do it at cost depending on what setup it is. basically because you don't have the technical expertise yourself.

You can't go out there and deliver these first few projects to get yourself off the ground. In the case of the technical founder, it's basically just going to be you and you are the lead developer of your agency.

You're basically just a freelancer at this point. But that

52:16

should be pretty straightforward for you technical guys. But for those of you who are non-technical going into a place like my free school community, which we've just hit 100,000 members on, which is incredible.

So, thank you guys for the support on that. Um, but there's 100,000 people in there.

A significant portion of those guys are AI developers

52:31

who are looking for work. So go in there to the hiring tab.

You can look for, hey, I'm starting an agency. I have XYZ leads through my warm connections, which we're going to touch on in a second.

And I'm looking for someone to uh pass off some of these projects to, and we're going to do a revenue share basis. Now, for all the costs of these different uh

52:47

hires, and in this case, the split, I'm going to be breaking it down at the end of the video, a full table of all of the costs, at least starting cost for each of the roles I'm going to mention. So I I didn't want to clog up this slide.

So I'm going to break that down at the end and you guys can sort of screenshot it and use it for your hiring moving forward. So starting off as a

53:02

nontechnical founder, you've got that freelance AI developer where you're going to work with. Now when it comes to the focus at this phase of your journey, it's going to be on warm outreach and finding your first free clients through your existing network and then eventually graduating towards paid clients through your existing network.

So that's using the warm outreach method

53:17

that I've talked about time and time again. I'll put it in the description.

It's one. It's really, really good.

Um, but that warm outreach strategy is going to allow you to find your first few clients and really just get some experience and get off the ground. And the big focus of this startup phase is really just building your confidence and experience gradually.

Just slowly like

53:33

baby baby steps to build your confidence and experience because like you like this quote here says at this stage you're likely feeling like I'm inexperienced. I'm unskilled and I'm struggling to really just wrap my head around this business and how it works.

I'm taking things one step at a time in order to ease me into things. And this

53:49

is the most important thing in this phase is just gradually and slowly easing into things and not trying to take this 10 $15,000 project or thinking you're going to have this fully productized offering or I'm going to build a SAS or something. It's just just start small and gradually gradually build up your confidence and experience.

54:06

Um, now when it comes to your tech stack to get started, you can use Slack. You could even use WhatsApp just to work with your warm connections for these first few clients.

I put down Slack cuz it's good practice to get familiar with it, but Slack is of course going to cost you a bit of money. But Slack, Google Meet, Google Calendar, Calendarly, which will cost you 20 $30 a month initially,

54:22

I think. And then Stripe.

So that's your tech stack starting off at this point. And then we have the estimated cost and profit margins at this phase.

And this is going to be based off the revenue share model if you're doing a 20% revenue share and you're making 5K per month. Then your cost will be around $1,000 per month, which is going to your freelance AI developer in exchange for

54:38

uh their services and helping you fulfill those projects. So that startup phase just purely focusing on getting things off the ground and building a little bit of momentum and experience.

The next phase is phase two called early growth. And this is from $5 to $10,000 per month.

The team that you have in this early growth phase of your journey. It's going to be one, two, or even three

54:54

freelance AI developers like you had in the startup phase, but this time you're going to have more of them to choose from. As you start to get more leads coming through your warm connections, as you share some of the things that you're doing from that startup phase with them and say, "Hey, this is what we've built." You're going to see a lot more things sort of shaken out of the trees.

And as you get more of these leads in

55:11

coming, you need to expand your ability to deliver on those. and that's going to be with more than one developer.

And so by going into the free community and getting one or two more freelance AR developers that you have a relationship with will allow you to take these these incoming warm leads and and sort of get a statement of work together and say hey look this is what we're going to build.

55:27

Are you interested like can you make me a bit of a proposal or say like why you should get this project and then you can say okay great let's move forward we'll do a revenue share on this 20 to 30% depending on how good they are and the size of the project and things like that. And at the same time you should also be hiring a virtual assistant or a VA.

Um, this is going to be really your

55:44

admin support to help you to start to build your first set of systems and scale your warm outreach in this case. So, you can see the focus is here scaling your warm outreach.

So, this means instead of you doing all of the messaging and follow-ups manually, you have to do quite a lot of tracking to make sure you're doing this systematically and not just doing kind

55:59

of willy-nilly. the virtual assistant.

The first role of that is going to be coming in is to help you manage that warm outreach process, making sure that you are reaching out to enough people per day and making sure that you are also sending follow-ups and and tracking the conversations and saying, "Hey, look, this person's ready for a call, etc." Having a bit of help so that you're not constantly in the DMs all day

56:16

or or emailing people constantly. Having a virtual assistant who can help you with that is a big step and first step towards you really building some acquisition systems.

As you see here, uh the quote for this phase is, "I'm getting the hang of things, but it still feels like chaos. I'm setting up my first acquisition system that runs while I sleep and learning how to manage

56:32

projects. So, the virtual assistant coming in to help you with that warm outreach and scaling of the warm outreach is key so that you can keep the the lead flow coming in.

And the other focus for you in this period is to start creating content and sharing the client wins from phase one and phase two um to build your authority and credibility in

56:48

the in the public eye basically. So, starting the long journey of content creation here is key because it's going to take a decent amount of time before you actually start seeing some results from it.

So, kicking it off here is key. The text stack remains basically the same, just adding on make or zap here for any internal automations that you need to set up and also for notion for

57:03

internal documentation. So that's the early growth phase.

And as for cost and profit margins, you're looking at around $3,000 per month at that 10k mark because you're going to be paying roughly 30% of your uh revenue to these developers as part of their rev share. So the next phase is establishment and this is going from 10 to 20k per month.

57:20

This phase is really one of the most difficult ones to get right, but also the the thing that really unlocks you to scale much further because as you can see by the team here, we are moving from a set of freelancers to having your own team of developers. And from my experience, you're going to be needing a senior AI developer who is full-time.

You're going to be needing a junior AI

57:36

developer who's also full-time and then your virtual assistant. and you'll be throwing in a bookkeeper here um who can do sort of part-time or contract work for you just to start to to manage the the finances of the business so that you aren't so stuck in and payroll and managing all of the the day-to-day finances which can start to get pretty burdensome around this phase.

The shift

57:52

from using a a gaggle of freelancers to help deliver your projects to having full-time AI developers in your company is such a massive leap forward because if anyone's worked with freelancers before of any sort, you know that particularly if you're finding good ones off Upwork, we found this very early on at Morningside by using Upwork devs or

58:10

just getting started cuz we didn't have any clue how else to get them. But you you become basically client number nine in the list particularly with guys who are well ranked or guys and girls who are wellranked and they're getting a lot of interest on platforms like Upwork.

And so unless you're finding really low-key freelancers through my free free community, which I'd say there's a good chance of getting them, in most cases,

58:25

really good freelancers are going to have multiple projects going at once, which means that in some cases, you're going to be bottom of their priority list. Um, which results in all sorts of issues with client communications, um, or them really just phoning it in, doing the bare minimum, and then that all of that heat from the client comes on to you and like, hey, why is this person

58:41

not responding? Like, why is this not up to scratch?

So, this becomes the issue with scaling with freelancers. And I cannot stress enough how important it is to get some AI developers who are working for you full-time.

It's like the only thing you're working on is our client projects and the quality work just goes through the roof once you make

58:56

the shift as a non-technical AI automation agency founder. These senior AI devs are basically the ones who are architecting the builds for you.

It's really a case of there being two sides to a lot of the AI development you guys will do through your agencies. And the first is sort of understanding the needs of the client and okay translating that

59:11

to how we're going to approach it. research the architecture.

This planning how you're going to approach the builds is a significant part of the work. And then after that, the rest is just the doing and sort of executing on what you said.

You throw in a little bit there of also troubleshooting. Okay, when something doesn't happen, who's the brain power that's going to try to solve

59:27

it? And that's why you need a senior AI developer.

Someone who does have that capability to architect the the system to work work with the client and understand what they're trying to get out of it and to then communicate that to in this case your junior AI developer for them to do a lot of the grunt work so that your senior AI developer can

59:43

handle a lot of other work themselves and pass off the grunt work to the junior AI developer. So that's that junior and senior dynamic and the split.

Again, I go into way more detail on these kinds of developers in my hiring guide for developers. I'll put that in the description.

But your senior AI developer is really key hire. your junior AI developer to do all the leg

59:58

work as a key hire, both full-time virtual assistant to keep helping you with admin tasks and of course your bookkeeper to handle those finances. Your focus as the founder in this phase is going to be scaling that content production up and really trying to get some results out of it now because at this 10 to 20k per month level and now that you've got your senior AI developer and your junior developer and all of

00:15

these things at a fixed cost on your payroll each month, you need to be able to consistently generate leads and you can't just rely on your warm warm connections anymore. You need to have a system for consistently bringing in new new business and the content is the best way to not only attract those but also to nurture them and make sure that

00:30

they're actually likely to sign with you and see you as the kind of person that they want to work with. So scaling that content output whether it's YouTube, whether it's LinkedIn, whether it's Twitter, whether you want to write on Medium, just picking something and doing it really well so that you can start to generate leads consistently.

And the other half of that content side is building an email list for consistent

00:46

lead generation moving forward. So, I've talked about this before, but part of the reason that we've never really had to worry about doing at running ads or or doing having to shake some extra trees for leads at Morningside, we've been booked out basically for two months ahead for the past year or more.

That comes down to us capturing thousands and

01:01

thousands of emails of businesses who want to work with us through our contact form. Pretty basic way, but we haven't really had to stress this too much because we've had so much interest.

But through all of those emails we've collected, when there's ever a need for us to bring on more clients, we've got vacancies available. we'll just send out an email and say, "Hey, look, we have

01:16

one or two slots available. If you're interested, please book a call here." And that's how we've consistently signed clients and allowed us to support a a significant payroll of developers and and other team members to help us run the business.

So, as you can see here, the estimated costs have shone up because you take on the senior aid and the junior AI developer, which I'm going

01:33

to be breaking down their recommended monthly salaries at the end, like I mentioned. But this is the phase where you do have to eat a lot of cost and the profit margin is going to drop down massively.

Like you see here 27.5% but once you throw on softwares and some other things it could be even lower than that. Um so this is really the phase where you're not taking any money home.

01:49

It's going all back in and you were just trying to grind through this phase and get that lead generation built up so that you're not only making enough money to support and pay for these new devs that you brought on but to actually get some kind of ROI and allow you to scale beyond this with that existing team. So this is really the first foothold in starting an agency because it's like

02:05

okay I actually have my own team now. Now I need to crank the lead generation so that I can actually support them and continue to make money moving forward at greater profit margins than this in the later stages.

The tech stack for this is all the same apart from throwing on kit which is a email marketing platform um which you're going to be using to build

02:20

your list. You can make lead magnets and sort of send traffic to it from your content.

They can sign up to it, put them into your email list and then also send newsletters and broadcast to them. So that's your whole email capture and email marketing platform which I'd highly recommend to use.

And the quote for this phase is, "My lead flow is consistent enough to hire full-time developers, but I need to keep pushing

02:36

on content and email capture in order to scale further." Then we're getting into stage four, which is scaling from 20 to 50K per month. So, the main hire for this phase is going to be a CTO, which is like your senior AI developer on steroids.

This is someone who can not only plan and architect these builds, but also manage a a larger team

02:52

underneath them, not just a senior and junior dev in this phase, but also moving forward. So, it's a very forwardthinking uh hire and you need to make sure that they're a great fit for you and and they have the capabilities to manage a team but also know how to architect builds as well.

So, the CTO um also kind of helps you out on the sales

03:08

side. If you are have been taking all of the sales calls yourself, then the CTO can start to hop on these calls for you either with you on the call as well once you I probably recommend you do that for a month or two and bring them up to speed on how to run the sales calls and then you can start letting the CTO to take the calls themselves which is going to be a huge time unlock for you.

03:24

when you were hiring for that CTO role, it becomes even more difficult because not only do they need to know the technical side, but also need to be able to talk to clients and be and be client facing as well and be able to take them through that sales process. So very difficult to find a good one u but well worth your while and you're going to see the compensation estimates in a bit.

03:40

but it can be pretty eye watering at times. So you've got the CTO and then under them is the senior AI dev, the junior AI dev, your virtual assistant and then your finance as as we had before and the CTO is going to be managing all of those devs.

The focus for this phase is going to be optimizing the onboarding and service delivery processes as you're going to be really

03:56

taking on a significant volume of projects per month. So you need to make sure that that onboarding process and so your prompt engineering process and your review process for your build all of these things are actually documented rather than just doing things by the seat of your pants.

Um in this phase that's so critical or things are going to get really messy very quick. And then

04:12

of course in order to get to $50,000 per month your content creation and email marketing needs to be consistent as well. The quote for this phase is things are getting chaotic again.

I'm out of my depth. They need help to bring order and set up delivery systems so that we can continue to scale.

So this is really a moment of understanding, hey, I need

04:28

help here. I'm like many of you may not be coming from technical backgrounds.

If you are a nontechnical founder coming in and running a a basically a form of development company at 30 to $40,000 per month, you're going to start to see, hey, look, I don't really I'm a bit out of my depth here. I don't know how to manage so many projects at once.

I don't

04:44

know how to work with developers and manage tickets and stuff like this. And that's why you bring in a CTO who can do that managerial side and really bring a bit of development expertise into the organization and can set up things like you can see on the tech stack here.

There's a whole bunch of different ones you can choose from. Jira is the one

04:59

that we use at Morningside AI and it's worked really really well for us. And when you have a CTO who comes in and knows how to use Jira for your project management and this phase you can see that the profit margins are increasing a bit again thankfully.

Um but you're taking on a big cost of that CTO. So that's eating up a lot of that growth that you take, but it's much better than

05:14

that establishing phase where you've taken on so many new people, but your revenue levels are still pretty low. Finally, the last phase is expansion, and this is from 50 to $100,000 per month.

So the team here is going to be your CTO. You're going to have a senior AI developer as before, but you're going to have three junior AI developers

05:30

underneath them. So in this case, you could maybe throw in another senior AI developer depending on the kinds of projects you're doing or depending on how good your team is and how well your CTO is managing things.

But basically expanding that set of junior developers. so that your senior and your CTO can be taking care of a lot of the planning and and and directing them on what they need

05:46

to do and the grunt work is being done by the junior AI developer so that you don't take on too much cost. I've also thrown in here a consultant which I'll touch on in a second.

Then you've got your virtual assistant, a fractional CFO instead of just a bookkeeper. So, he's sort of upgrading your finance capabilities at this phase cuz he's handling quite a lot of money now.

And

06:03

then throwing in to help you on the marketing side, a CMO, a chief marketing officer, and then a copywriter as well to help with things like email copy and also content creation. And we also have a product/client relations manager in here as well.

And this is what we found at Morningside to be really necessary for the bigger projects that you take on. Having someone who's in charge of

06:19

managing the client and being sort of the in between the client and the devs and making sure that everyone's on the same page and putting someone responsible of you are responsible for this particular project going ahead has been super helpful for us. So having a product owner/client relations manager has been a really key role for us in allowing us to scale further.

The

06:35

focuses for this phase are going to be hiring and training processes. as you're bringing in so many of these junior AI developers, um you need to make sure that they are being onboarded and trained right for working in your organization.

This is how you're supposed to do prompt engineering within our organization. This is how we do reviews and all of these things need to

06:50

be streamlined and and clearly documented so that you can onboard new devs without this really clunky like 2 month period of just them bashing into stuff until they finally learn how it actually works. So documenting it and working on those training processes as soon as those new hires come in and then also diversifying your offering away

07:06

from strictly implementation to things like AI consulting or AI education. And when it comes to this diversifying of your offering away from strictly development, uh the quote here breaks it down.

So we've built a capable development shop. So we've got a really good development shop on our hands.

We've got a great team. We are able to deliver quality projects.

Now it's time

07:23

to diversify our income and build a support team for me on the marketing side. Basically, we have the AI expertise now.

we've proven that we know how to do this. We've helped so many of our clients do the same.

Now you can start to like break that that knowledge and expertise into other services. Okay, we can help you with consulting and

07:38

identifying what best use cases can be used within your business or we can make an AI education package to help your organization understand this technology as a whole and you can start to sell different services to different segments, not necessarily just those businesses who are ready for AI implementation within their business. So that's what the consultant represents in

07:54

that team. it's expanding outside of implementation to say a3 or $5,000 of a of a consulting package.

Or you might put together some kind of workshop and the consultant hops on and and educates a business for a few thousand for a 2-hour workshop. There's these kind of options that open up now that you actually have the credibility of we

08:11

build AI stuff for businesses. We know what we're talking about.

That's why you don't start with education and consulting immediately. You do need to kind of learn the ropes and figure out what actually works so you can go back and sell those services with some kind of credibility.

You can get away with it just immediately, but the credibility

08:26

really comes from we have this this we've done. This is why we can tell you or direct your business on how to implement on your AI strategy moving forward.

And so finally, as promised, the compensation estimates are here. Um these are just the starting monthly cost.

You will likely get people asking for pay rises or they're performing

08:42

really well. So you want to increase their pay, but this is roughly the the starting monthly costs or or starting fees that you're going to have for these different staff members.

So, the revenue share developer, you can start off at 20% or 30% depending on how the negotiation goes. Um, so that's for the early stages where you're taking on, hey, I have a $3,000 project.

If you

09:00

want to build it for me, we can do a rev share. You get 30%.

Even again, it depends on the on the person you're working with. But if you can get around that 20 to 30%, that's ideal.

Then your virtual assistant, you can expect to pay about $1,000 a month for that. If they're working around the clock, you might not have that much work for them.

So, it might be less, but if you're talking about a full-time virtual

09:16

assistant, that's about how much you're going to be paying. Your senior AI devs will start at $8,000.

Your junior AI devs will start at $5,000. Your bookkeeper and finance will start at $500 to $1,000 a month depending on the level of services that you need.

Then your CTO comes in at a whopping $12,000 per month, which is why we wait a little

09:32

bit longer to get them involved. The CMO can be around $6,000 a month.

Your copywriter can be three. Then you have your product and client relations manager, which can cost around $5,000 a month as well.

So again, these are starting prices. you may be able to find cheaper elsewhere, but these are just the costs that we've encountered at Morningside AI in order to get good

09:47

talent at these different levels of uh levels of seniority and across all of these different roles in general. So, hope that's been helpful.

Um, I tried to bake in as much of my experience over the past nearly 2 years of building these businesses um into that. I really hope that that's demystified a lot of these different things like what should I be focusing on and when.

I will be

10:02

putting the slideshow on my free school community. There's a little post you can find in the YouTube resources.

This entire slideshow will be on there for you guys to take if you want. But yeah, that's all for the video.

Today I've got a quick video breaking down general versus niched AI automation agencies, the two different methods or

10:19

main methods in the market right now and why choosing wrong could be the biggest mistake you make in your journey. So it's so vital that you pick the right one and in this video I want to break it down and give you a step-by-step strategy.

So here's the key takeaways. Understand the key difference between niched and general AAA's.

Uh knowing the pros and cons of each of the models, uh

10:35

deciding which one of these is best for your unique situation. And finally, I'll be ending the video with a six-step action plan to start your own, depending on which one is right for you.

So, if by the end of the video, it's clear that a niche agency is right for you, you'll get a six-step plan to start one. And if by the end of the video, a general one is clearly right for you, you're going

10:51

to get a six-step process to start your own general agency. So, let's get into it.

And for full transparency, because I know YouTube could do with a lot more of that. Um, I make these videos so that I can educate you to start your own AI agency and and successfully run one so that you can become a potential customer for the software that I make for successful AI agency owners.

So the more

11:07

money you make with AI automation agency and the one that you start, the more customers I have my SAS and the more I can potentially sell my SAS for eventually. So um if if you don't win, I don't win.

And that's why we're kind of in this thing together. So So let's do this.

General first niche agencies. First example we can look at is in

11:22

nature. So in nature there are ecological niches.

All organisms adapt through natural selection if that's what you choose to believe. But they adapt to fulfill different ecological niches.

And we have either specialists or generalists. In this case here, you can see a koala and a panda.

They are specialists. They have a narrow niche.

Uh they're less adaptable because they

11:39

have specialized needs. They are more likely to become extinct because they're less adaptable to change.

Um they use a specific set of resources. I think koalas just eat eucalyptus leaves of eucalyptus trees all the time.

Um so you get the idea. Specialists are very narrow.

They they occupy one little area of the wider ecosystem, but they do it

11:56

well and they escape competition by uh succeeding within the small niche. And then we have generalists who have a broad niche.

They are adaptable to many environments, therefore less likely to become extinct, and they use a variety of resources to to survive, right? Um, so these are the two different types.

And you can see obviously we've got rats

12:12

and raccoons as being generalist, and they're much more hearty. I mean, alligators and stuff like this that have been around basically unchanged for for millions of years.

Then we have specialists on the other side. And the specialists are typically where the majestic and interesting animals are, while generalists are sort of functional and they don't have too many frills.

12:27

we can learn a lot from nature and how these different organisms adapt and the benefits and drawbacks of being specialists or generalists as you're going to see reappear throughout this presentation. So firstly we have general agencies in the in the AI automation agency space.

An example of this is my own agency morning site AI which is basically a if you want it we can build

12:44

it. So we have the capabilities in the team to basically deliver anything as long as it's within the realm of possibility right so this consists of a team of AI developers.

We've got some low code specialists as well that are a little bit cheaper. If you haven't seen my hiring video I'd check it out up here.

That's a very important one that I posted last week. And we have some front

12:59

end devs as well. So, you're not always going to have front end devs, but because we do some some full platform buildouts at Morningside, we also have front end devs on hand, too.

And the usual sales process for general agencies is a discovery call, then going to scope it, you do a proposal, and you sign a deal. So, it's very much what do you need?

Let's figure it out. Let's get on the same page.

Okay, this is how much

13:14

it's going to cost. Great.

Let's get going. And so, the pros and cons of the general agency model.

Uh the pros are firstly that you don't need an offer and that if you set your agency upright and your lead generation systems are solid, people will be coming to you and telling you what they want. So because you don't need an offer and you don't need to identify what these people need and and

13:31

sell it to them. They're going to come and tell you what they want.

So it's a lot easier to start. You can say we have the team, you have the problem, let us know what you want and we'll try to build it for you.

So easier to start because you don't need to do market research and come up with an offer. Secondly, we have a larger TAM or total addressable market.

I put asterisk on

13:46

the TAM because I think it's a bit silly to be talking about, oh, but my market is bigger than yours cuz I mean it's we're so new to it that there's very few service providers in these different niches. So, that's not a major, but essentially you have a larger pool of people that you can sell to.

Thirdly, as a general agency, you get to taste a lot

14:01

of different niches. Um, because you're working with anyone who comes to you, you get to see how AI can be applied in different industries, which can be very helpful for you as the agency owner to build up a better mental model and understanding of how AI can help businesses.

So at Morningside, I've learned so much from seeing the different businesses that we work with. And it helps me to communicate a lot of

14:18

the stuff to you, which is why I why why I know so much. Basically, number four is that as a general agency, you're more nimble and adaptable by not being specifically focused on one niche or one offer.

You're able to change and update whenever you need to. So when OpenAI drops an update, you can go back to clients and say, "Hey, look, GPT5's come out.

Do you want this? Oh, there's this

14:34

new product coming out from Google. Okay, do you want this?" You're very nimble and adaptable.

Or you can start offering consulting and you can pivot in any direction you want. And that's that's the last point here which is you can always niche down later.

So if you unnimble your you do see a good opportunity then you can narrow down your agency to a specific area which is

14:49

what I recommend you guys doing if you start an agency like a general one. Then we have the cons of the general agency.

Firstly because you're a general agency you're not seen as a specialist and therefore the value of your services is perceived as lower by the people that you're going to be selling to which can be an issue if you were AI. I mean hypothetically if you had an e-commerce

15:05

customer and you had two agencies competing for it. one was a specialized e-commerce AI agency and one was just a general agency.

Um, which one would you choose? Right?

So, that's that's the basic concept of not being seen as a specialist. Secondly, you have lower reusability and therefore lower profits.

So, this goes back to what I covered in

15:20

my my hiring video as well that I recommend you go watch. But, when you are selling uh as a general agency, you're likely going to be taking clients from all different industries.

Every single time someone comes in, it's going to be new and you need to plan it and build it from scratch. So, there's less reusability between clients.

But if you're doing a niche agency, as you're

15:36

going to see in a second, you can sell basically the same thing over and over and over again just with minor tweaks between them. So less reusability.

You're building it from scratch every time. Therefore means there's lower profits because there's more time and manh hours being put into uh every single one of those projects on in general.

You know, you can you can tweak

15:52

around the margins, etc. But as a general rule of thumb, it's going to be lower profits.

Thirdly, as a general agency, you're likely not going to have any offers and say we build X for Y amount of money. You can I've seen some people experiment with it, but I haven't done it myself.

Uh but it's harder to market yourself when you don't have an offer. You don't know who you're

16:07

supposed to reach out to and you can't really angle it and say we make X for Y businesses by doing Z. So it makes it a little bit harder to market your services.

Now fourth, we have a higher complexity and therefore a higher issue rate. So if you're building customcoded stuff from scratch every time or you're building not necessarily custom coded, but if you're building custom projects

16:23

from scratch every time um to the client's needs, you're therefore going to have a higher issue rate. you're going to have more problems that come up because when you're reinventing the wheel every time and and coming up with a new solution, you're to some degree testing and and and making a hypothesis and and seeing if that's right.

And when it's wrong, you have to go back and and

16:39

continue to to work on the project and bring more developers in, etc. So, a higher issue or problem rate typically results in lower client satisfaction and also lower profits because you're tending to spend more time going back and and paying your developers to work on the same problem that you've already solved.

So, it's it's it's highly inefficient if you don't have the right

16:55

talent. Number five one here is less compounded credibility.

And this comes from by doing projects in a bunch of different niches and you're not consistently delivering one or or building up some kind of track record. When you go to pitch another client and they say, "What have you done?" Well, I've done 10 other projects in completely different industries, your perceived expertise is lower and

17:12

therefore your it's going to be harder to close those deals and you can charge you won't be able to charge as much. So, um, as you'll see with the niche example, it's a lot different there, but you have less compounding credibility because all your projects spread out across different industries.

Next point here is that you're going to need more expensive devs. This is because if

17:27

you're building on request and you're building custom solutions for your clients each time. Um then you're going to need to hire people who are smarter or have more experience and are better able to solve problems and architect solutions as well.

So you're naturally going to be spending more to get developers who are capable enough to come up with these custom solutions

17:42

every time. And finally, there's actually less bang for your buck for your clients when you are doing custom development solutions.

A good example of this is a student of mine, Isaiah, who's built an AI appointment setting system for Instagram DMs for coaches. And I believe it's a $5,000 package at the moment with some usage attached to it.

He can sell that to his his clients for

17:58

$5,000 plus usage, right? Um because he's put in all the work and he's built the product and it now has a thing that he can just reuse and and resell.

So he can sell it for $5,000 because he knows he's going to be able to sell multiple of it. But if that same client came to me and my team at Morningside and we do everything custom and from scratch, when

18:13

they come to us, I'd need to charge him $30,000, $50,000, $60,000 just to try and rebuild what Isaiah and his team as a niche agency have done. So the client is technically getting less bang for their buck.

they're having to pay more to get the same thing if you are always doing custom projects as a as a general agency. So next we have niche agencies

18:28

which is basically you have a problem and I've built the solution. Um you have a single product or even a suite of products that address some problems within a given niche or market and for your team you need to have some kind of product lead or or lead developer who's leading the development of the product and improvement and a team of deliverers

18:44

potentially. So you can have a guy who's okay this is our product this is what we need to do.

these are the new features we need to add and they can build build build but then whenever a new client comes in and says hey I want to buy your niche solution you just have some junior developers who your lead developer or product lead can actually pass the the the template to one of your junior

19:00

developers and they can go in and deliver it for the clients. So you've got the brains and you've got some junior developers who can actually do the the grunt work of delivering it to the different clients as you on board them.

So, as I said, my student Isaiah has this AI appointment setting system for Instagram DMs for for coaches. And this is his website here.

And they clearly specialize in chat bots. In this

19:17

case, AI appointment setting systems for their businesses. So, jumping into the pros and cons and the pros of the niche agency are naturally the inverse of the general agency.

So, you are seen as a specialist. You have higher reusability and therefore higher profit.

you have a clear offer, so it's easier to market

19:32

yourself and really laser target the people that you're trying to contact and and say things that connect with them and and make them want to purchase. And fourth, you have a lower complexity when you're doing the delivery and therefore a lower issue rate because these delivery junior developers are just going to be taking the the system or the template that you provided and they can

19:48

just copy and paste it across different people and tweak it based on the client's needs. Um, therefore, you have a lower issue rate because you're not building it from scratch every time.

And I have asterisks here just to point out that the lower complexity is only after you've built that first version or or a satisfactory version of the product and then it's relatively easy to to

20:04

distribute that out. But the building of of a solid product that provides real value is is very difficult as you can see on the con side.

So um fifth point here is that you get more compounding credibility. You're selling the same thing over and over and you can say we've helped 20 businesses just like you to achieve XYZ and you get real data

20:20

points and suddenly you're making much more compelling offers. And finally, uh, you get to use less expensive devs for those deliverers.

You know, once you're actually distributing it and and putting it onto clients businesses, you can use less expensive devs that don't need to reinvent the wheel every time. Jumping into the cons, these again are kind of the inverse of the the pros of the

20:36

general model. Um, and that you first need to solve a real problem.

Um, therefore, it is harder to start. You need to identify, do some market research or understand a niche yourself, be able to identify something, say, there is a problem in the industry.

I think I can solve it with AI and then you need to actually build the solution. So, it's it's a lot harder to start

20:52

because you might spend 3 months thinking you're solving a problem and getting to the end and realizing no one wants it, which is really the risk with the general agency. Um, secondly, you have a smaller total addressable market again with an asterisk um because you're narrowing down to serving only a certain set of people.

You're less nimble and adaptable. So, if OpenAI drops a big

21:08

update and just wipes you out if you're not careful, that's a real risk for running a niche agency and something you need to to factor into your decision to go into one. Fourth point here is that it's hard to generalize and step back once you've niched down.

So say I I say I build um automation systems for XYZ

21:24

niche that solve XYZ problem and and I've based my whole agency and my whole brand around we do this very specific thing. It's hard if you bought the domain and made the website and and talked to a whole bunch of people and made a whole bunch of posts on your YouTube channel.

It's hard to generalize and roll back after that if you've already niched down. So that's one of

21:40

the cons is that it's it's really hard to go it's easy to go down. It's hard to go back.

And finally, creating a good product that actually solves a problem and that people want to that climbing overhand and fist to get access to is hard. Finding product market fit is hard, but once you can achieve it and once you get there, it is worthwhile.

21:56

And so with these in mind, which one is best for you and your unique situation? So, uh, for general agencies, if you don't have any clear experience in in a niche, say you haven't worked in in the accounting space or the financial services industry for 10, 20 years, and you don't really understand a niche

22:12

inside out, you haven't maybe run a business in the space before and understand, I mean, I had a landscaping business. I know that that's a really good problem and I I could very easily go in and solve it.

If you don't have clear experience that's giving you ideas for problems to solve, um, then a general agency is probably the best option. And secondly, if you don't have a bunch of connections that can allow

22:28

you to start having conversations with business owners in a certain area that can give you insights on what problems they're trying to solve um or have connections that you can sell to or use as a referral partners to distribute your solutions later on once it's done. So if you don't have experience, you don't have clear connections, then a general agency is probably the best

22:43

route for you. And starting a general agency doesn't require a ton of upfront capital.

I didn't have to invest a huge amount of money into Morningside to get it off the ground. I just started making my YouTube videos and we were off to the races once the leads started coming in.

And if you are new to business, a general agency can be a better starting point for people getting into entrepreneurship as well. It allows you

22:59

to learn the skills more slowly and gradually than to throw yourself head first into a niche agency. Now, for a niche agency, uh if you have the industry experience, like I said, you know the pain points of a given industry and you can go straight in there and say, "I'm going to solve this problem." If you have a strong pool of connections that you can start using to distribute

23:14

this solution once it's done, that's great. If you do have some capital on hand or you have some money that you can invest into building a solution, you might need to go to a developer or a development team and say, "I know what I need.

Here's the money. Build it and then I can go and sell it." So that's in the case where some capital will be very helpful for you in starting your niche

23:30

agency. And finally, being experienced in business can be very helpful when you're starting a niche agency because you you understand how a business works overall.

Okay, there's sales teams, there's lead generation, there's this, this when you understand end to end how businesses work, it's much clearer and it's much easier to identify where you can provide value. So just pause the

23:46

video now have a think is based on these criteria on screen is a general one best for me or is a niche agency best for me and the way I've formatted this should help. If it's bolded you have to have it.

So if you're going to choose niche you have to have the industry experience you have to have a strong pool of connections but these are are nice to have haves but if you're looking at being a general agency owner you

24:02

shouldn't have any significant experience and you shouldn't have any significant connections in which case you would have been over there. So make sure that you stick to the way that I formatted these cuz these are nice to haves.

These are must haves. So now that you know which type of agency is best for you, you need this sixstep strategy on how to start.

So with general agencies, this is the fastest route to

24:18

start and and get up and running that I would recommend. Firstly, start a personal brand as I have done here on YouTube.

Whether that's LinkedIn, YouTube, u Medium or Twitter, whatever you want to choose, just pick one and do it well. Secondly, you need to start tinkering with AI solutions and learn the platforms that I talk about here on the channel.

So you need to at least

24:33

become familiar with the tools that we use to deliver the solutions and get an idea of, okay, this is the value that I can start to create. So at least a fundamental understanding can be gained from tinkering around and watching my tutorials.

Thirdly, you need to start sharing your builds and your learnings on your personal brand platform, whether that's LinkedIn or YouTube, etc. This is

24:49

going to start to build your authority and also lead to growth on these platforms as well. This is what I've done on YouTube.

You can scroll back and see my entire history of doing this on this channel. So fourth, uh you need to offer free consulting calls that can help businesses with AI.

And this can be done through posting, say on LinkedIn, you're making posts and saying, "Hey, if

25:04

you're interested, you can book a consulting call with me here for free." And at the same time, you should also be doing warm reach outs to anyone that you have access to and saying, "Hey, would anyone that you know be interested in the stuff that I've been posting about on my LinkedIn or my on my YouTube?" Using content and warm reach outs is how you're going to start to have conversations with business owners,

25:19

which is going to lead you down the down the road towards actually signing your first couple of clients. And in this case, number five, I say start working for free.

So, use the skills that you got from tinkering around, start to put it into practice, and actually working with real businesses and real real systems and real data. Uh it's really key to step up from tinkering to actual

25:36

delivering or at least mocking up some prototypes for these free clients. And finally, once you've got the raw rolling and you've got some rhythm, you're building your confidence, you can then start to increase your prices and hire your first developer using the the video that I've done that I've mentioned already, which will be down in the description if you didn't catch up there.

Next, as a niche agency, it's a

25:51

bit of a different strategy. Firstly, you need to identify a problem to solve.

And this should be either from your experience or using your connections experience to identify the problem that you want to solve. So once you've got a problem to solve, you can then start to create the prototype yourself by tinkering around with the tool.

Same sort of thing. Or you can hire a developer.

And I recommend doing that

26:07

through my school community. Go on to the school first link in the description.

Free to sign up. Put a post up.

Hey, I have clients in XYZ niche who really want me to build XYZ for them. Is there anyone in here who can do it for me?

Number three, once you have a working prototype or a first version of the product that you're looking to sell, go and show it to your warm connections

26:23

and ideally find your first client from one of them and start to implement it and test it on their business. Step number four is to continually invest in improving this product until that client is happy.

So, put in the work, put in the hours, invest money, whatever you need to do to continue to iterate this product towards being something that you can actually start charging for. Um,

26:39

number five, you need to start finding more people like that first client that you helped and and got a happy result for using strategies like warm reachouts. Contact people that you know and say, "Hey, I built this thing.

Would you or someone you know be interested in trying it out in their business xyz?" You can also start posting content on these different platforms. You can start

26:54

running ads if you want, and you can even start doing cold reachouts or or cold outreach to different people who have never even heard of you before. And step number six is to continue improving the product, continue increasing your prices as you go, and before you know it, you're running a successful niche agency.

All righty. So, key takeaways, making sure that I've done everything I

27:09

said I do in this video. Firstly, you understand the difference between a niche and general AI automation agency.

Correct? Secondly, you know the pros and cons of each.

Thirdly, you've decided on which one is best for you. And finally, you have a clear plan on your next steps.

27:27

Over the past two years, I've built and sold AI automation systems in every niche imaginable, from international logistics to martial arts to even recently an NBA team. And through my free and paid communities, I've seen the successes and the flops of thousands of AI automation agency owners when it

27:44

comes to niching down. And so, I'm pretty uniquely positioned to know what's working and what isn't when it comes to AI automation agency niches.

And so in this video, I wanted to make sure as many of you as possible start the year on the right foot by revealing my number one pick for AI automation agency niches in 2025. So if you want to

28:00

start building an AI business or start making money from the AI space generally, then you can take my exact pick that I would choose right now if I was to start over. Now, niching down is of course an extremely important part of running a business.

It affects basically everything you do from the skills you need to learn like if you're specializing in a certain area, the

28:16

kinds of clients you're going to work with and be targeting and reaching out to, the way your business operates in terms of the size of the deals you're going for, the retainer structure or the payment terms you take. And all of this determines really the the feel and how the business runs.

It's such a significant part of it and it's something I see beginners struggling

28:32

with all the time. So I wanted to sort of clarify firstly what niching down is, right?

So your agency niche is what I I prefer to call as your agency scope and that refers to what you sell and who you sell it to. So your agency scope can be anywhere from completely general to all the way to fully productized service

28:48

where you're selling a specific set of specific product or set of products to a certain set of people or you can be completely general and unleashed and do your best to deliver on everything that people ask you for. And so between this fully general model and the fully productized model of selling a specific set of products to certain people, you

29:03

have a lot in between. And you have basically different shades of niching down, different stages is what we call it.

And so you can niche down by just the industry that you're serving. So I make AI automation solutions for chiropractors or you can niche down by the category of solutions you provide.

So I make AI voice agents. And so that's

29:18

a way of niching down by solution type. And then you can start combining the both.

So you could say, I make AI voice agents for chiropractors or I make AI appointment setting systems or AI receptionist systems for chiropractors. And you can start to combine the industry aspect with the solution category or the solution type.

So it

29:33

could be the category of voice agents or the type of appointment setters or AI receptionists, right? And then you can sort of cross them over and be even more narrowed down by what you sell and who you're selling to.

So that's just a quick update if you're not familiar on the sort of niching specifics of AI automation agencies and the services we

29:48

provide. Now that we have that out of the way, we can move on to what you all been waiting for, which is my number one pick for 2025.

Now, as some of you have probably guessed, this is a bit of a trick question, and I'm not just going to give you one niche because it's actually not the best process for picking the niche. the number one niche for you will be very different to the

30:04

number one niche for me and the diff very different to the number one niche for someone else. Right?

So, give me two seconds and I'll explain this entire process, but I'm going to give you a a a worksheet or a process that you can go through to identify the number one niche for you because business is all about finding your unfair advantage, your

30:19

unique advantage that puts you far above everyone else and you can really play your advantage and and that's how you get ahead. You never want to be joining the back of the queue or joining dead in the middle where where you are competing with everyone who's on the same level as you.

All of us have innate strengths which I'm going to go through here. Based on your background, based on your

30:35

connections, based on your interest, you need to base your niching strategy on something that gives you a a unique and unfair advantage. For example, in in my business, Morningside AI, we worked out that our unique advantage or unfair advantage is to be building AI automation systems for education and

30:51

coaching businesses. Why?

because I have my own education coaching business that one I deeply understand the problems in and therefore I can make much better systems that people actually want and two I have my own business to test it on. So I'm going to go through this worksheet with you now.

This is actually directly from my accelerator and this is the first thing that people come in when

31:07

they join my program. They go through this worksheet.

So I want to give you guys a little freebie of the stuff that we do inside the accelerator because this is such an important part to get right and I thought the new year let's start everyone off on the right foot as possible. And so for the rest of this video, I'm going to be walking you through the finding your unfair advantage process that I take all accelerator members through.

And at the

31:24

end, I'm going to be sharing with you how you can get this worksheet yourself. And so you can go away and fill that all out and get the best niche for you in 2025.

So this process of finding your unfair advantage is really a self audit. And it's broken into four different stages of business access, experience, connections, and interest.

So I'm just going to walk through what each of these

31:39

is about and why it's so important that you analyze this first in order to direct you towards a niche that's best for you. So firstly we have business access which basically means do you have a business that you have access to whether it's your own.

Some people come into this business model with their own business that they're coming from or do

31:54

you have access to maybe your your parents or your aunties or your uncles or or or your best friends or someone close to you who has a business who will basically give you access to that business where you can go in and try to identify use cases for AI automation and you have a very free roam and and low pressure environment to experiment and

32:11

test. This is such a huge advantage and you should absolutely niche down to wherever you have access to a business because it gives you that space to experiment and learn it.

I promise you if you were coming into this brand new and you're maybe not familiar with AI automation as a skill set and actually doing the technical side or you've never run a business before or both then this

32:28

kind of freedom that you have and and safe space to innovate and test and and learn and stumble is the most important thing that you could get and by far the most valuable thing that you could have. So that's number one, business access.

And by the end of this process, I'm going to explain sort of the grading criteria on what you should prioritize and when. But first one is business

32:45

access. And I've got a little stat here for you.

According to Startup Genome, on average, startups have to pivot upwards of seven times for achieving product market fit. So when you come into this new business and you're trying to find a solution that you can sell that is really creating value for people and you can sell repeatedly to other businesses,

33:01

you may have to go into this business you have access to and try this and try this and try this up to seven or more times until you find something that's actually worthwhile. So that's just like setting the expectations and when you have that safe environment to do it by far the best thing.

So that should be your number one pick. The second part of this self audit is centered around

33:17

experience. So all of your past experience and the idea with this is that if you have maybe worked in the landscaping industry before or worked in the insurance space before, the experience that you gained in those years or maybe decades that you worked in it is going to allow you to understand the unique problems that that industry faces so that you can create a

33:33

product or service around solving that problem. Business is all about value creation through problem solving.

And so the core of anything you're trying to do when you're starting a new business is finding a valuable problem to solve. And so the experience you've gained allows it's firsthand experience, right?

So this is allowing you to really pinpoint and target something that you know is

33:49

painful that you are kind of data backed is what I try to tell all the accelerator members. Try to find some either firsthand or secondhand data that this is a problem that's worth solving so that you can start off on the right foot.

I have another a stat here. Basically, this is going to remove a lot of the guesswork for you because if you come into a niche where you're

34:04

completely new to it, you're going to go, I'll go on Reddit. I'll watch some YouTube videos.

Sure, you can you can guess your way, but it is literally guessing what problems need to be solved. And again, I want to remind you of that stat.

Startups have to pivot upwards of seven times before achieving product market fit where they have something that really serves the needs of the market that they're trying to

34:20

serve. So, by doing this and prioritizing niching down based on your experience and understanding problems that that particular niche has, you get to eliminate as much of that guesswork and sort of jumping around as possible.

And ideally, you just bang the nail on the head the first time. It's probably not going to happen.

You probably are

34:36

going to need a couple little pivots with the product or the service that you do, but you can sort of get the general area right first time. And that's why experience is so important.

The third stage of the self audit is based on your connection. So, who you know, who you have relationships with.

They might have been friends, colleagues, anyone in your family even. Basically any connections

34:52

that will allow you to either firstly talk to them and say hey what problems and try to like leech off their experience and like I said the experience of firsthand like what problems are actually in this industry is ideal but if you have connections who have maybe 10 years experience in a certain industry you can have a conversation with them and say hey look

35:08

what are the main problems that you're facing on the dayto-day can you sit down with me for a bit maybe you need to pay them a little bit if you're not very good friends with them or the connection isn't very strong or if it's a family member take them out for dinner or or go make dinner for them if you're truly trying to be a good family member and have a chat with them. Say, "Walk me through the biggest problems you're

35:24

facing in your business." And really try to absorb all of the information and understanding they have of their niche and the problems that they face so that you can then go and create some ideas of services and products you can recommend to them. Say, "Hey, how would you like this?

What about this? If I could build this automation that would take this off your plate, would that be really valuable?" And you just use them as a

35:39

sounding board and go back and forth. And the second part of why connections can be so valuable is that one firstly they could be a a first client for you or a free client that you get to build it for.

But more importantly, they could also have if they've been in the industry for a long time, have an extensive set of connections and you can say, "Hey, look, let's let's cut a deal

35:55

here. Well, we've we've dialed it in.

We've got it really working on your business or in your example, um, now we can take it and sell to other people. do you want to do a deal where um I can sell it for $4,000 and I'll give you a cut 50/50 or what you know you can do whatever cut you want there just to get things off the ground and they can actually help you with the distribution

36:11

and they can provide referral leads and referral leads according to some of the data that I've I've found for us referrals as in people say your connection referring someone to you and saying hey look I know this guy who's got this really cool AI system or this great AI offer for for your consulting or education according to refer reach

36:26

B2B organizations with referrals encounter a 71% higher conversion rate You also have faster deals overall with 69% of B2B sales personnel believing that referred leads close faster than other leads per refer reach statistics. And finally, you get higher value

36:42

customers through referrals as well. The Wharton School of Business found that referred customers have 16% higher lifetime value on average.

Right? So massive benefits to referrals.

So you can use connections in two ways. Either to learn more about their problems they face and really leverage their understanding of the problems that they face on the dayto-day and then use them

36:58

as distribution partners if possible. So that's why connections are a massive win if you're trying to pick a niche where you have an unfair advantage.

And the final part of the self audit to find your best niche for 2025 is based on your interest. What are you what gets you really excited?

What gets you motivated and you're really curious

37:13

about what what the potential is for this certain area. Your interest maybe centered around a certain niche is then like man I'm really interested in learning how I mean trades people.

I keep using the example of plumbers. I just think it's so interesting that at some point plumbers are going to be using AI throughout their business and I mean someone's going to be the ones to

37:29

facilitate that and sort of map out the the plumber AI stack, you know, I think that's pretty interesting to me. I don't I don't know why.

But if you you may be interested in a certain niche and how AI can affect that and really help businesses grow or or have some impact in overall like there's agriculture cool

37:44

stuff going on. There's healthcare, but I'd probably stick to something sort of more basic service-based business if possible.

But again, your interest is an interest. And aside from just the industry that you could be interested in, you could be interested in the solution type or the category saying, "Hey, like I'm really interested in this AI appointment setting thing.

I think

37:59

there's so much value to be created with these systems and taking humans away from doing this mundane stuff and allowing them to focus I think AI appointment sets are really cool and I really want to go deep on that." Or it might be the solution category. So type is like the specific the category as the whole and the solution category of hey I think these AI voice agents have a lot

38:16

of potential and I'm really interested and I like seeing where that's going. So an interest is an extremely good way of of picking an unfair advantage because if you have like I go back to Naval a lot on this Navar Raikant um he says do what feels like play to you but may look like work to others and this comes back to his concept of specific knowledge and

38:32

he calls that stuff that you you can't go to school and be taught it. So specific knowledge might be knowing end to end how to implement an AI sales co-pilot system.

You can go to school and get taught math. You can go to get school and taught the basics of economics, but you couldn't necessarily go to school or university and be taught end to end how to implement an AI sales

38:49

co-pilot, right? There's a lot of extra I could tell you the steps and you could understand it, but the actual implementation of that, there's a lot of extra stuff and specific knowledge that's gained like the the potholes along the way that you need to dodge.

And so he says specific knowledge like this is extremely valuable and we should all try to find it to be to be very successful. And specific knowledge is

39:05

found much more by pursuing your innate talents, your genuine curiosity, and your passions. If you're not 100% into it, somebody else who is 100% into it will outperform you.

And they won't just outperform you by a little bit. They'll outperform you by a lot.

And so to bring this back to niching down and finding

39:21

your unfair advantages here, I can use the example of myself at least. Um I am absolutely obsessed with this AI and business thing.

And it is just and in content creation as well. This is something it's just I found the perfect mixture of things that interest me and that I'm good at.

And that's why you have seen me if you guys have been

39:36

watching me for a while really just absolutely take off in the past few years. And I'm so grateful for that.

And while I am of course grateful for the monetary stuff and everything that comes with it, but I'm actually more grateful that I found something as a job and as a as a career that combines all of my interest and also matches my my talent

39:52

and skills, if you want to call it that. And I've seen time and time again people try to copy what I'm doing or try to also get into AI cuz they just see it as a shiny object and because they don't actually love it, they just get like a fraction of the results that myself and my team have got.

So please if you are

40:07

looking for any the the interest and something that actually motivates you and you're really interested in is a significant factor but I do see interest and passion as a nice to have in this case and also as a last resort. So if you give me a second I'll break down how these different things.

We've got business access, we've got experience, we've got connections and interest. So

40:23

breaking down the scoring criteria, business access is number one. If you looking to pick your ideal niche for 2025, wherever you have access to a business should be the place you start.

That is by far the most important thing. Even if you're not super interested in it, trust me, if you start making progress and making money from it, you

40:38

kind of get naturally interested in it as well to a certain degree. And if you don't have business access, the second best option is a niche where you have both experience and connections, right?

So if you have experience, know the problems, connections to help sell that and distribute it. That's second best.

And then third best is if you have either connections or experience. So one

40:55

or the other, that's third best. And number four is if you don't have any of those options, you just have some interest in hey oh these these like AI automation and building things on make an air table and stuff seems interest or I'm interested in voice agents.

Just having some kind of interest is the the

41:10

bare minimum and in the bottom bottom tier of this. However, interest can also be added on top of all of those.

So if you have business access and you're really into it, that's even better. If you have business or if you have experience and connections and you're really obsessed about it, then that's even better.

So interest is more of like a nice to have and like a jet fuel or a

41:27

rocket booster that you can strap on to your your niching selection and your business as a whole. But if you do have the business access, experience, connections, etc.

and don't have interest, don't worry about it. But again, to reiterate, priority should be business access and then experience connections.

Interest is a nice to have. And also, if you don't have any of those

41:43

three, then interest is is a is a good last resort. So if you don't have any other option, do what you interested in.

All right, so that's the breakdown. And and if you don't have anything that you're interested in the AI space, then go out and watch some videos.

Go and watch more of my stuff, watch more of other people's videos. There's so much

41:59

out there. If you just find something to latch on to and you go, "Wow, that's interesting." You feel that pull like you want to go and have a have a play around or learn more about it.

That is your niche and that's what you should stick to. So, I want to just wrap this up now.

It's probably been a bit longer than I planned, but I got a little bit of extra explanations in there to share with you guys. But the resource that I

42:15

want to give away is actually directly from the accelerator, as I said. So, my accelerator program, paid program, I have my free community as well.

Soon as they come into my accelerator, they use this exact worksheet that I'm going to give you access to. And to get access to it, it'll be in the first link in the description.

You go in and fill out a little form. Then it's going to be sent to you directly via email.

Um, and

42:31

that's how you can get this entire worksheet that I put my accelerator members through. So, again, sorry to bait and switch you with that title.

But, I hope you got to the end of it and you realize that I'm actually trying to do this for your own good. Don't let someone like me or other people be like, "That's the right niche for you.

You need to do this." Unless I sit down and have a chat with you, of course, and you're on my Q&A in the free community,

42:46

but I don't know. Don't like try to be spoonfed either, oh, I heard there's a lot of money in real estate, so I'll guess we'll go into real estate.

No, use your brain. Follow the exact process I've just given you.

By far the most important thing you can do because you want to do work that feels like play to you or you have a ridiculous unfair advantage

43:04

in struggling to make money with AI, then this graph is probably going to tell you what's wrong with your strategy and uh I'm going to help you fix it and understand everything about this. There's multiple layers to this.

Um, and I've also done an excellent drawing here. So, you can leave a like on the video purely for the drawing.

Um, but

43:19

there's a lot to this and I'm going to try to break it down for you so that you can actually be successful in the AI space because not understanding what this graph means is is the most one of the most common reasons that I'm seeing of people not succeeding cuz it's if you don't understand it, you apply the wrong strategies to acquire customers and it's really like the the foundational

43:35

paradigm of of understanding this the the adoption of AI technology which is what we are writing as AI agency owners. This is called the technology adoption life cycle.

Now what this graph uh outlines and really details let me get

43:51

my other pens here. Um is the adoption of new technologies.

Now we see this it's a pattern that they've recognized. I'm not sure who I attribute it to but uh this is used to describe basically the adoption of any technology.

Um and we have multiple stages here and the multiple stages represent different portions of the population and the speed

44:06

and and rate at which they adopt new technology. So uh firstly we have the innovators, we have the early adopters, we have the early majority, early match um and we have the late majority late match and we have the uh what are these guys?

The laggers, right?

44:23

Lag gods. So these are different sections of the population.

These guys are a handy dandy 2.5%. These guys are a 13.5%.

I don't know who made these numbers up, but someone's smarter than

44:38

me probably. Um, these guys are, I believe it's like 34%.

Um, these guys are another 34%. And these guys are the remainder.

I can't remember exactly what. No one cares about these guys really cuz we're not going to be selling to lagards.

Um, so forgive me for not remember. You do

44:55

the math. You can figure it out.

Um, but so we have the innovators, the early adopters, the early majority, the late majority, and lagards. And in between these two we have what is known as the chasm.

Now it was Jeffrey Moore has a book uh called crossing the chasm and

45:12

this chasm describes um the the gap that forms between early adopters and the early majority that a lot of software companies uh struggle to bridge. So you might get a couple of early adopters to your technology and to your to your software, but you struggle to jump into this bigger pool of people and cross

45:27

this chasm which has got a nice little skull here um over into the early majority so that you can then start to sell it to more people. So why am I telling you this?

Well, we sell technology and AI is the technology that we are selling primarily, right? So if

45:43

we understand how these different segments of the population uh need to be marketed to, how we can find them, what stage we're currently at, if you can understand this stuff fundamentally, then you can create a strategy on how you can create and and run your business that utilizes the the underlying effects

46:00

of the market. So the market dynamics are absolutely key to understand or you're going to use the wrong the wrong paintbrush on the wrong canvas or something.

some fancy analogy there that makes sense. But you're using the wrong tool uh the wrong tool for the job basically.

So these each of these components well these these sectors have

46:16

their own qualities to them. Uh now you need to understand these qualities.

So let's go through them. The innovators are sort of more interested well they might have a lot of money.

Often times they have some money and resources to throw at this thing cuz it's not going to make much money. It's not very useful but this technology is exciting to them and they're willing to be invested in

46:33

it. Um, like I said, they're more like tech versus use case.

They see the potential in the tech more than than anything else. They're not too worried about uh the rest of the stuff.

Um, so the innovators, um, then you have the early adopters. The early adopters are people who are kind of the the

46:49

visionaries and these are people who look at this technology that these guys have been tinkering around with and they go, "Wow, I understand how that can be used. I'm going to try and create the first sort of implementations of that and stretch this from a little sciency like these are often academics academics.

Oops. These are academics and

47:06

they're sort of experimenting around with things and then people bring it into uh these visionaries and the early adopters will take it and sort of apply it to some real world use cases and start to stretch the capabilities so that it can really come into its own. Um these guys are not too much worried

47:21

about the see they're more just excited, right? and they are looking at this technology as a new thing that they can take and take to the world.

Then we have the early majority. These are people who are a little bit more pragmatic matic.

U they rely on more

47:42

proof evidence and can best really be described as weight and see. Um so these guys uh the early majority the reason technology companies

47:58

and and technologies as a whole kind of failed to bridge this gap and cross the chasm is because this early majority and everything beyond they want proof they want evidence. They want to wait to be sure about something new before they take a risk on it.

So they're lot more riskaverse. These guys are sort of risk

48:14

takers and again they're they're more focused the early majority are more focused on the potential of it rather than the the current sort of efficiency and and output of it. Right?

The early majority pragmatic, need more proof. They wait and see.

Late majority, it's a little bit more. They're sort of a little bit more.

That's these guys are

48:29

conservative. These guys are skeptical.

Now, I'm not going to go into all this cuz we're not really dealing with with those guys. Um, but what I'm trying to teach you and explain to you something that's made me successful in the space.

I've I've made now over a million dollars selling this AI stuff. Um, and

48:45

since I started my AI journey. So, I feel like I'm kind of qualified and without understanding this, I wouldn't have made nearly nearly as much as what I have.

So, I'm trying to communicate this to you all because I'm I'm it really hurts me hurts me seeing so many of you trying to I'm waving these things around. It hurts me to see so many of you trying to succeed and I know how

49:00

hard you're working on your agencies and trying to build them and sell solutions, but you're using the wrong tool for the job and it comes down to understanding this. So, stick with me cuz we got a lot more to cover.

All right, so the early adopters and the early majority is really the focus where AI is right now

49:15

is we are in this early adopters phase and we're kind of crossing the chasm into the early majority. Now, who is our market, it's business owners.

So, we need to think of this as not the consumer market, not not people in their their their nan going on and using ch. That's not what we're talking about.

We're talking about the adoption of AI

49:32

technology within businesses, which is a it's a different curve. They all have their own places and and ages and stages, but this is part specifically for businesses.

Now, how can we take what we've understood from this in the different stages of people? But these are visionaries, they're excited,

49:47

they're risktakers. Um they they want to try the technology and they want to apply it to to use cases.

And then we have the gap and the chasm that goes to these people here who are a much larger section, the 34 over over double nearly three times as much. Um so we really want to be tapping into these at some

50:03

point. But for those of you who are starting your AI agencies, you may be looking at this and seeing an issue, right?

So if I'm trying to sell to early majority who are wait and see, they're evidence-based. They want more proof.

They're pragmatic. How in the hell am I

50:19

going to sell my AI solutions if I've never sold one before? I don't have any proof.

I don't have any evidence. The use case I'm trying to sell them is not something that I have evidence to prove that works.

So maybe selling these AI callers and the AI AI calling systems. Sure, early adopters look at that like

50:34

me and you look at that and go, "Wow, that's cool. I see the potential potential." We are visionaries.

We see the potential of the technology. But when you're trying to sell to people who need proof, you're talking they're deaf.

50:50

It's falling on deaf ears. So, how can we tailor our strategy as AI agency owners when we're getting started to use this to our advantage and plan our strategy according to the different pools of people in the market.

So, I'm glad you asked. What you want to do when

51:05

you're starting agency is not go for these people because you don't have the proof. You need to find early adopters.

And in order to find early adopters, uh, but they're a small segment and I guess innovator is kind of included in this as well, right? So they're sort of a a group that you can sell to collectively,

51:20

but in order to find them, these are already a small segment of the population. This is what um 14 16%.

And meaning you have all of these people that you cannot even attempt to sell to without any proof or without any

51:36

evidence as to as to the the the results that your systems can get. So, keeping this in mind, how should we be trying to sell our solutions?

By cold email, by reaching out to people via Instagram, by LinkedIn, cold DMs. Well, I hope I've

51:51

got enough room on the screen here, but let's just say we have a a box of 100 people, but but this is 10 by 10, right? 10 by 10.

And then I'm sending my cold emails and I have a list of thousands and thousands of people. In

52:07

this case, let's just use 100. And I'm sending out these emails.

And um let's let's fill this out. 5 6 7 8 9 10.

Um 2 3 4 5. Um yeah.

There. So this is imagine

52:26

this is filled out. I'm not going to draw it obviously cuz there's there's quite a lot.

But there's a lot more X's going on here. There's 10 different rows of them.

Now I've used the wrong colors, but you get what I mean. If I'm sending cold email and I have a list of 100 people and 100 business owners that I'm trying to contact and I send out the

52:41

cold emails, there's only 16 people on that list who are even moderate like even open to buying and and use adopting this technology. And that's that's pretty optimistic.

There might be none. I mean, this is if you get if you get a

52:56

perfect slice and segment of the population, you'll get this 16 people out of 100. You might get more, you might get less.

Depends how you build your list. But if you're cold emailing, it's likely going to be this or less.

So that means that you at a at a what a 80 84% handicap. Where's my red?

I need to

53:14

use red on this. 84% handicap.

So you when you're sending out the cold email, what's might be effective in other niches, not other industries, we are at a massive handicap

53:30

here when you're trying to send this stuff. Um, so keeping this in mind, the the real question should be, okay, if I'm trying if I don't have any proof and I'm just starting my agency and I have to be selling to this this early these early adopters and innovators, how can I

53:46

get my message in front of as many of them as possible? All right, have a think.

Is it going to be I mean with volume, if you send out huge amounts of volume, you can negate this. You can if you're only getting I don't know two

54:02

people who are interested and then you're getting but then you even break this down even more. Say say you've got this amount of people are interested and you're getting only like a 5% 5% uh positive reply rate.

There's still very small numbers coming out of this cuz 5% of 16 what's

54:20

that one point? It's like it's like one, right?

So there's not there's not much going on there. And if you have these kind of numbers, it's it's just like I'm working against you really, which is what I'm trying I'm stumbling over words a bit here, but I get I get anxious when I have to do math on camera, by the way.

54:36

I'm not sure if you do too, but um 5% of 16 1.6. So like.5% or something like that.

Maybe we fact check it on the screen, but I'm not good at mental math on camera.

54:55

[Music] Anyway, yes. So, I could have gone a little bit deeper here just to explain this, so I thought I'd do it in the editing process.

Now, um, if we were to get a 5% positive reply rate and we had a total of 100 people, cuz the whole box was filled with black X's and everyone

55:11

was a potential customer, we'd be getting five replies out of 100, right? Um, what I was saying here is if we've only got 16 out of 100 cuz we're on the 84% handicap, then only it ends up being 0.8 um, of a person.

So that means there's one out of 16 is actually going to be a positive reply rate. Meaning

55:27

instead of getting five replies for sending 100 emails, you'll be getting one out of 100, which means then you add that to the booking rate and the close rate and you're basically getting no clients, right? So yeah, thought I'd just add that in there.

Hope that's been helpful. So going back to what I was saying how if this is the handicap we have when we're doing outbound

55:43

communications the only other option is well might be others but the only other main option here is to try to get these people via inbound lead generation methods which essentially is instead of me trying to reach out to the whole damn

55:58

world and and fighting against this handicap of 84% or more I'm going to instead try to attract these people to my business and how are you going to attract them? Well, you can make content that appeals to those early adopters.

56:15

So, in this case, running out of room here. So, we have inbound inbound legion.

So, trying to attract the early adopters to your business is probably going to be and from the from

56:30

what I mean I'm an example of it. Morningside AI and everything that I have achieved and everything that I've achieved the the small wins that I've achieved relative to other people in this in the in the world but within the AI space I haven't done too damn bad.

My success has come from attracting early

56:47

adopters and innovators to my business Morning Side via in lead generation. So I'm just sharing what has worked for me and what I'm starting to see.

The reason I'm making this video is because I'm starting to see an emerging pattern within my community of more and more and more and more people using the exact same strategy that I'm about to

57:04

tell you to generate those leads and get themselves out of just serving early adopters, getting them the testimonials and case studies they need so they can start to tackle this early majority. Inbound lead generation, LinkedIn, Twitter, I still

57:19

call it Twitter X, whatever you want to call it. YouTube, hell, maybe even you start a Pinterest.

Don't sign up on Pinterest. I was just joking.

LinkedIn, Twitter, and uh and YouTube are kind of the uh the go. You could do blog posting, SEO, whatever you I just stick

57:35

with these ones. But the thing is, you got to pick one and do it well.

I, for example, picked YouTube and I think I did it moderately well. Um you guys can be the judge of that.

I guess it's the like and dislike ratio on this video will determine if I've done it well or not. But when it

57:51

comes to money made from all of my businesses, I'd say I've done pretty well on YouTube. And you can do the same.

But you got to pick one. And by picking one, we get so many like I have never had to run any kind of advertising for Morningside.

I've never had to run

58:07

any kind of outbound communications. No LinkedIn outbound, no Instagram outbound, no nothing.

No cold email, no nothing at Morningside. It all comes from my channel.

And my channel is more so focused on helping you guys now to start your own agencies and sharing what we learn at Morningside. So, my content isn't even focused on selling to

58:22

businesses. Like, it's I'm not even trying to attract businesses to my audience, but people are still seeing my videos who are business owners and coming to me to build their solutions.

Inbound lead generation pretty good if you do it right. So, what I'm seeing is a lot of success on LinkedIn at the moment.

Uh LinkedIn is really hidden for

58:38

a lot of people in the community, particularly in my accelerator. I've had some great uh success stories of people who we've just been on interview and interview interview of people within my accelerator and they all are using the same LinkedIn strategy um which is to generate inbound leads and okay so how can you generate the inbound leads if

58:55

you were to take LinkedIn well what they are all doing and I mean what I've done as well on on YouTube it's not rocket science but you need to somehow get people on your LinkedIn so you need to gain connections you can just be spamming out connections within your given niche just pick a niche start trying to connect with different people.

59:11

You will get a high acceptance rate of connections. People just like, well, yeah, sure, you can connect with me.

There's there's going to be enough people that you can just start to connect and build a bit of a base. And then you want to be creating I should do it over here, right?

So, you go build a

59:26

base or you might already have it already. A lot of the guys who are succeeding quickly have already been working in another job or another industry and they're just starting to convert their LinkedIn from their old career or their old persona into this new I'm an AI expert and I help build AI solutions for this this doesn't even

59:41

need to be niched niche down. You can stay general I build AI stuff and find your niche later but getting a little bit and then you need to post cool valuable stuff and this way people will see that you know your stuff will know

59:57

your [ __ ] uh is probably how I would have said it if I wasn't uh wasn't limiting my vocabulary on here, but you need to prove that you actually know what you're talking about. And in this way, by posting stuff regularly and sharing what you're doing as I have on my channel, look at my past videos.

You can see from the start the entire

00:13

character arc of my channel. The reason I was able to do so well with Morning Side and and we continue to do so is because I built a base of proving that I knew my stuff.

I was there giving coding tutorials of stuff that I had personally created and sharing it on my channel and

00:29

then I hired developers who are even better than me and now I get them on my second channel on my morning eye channel. I bring my CTO Spencer.

I brought him on the channel the other day. You need to be proving that either you have a competency or your team has a competency.

Um anyway, I I'll leave that

00:45

there cuz I don't want to don't want to get a little bit a little bit too sidetracked on that. That's probably talk for another video, but there's the cliff notes of it.

Um, the more important thing that I want to talk about now is that there really is a a race that is on. Um, the race is on for

01:02

this early majority. And this is what we've been we've kind of known it as we've been early to this this space and this AI agency opportunity that we've we've all hopped on.

But we're still in this this period of the AI space right now. We're we're in the the early stages, but we are

01:20

quickly moving into this early majority and crossing the chasm where there's now unlocking more and more people and in our case, more businesses who are willing to buy our solutions. But they're only willing to buy it if they have the proof, the evidence.

They want to wait and see that the stuff really

01:35

does what we say it does before they take they they take the red pull or the blue pull or whatever matrix analogy you want to use there. uh before they take the dive into using AI within their business, they want to see the proof.

Now, for us, if you don't ever get past this early adopters phase and you don't follow one of these strategies to get

01:52

your first couple of clients and get some evidence and get some proof, then you'll never be able to come and compete with myself and the other big dogs in the in the space. I just call myself a big dog.

That's so cringe. But, um the other people who are actually doing numbers and selling these solutions successfully,

02:08

uh we're in here. Well, we can access here.

Like, there's still a lot of money to be made with these early adopters and they're far easier to work with because they're not really worried about they're less pragmatic. They're not too worried about the they're just excited.

They're not too worried about the effects while they do want to see a bit of value. If you're selling to these guys, you may

02:24

notice that you build stuff that isn't super valuable and they're still happy with it cuz it's like, "Wow, that's cool. My business has AI." Now, these guys can be lovely to work with.

When we get into here, they need a lot more evidence-based proof, etc. But as this market

02:39

progresses, you're going to need to get into this point if you want to survive and if you want to really make the big bucks. So this is the current competition within there's not much competition within the AI agency space cuz there's not many of us.

There's very very few of us who are actually on this opportunity and trying to make money off of it. And and the many few of us who

02:55

understand this and are doing it well and and positioning their strategy in order to get this part done so that they can move into this early majority. So there's not going to be many people after this video maybe a bit more.

there's not going to be many people who are in here competing for the big bucks really. So that's my challenge to you

03:10

all is that you need to use a strategy that factors in this dynamic within the market that very few people 16% or thereabouts are actually interested in implementing the stuff at the moment if you don't have any evidence or proof.

03:27

And the thing is if you're trying to get your offer or get your business and your services in front of people, you don't want to get it in front of these guys. Listen, you're wasting your time.

Get it in front of these people. And the most effective way to do that is to attract them to you instead of bashing on their door and saying, "Do you want to buy

03:42

some AI stuff yet?" Just attract them to yourself and let them self- select. If you are connecting with people on LinkedIn and they see you're an AI guy, I do AI for dental.

I do AI for financial services. Whatever it is, if

03:58

they see that and are interested, they'll self- select and say, "Cool, I'll connect with this guy. He AI for financial services sounds interesting.

I'm going to connect and add it. And then you build your base on LinkedIn and you start building cool stuff.

And while you're burn building cool stuff, you're also learning. So you're you're making

04:13

leaps and bounds in this thing. Every time you learn something and post it, you're not only learning, but you're also getting the marketing material to continue to show your your expertise and and build trust with your audience as well.

So yeah, I just thought I'd throw down the gauntlet there and let you guys know that this is the challenge within

04:30

AI agency space right now. We are all brothers and sisters in this space which okay let's there's plenty plenty to eat for everyone.

Let's deal with this. Let's all start creating content.

Let's make a personal brand. Let's get out there and start engaging with people and building connections so

04:46

that you can start to make money and get your start in this because I'm telling you if you dillydattle around dillyd is that a word? Anyway, you get what I mean.

If you mess around in this stage where we are here and we're very quickly jumping over to this as I'll talk about a little bit later. But if you are

05:01

messing around, then you're not going to when the when everyone else mobs onto this this opportunity and they're coming very soon. I'd say in the next next year, I mean, we're already starting to see other people selling these courses and and things like this and trying to trying to say that they know what they're talking about in this.

And

05:16

honestly, I've seen so many ads now, it's kind of getting embarrassing what these guys are trying to sell. So I would say that not to not to big up what I'm doing and my team and there's only a few people in the space who are who are actually doing this thing and I I I tell you like I am I am one of them and there's a couple of other people who I

05:31

recommend on my channel and things like this. So they are coming and it's evident by the amount of other people who are popping up and selling selling how to do this thing.

So that's the that's the challenge. But if you delete the other realm, other people are going to jump in here and but you're going to spend all this time trying to get get

05:47

yourself off the ground and then by the time you you get there, there's going to be way way better way better agencies who have just jumped in here and are attacking this issue by because they tried to solve these problems so that they can attack this new market. So now I don't want to rub this off cuz it does look nice and pretty.

Um, but I do want

06:05

to layer over something else here that's also important considering on this fine Saturday, we just had a uh a pretty big update from OpenAI, which I think uh highlights another uh another factor that gets

06:20

incorporated into this this whole picture. So, um we just had um I'm going to rub this off.

We just had the assistance API v2 release from OpenAI. And now this is a massive update.

This is something

06:36

myself and the team at Morningside um and and Agentive my my SAS platform we have been waiting for this. This was really a bet that we made um 6 months ago now to say look the assistance API is a ridiculously powerful platform.

06:51

has custom knowledge agents. You can connect tools.

has does everything for you. The chat history management, thread management, tool calling, very powerful package.

But when it came out, it wasn't in a great state. Like it was very ludicrously expensive, very slow, knowledge base was very spotty.

And so

07:08

when we built a Gentive on top of it, we had to deal with customers who were very well users who were very unhappy with uh the quality of of the the assistance API that we were built on. But by association, they think that our knowledge base wasn't working.

But in reality, it was the assistance API knowledge base that was not working. So

07:24

anyway, enough of me coping. Um, what I was trying to say here is that we have just had assistance API v2.

Stick with me. This is going to sort of light the fire under your bum.

Now what also happens in

07:42

these is say using the web as an example. This is like early 90s, 1990s, early academics.

So they you can plot out the

07:58

entire web adoption on this. You got the academics early on who were like, "Wow, this internet's really cool.

It really didn't work and it was terrible." Um, but they believed in it and saw the saw the saw the potential. Then you had people who came in in the sort of mid '90s, I'd say.

And then they were able to build companies on top of it. you got

08:14

the first couple kind of dot companies and people were starting to be visionaries visionaries and they were taking the the technology and pushing it to new limits and and finding real use cases for it and these this is is where we are right now with AI all of you watching this are seeing the same thing these voice agents chat agents u these

08:31

automations and systems like these and you're like wow there's so many use cases for this uh but in order to get to the early majority when it came to the web it needed faster like the infrastructure and the technology itself had to actually improve as well. So it

08:47

wasn't just ah yeah like people had to kind of push it down here just by doing this businessy stuff with it. No, the technology that was underpinning it had to improve and the infrastructure that allowed people to use it had to improve.

And what we are seeing why I'm saying this is what we're seeing right now is

09:02

the assistance API update is representative of this very move which is my my brain FM has started playing. Stop.

got a ghost on the keys. In order for the web to progress into the early

09:17

majority, early match, they had to have improvements in the infrastructure. So the the web was faster, the pages loaded better, it looked prettier.

Things that took it from this this early on like scientificy really nerdy academic thing.

09:33

It had to get to the point where these early majority people were willing to adopt it cuz it made sense. It was practical.

These people, these visionaries in the early '90s and DA innovators, they're not too concerned about the practicality of these things. They're more excited by it.

But in order

09:50

to get to the early majority, we need the infrastructure and the systems to make this thing make sense. I will wait and see until it makes sense.

And what we have just been given a few days ago is the update that makes it make sense.

10:07

I will probably put a video out on this in a bit. But the assistance API V2 is, let me get red so you really get the message.

Faster, more reliable. It is also cheaper.

So all of these things, if you were selling these solutions via Aentive or whatever you were selling,

10:23

you'll understand that it was slow. It was very slow.

It was also extremely expensive in the V1. And that's supposed to say reliable, not relatable.

But um it was not reliable. The knowledge base kept kept going on

10:39

Smokco as I like to say and kind of deciding that it wasn't working for that afternoon. This is very much early adopter behavior.

So like I'm okay with it being like this cuz I it's still cool and I like it and I'm in this bucket and I thought it was cool and I'm

10:56

sure you are too if you played around with these GPTs and AI agents. But the assistance API v2 is a sort of coming of age of this AI agent opportunity and technology where it's going to start to make sense for a lot more of the early majority because it's faster it's cheaper it's more reliable and they have

11:14

waited and waited and seen waited and saw you get what I mean they have waited around for the time for this kind of technology to get to the point now when we come to them and say hey look I can build you an AI agent that does this or this this and this okay well well how much is it going to cost me oh it's only going cost you this, this, and this. We

11:30

have techniques. We can fine-tune the assistance API.

We can actually do a fine tuning. So, when we're testing it initially, setting it up using GPT4.

You probably don't want to get that technical when you're talking to clients, but you can say, "Hey, look, we can start it off, run some tests, get all the get all the data back, and then we can do a a sort of fine tuning of the

11:46

system down to your specific use case. It's going to be cheaper, faster, um, and it's going to be much more suitable for your use case." So, thought I'd lay that in there.

There's also, how do I how do I lay this in? Like I'm pretty proud of that drawing.

So I apologize for not rubbing it off and and giving

12:01

you some new stuff, but I kind of want to leave it up there for as long as possible. You can overlay the curves.

Let's say that this one is the technology itself. So let's say this is the tech.

By tech, I mean the assistance API

12:18

for the web. It would mean like broadband and and faster connections and and better better browsers and things like this.

uh tech and then laid over that you might have the actual adoption. So you might have the adoption

12:34

which is like oh and this is the actual adoption. So it lags behind the tech.

We've just had new tech and we continue

12:52

to see new tech, bland conversational pathways. Check out bland conversational pathways.

Check out this is the voice agent equivalent essentially of the assistance API. Wouldn't say equivalent, I'd say the level of of complexity and

13:07

polish on things like bland conversational pathways as a solution type of AI voice agents. We're seeing this coming of age of the technology beyond just what we're used to.

I mean, when I started doing this stuff and you go back and look at some of my videos when I was in my other apartment in

13:23

Dubai and I was making these tutorials for people, I was having to create custom mod chatbts with custom code and all these difficult things and it would barely even work. Often times it wouldn't work.

We struggled to deliver a custom mod chatbot for months at morning. That was the level of the tech

13:40

and now it's can take you probably 30 minutes or 10 minutes to create. We are seeing leaps and bounds and the technology is maturing.

But that means there's this actual adoption lagging behind which is going to quickly Oh. Oh,

13:55

look. This is just the uh chef's kiss on this graph if I can do it right.

Um, where's my black? This is taking me back to doing like economics in high school.

Oh, we see a shift in the curve to the right. So this actual adoption curve is

14:10

going to catch up to technology itself. And it is our job and this is where we make the mali.

This is our opportunity. The mali is in this

14:26

shift. All right.

I can give you a second just to absorb that. We have new technology coming of age that it makes sense for the early majority.

All you need to do is facilitate this

14:41

shift which is the entire thing that this opportunity when I start first started talking about it was facilitating the adoption of new technology. Now we have the new technology the new new technology which is much better and makes sense for the early majority.

So this is more so for urgency a big kick up the butt for you

15:00

that this is we're we're moving. So, if you don't quickly get this under control and get some inbound leads and start to close these early majority of these these early adopters, you're going to have issues because we're going to be selling to these and and most of these

15:15

guys are going to have their things built. A lot of the needs of these people are going to be snapped up or they're going to be even worse.

They'll be psychologically conditioned to working with agencies who haven't worked well in the past. This is what you see in the SMMA markets and things like this where there's so many agencies trying to sell so many services that segments of

15:31

the of the different niches and stuff can get fatigued because there's so many bad actors not technically they are bad actors but people who are selling solutions who don't know what they're doing and aren't able they just take the money deliver bad service and there's a skepticism towards new new solutions providers. So these guys are still they

15:48

haven't been screwed over yet or it's highly likely they haven't. So you need to move fast.

Start a personal brand. Start talking and sharing about what you're doing.

Learn and document the process so that you can and have some kind of strategy. Right?

So you may be thinking

16:04

this doesn't make sense, but any of these posting regularly as long as you have some kind of growth strategy which any of you have, you all have fingers. You can all search up on the internet how to grow a LinkedIn, how to grow on Twitter.

The information is there. You

16:21

just needed the strategy. And I've given you the strategy.

You use one of these. You learn on the job.

You share what you learn. You hire these PE.

You close these kind of clients. And that will set you up with the evidence in order to tackle this.

16:37

Now, you can continue to serve these clients cuz they're usually a lot nicer cuz I don't require this pragmatic angle on it. But when the opportunity comes, when this pool starts to be tapped out and when there's bigger money to be made here, you are going to have the skills, resources, and testimonial and proof to

16:54

start to do it. If you don't understand these different segments, then you're going to be doing using the wrong strategy at the wrong time.

But when we do start to see this this pool open up, that's when you can do the cold email. You can still do the cold email.

Now, as you give it a year or two, this opens up

17:10

and now these 50% of the population who are like, "Hell yeah, like I'll get some AI in my business, then you can start to do those cold those outbound systems. Or better yet, you can start to even do it once you have the proof.

You can just start setting them up because you need to you can't just write a cold email and

17:26

say, "Hey, I can build your chat. What do you want it?" He's like, "What does it do for me?

How much does it cost? Is there going to be any like what if it doesn't work?

Are you going to waste my time?" there's pragmatic reasons that you need to answer and objections that you need to handle. So, if you can have the testimonials and case studies in your camera and the outbound um but it

17:41

will take a lot more to get through to them and a lot more proof. But yeah, that's uh that was cool.

I hope you guys enjoyed and I hope that was valuable. You guys really seem to like the video I put out recently on five different ways to start an AI agency in 2024.

Um, and that was more on the

17:57

technical expertise side and how you can get your foot in the door to actually learn the skills required to start one of these agencies and get the AI expertise part of your business. So, if you remember in that video, there's three problems or or three key hurdles that you need to get over when you're starting one of these businesses.

The first one is some kind of technical

18:13

expertise and actual understanding of how AI can help businesses. And that's familiarity with the tools.

It's experience in in building solutions and playing around with them yourself. And then the second problem is the lead flow.

How are you going to actually generate leads and get people to come and contact you about building things for them? And finally, the third problem

18:29

is authority and credibility needed to actually close those deals to prove to these business owners that you are the person for the job and they can entrust you with their money to actually give them the results they require. So, what I'm going to do in this video is rip through these 23 methods very quickly.

I'm not going to be giving you super in-depth information, just a highle overview of what the lead generation

18:45

method is and who's used it in my community, etc., where I'm getting this information from. And then from there on my free school community, same deal as the last video.

um it's going to be all the information on each of them. So say if we have 1 2 3 under each of those on the school community is going to be resources and free resources that I can

19:01

point you to on YouTube elsewhere that you can then go and explore that lead generation method further. So keep that in mind as you're watching this.

Each of these methods is going to have more information if you are interested in pursuing that further on the school community. Now, uh, jumping into things, let's get started.

As a disclaimer, before you go into this, I

19:17

don't want you sitting there and making a big list of 10 different ways or 10 different examples or methods that I'm going to cover here and thinking you're going to do all of them. The worst thing you could do is to try to do too much at once.

If you're just getting started, I like the Hazi analogy of taking some weight off the bar. When we are starting

19:33

as entrepreneurs, we like to think we're really strong and put a lot of weight on the bar and think that we can do very complex things. So, I want to make it clear that all you need to do is pick one of these and do it well and you will get your agency off the ground.

Personally, for me to grow Morningside AI, my agency into what it is now. We have only had to use one of them and

19:48

that was YouTube. So, there's your disclaimer.

There's the note. You don't need to do too much.

Doing too much will actually be detrimental to your success. So, 23 methods client acquisition.

Number one is Fiverr. So with Fiverr, you may have negative connotations

20:05

towards it being a $5 cheap platform, but in fact, this is where a lot of people and a lot of business owners go and they don't know where to look. So they'll go into Fiverr, they'll go onto the next one, which is Upwork, and they try to find some professionals who are on there and offering services in the AI space.

The Fiverr and Upwork methods do

20:20

work extremely well if you're willing to put in the effort on the platform. If you just treat it as another throwaway part of your business, you're not giving it all of your attention, you're never going to reach the higher earnings on the platform and also the reviews and ratings that you need to get that authority and credibility to close the deals.

Right? Remember the three problems, technical expertise, lead

20:36

flow, and authority and credibility. These will give you the lead flow because you can position yourself on them as I I've built XYZ or I can do this for you.

And then if you've got the reviews to back it up over time, you're going to have the authority and credibility that'll get those deals over the line. So Fiverr, um Mark, a member

20:52

of our community, one of the top guys in my accelerator. If you haven't watched my interview with him from last year, that'll be up here.

But Mark is absolutely crushing it. He is top rated on Fiverr.

So he is like the number one AI guy on Fiverr right now. And he ranks at the top.

Anytime you search anything AR related, Mark is right at the top there. And you can actually run ads to

21:07

make sure that you get done with placements and stuff like this. So Fiverr and Upwork, um Mark, uh I will have resources and links to Mark's channels, etc.

because he's got some videos on Fiverr. it'll all be on the school community.

So these are the same deal. Upwork and Fiverr allow you to list yourself on a platform and be

21:22

discovered by business owners. Thirdly, we have referrals.

Now, these are not necessarily how to get your first client methods. These are just general client acquisition methods.

So referrals after you've done a couple jobs on Fiverr and Upwork, you can then go ask the people that you've worked with for referrals for other people that have similar

21:38

business and similar problems to them. So referrals something that a lot of the time businesses forget to do and you need to build it in as part of the system to your business.

Okay, after XYZ number of days when they go and ask or on the on the offboarding or or like end of client call, we need to ask or request for this. If you do it every

21:53

time you finish a client project successfully, you are going to get some clients from referrals, which is just free acquisition basically. And it's also coming through with a little bit more authority and credibility when you go to hop on those calls with those referrals that you've been connected with because that's come from someone that they know and saying, "Hey, these guys did a good job.

They can help you

22:08

with this problem as well." So, you get the authority and credibility and the lead flow from this. Number four, we have warm outreach or warm reachouts as uh Mozy will say.

So warm outreach or warm reachouts is reaching out to people that you already know who are in your network. The Homozi strategy that he

22:25

detailed in $100 million leads is the the gold standard here. I'm going to try to tell you a better method.

Um I will leave a link to that particular podcast. You can get it for free.

That'll be on the school community as resources for this as well. Basically, you can pull all the the contacts that you have in your phone, your email, all your followers, etc., And you can build a

22:40

list of people that you have warm reach out capabilities to. And then you write a message to reach out to them, offer your services, or even ask them to refer you to people who can.

This is actually by far the easiest way to get clients initially for anyone who's starting these businesses is to reach out to your existing network. And many people overlook this.

And this is actually

22:56

something we're seeing a lot of success with within my accelerator. And as soon as people join the program, we tell them, okay, get straight into warm outreach.

And they're signing one, two, three clients within the first couple of weeks as well. So warm outreach if you're not doing it don't overlook it because it's a very easy way to get your foot in the door and get started.

Next we have LinkedIn content and then

23:13

similarly we have I'm going to keep the separate LinkedIn uh connect and DM. So LinkedIn content and DM LinkedIn is by far one of the most effective platforms for getting leads for your AI agency right now.

People in my accelerator are crushing it with some of the stuff we put out there. Not to

23:29

just keep talking about that but that's where I get most my information from. LinkedIn absolutely smashing it.

If you're able to post a valuable content and then people are engaging with it, they're liking it, they're leaving a comment, etc., then you have the justification to then go and uh shoot them a DM and say, "Hey, look, saw that you engaged in my post. I was wondering

23:45

if you have any other questions or I can help you out in any other way." And you start a conversation there and that can lead to hopping on a discovery call. This is a good way to attract if you I mean I talk about it every video by now but this technology adoption curve you're going to attract those early adopters who are easy clients to get

24:00

signed initially and by posting content and letting them respond to it and say hey I'm interested then you able to find those early adopters who are willing to get AI built into their business right now whereas the majority of the market right now is not actually interested. So LinkedIn content post valuable things and DM people.

Um and LinkedIn connect

24:17

and DM is a little bit different. We set up an automation like on Dripify.

Again, I'll leave resources for all of these so that you know how to set these campaigns up and set up these automations. But you can use automations on LinkedIn to automatically connect with people from a given uh industry or niche.

You can filter by niche or industry and you're

24:34

able to connect with them automatically, send them a little message, etc. And then you're able to shoot them a DM and a sequence of DMs and you can offer your services that way.

So this is more of an automated way. This is a contentbased way.

You can automate this to some degree if you have some fancy AI content creation tools, but I'd recommend just

24:49

starting off manually writing it initially. So, of course, you can do both.

And if you choose LinkedIn as as your platform, you can stack these two, and I would recommend that you do so you go all in on growing. So, you can use the connect and DM automation.

And again, I'll I'll leave setup guides on the on the school post. Um, you can use

25:04

this to add people to your audience, and then therefore more people are going to see your content. You're going to get more people out of here who've got a bit more trust, etc.

So it is a is a virtuous cycle where you're going to see more and more results over time because you keep adding more people to your connection request. So to your connection sorry and one thing I'll

25:19

mention here is you are using an automation um a friend of mine who is a LinkedIn sales expert that's is the whole thing he does he says if you are sending a connection request don't include a message with the connection request. If you send just a plain empty connection request people assume that you know them or it's just a friendly

25:35

thing and they'll accept it at a much higher rate. I believe you said it's a 20 to 30% increase in acceptance rate of the connection request if you don't include anything in the connection message because then they assume that you're trying to sell them something.

So if you can leave it out and you're going to see more connections and more people added to your network. Now similarly we

25:51

have uh seven Twitter content Twitter X whatever you want to say uh Twitter content and then Twitter cold. So similar to LinkedIn LinkedIn you can't cold DM people.

you need to be connected with them or some people you can message

26:07

if they choose to but in the majority of cases you can't cold DM people on Twitter it's much more likely that you are able to send a cold DM to someone so the cold DM strategy applies here and then posting content on Twitter and growing your following so more people see it giving out value etc building trust similar to the LinkedIn content strategy again it's just different

26:23

platforms right so you can take this idea of posting content and doing outreach on basically any platform you want LinkedIn and Twitter are good ones but again you got to pick one and do it well if you try to do both you could try to crossro But there are nuances and and intricacies and details that you pick up

26:39

on each of the platforms that are different. And so if you're trying to split yourself between learning LinkedIn and becoming a really deep expert in LinkedIn and then also doing Twitter as well, it's going to be harder to reach the the higher levels of success with the platform if you're spreading yourself too thin.

So LinkedIn or Twitter, same deal. Then number

26:57

nine is YouTube. And I think you watching this video is exhibit A of how YouTube works.

I have built my entire AI career off of YouTube only. I haven't bothered doing anything else.

Sure, do a bit posting on LinkedIn, a bit on Twitter now. Um, but

27:13

my main thing has just been YouTube, but I just focus on getting really good at that and I've grown a massive following now on within the AI space and built three different businesses off the back of it. So, YouTube extremely effective.

This is the gold standard of personal branding because people sit here and watch you for so long. you build up a

27:28

lot of trust and again you need expertise, lead flow and credibility and authority. YouTube handles those secondary very very well.

So if you're able to get on camera and talk and and sound like you're intelligent, like you know what you're talking about and you've got experience, then people are going to trust you a lot more and you're going to get a lot of highly engaged

27:44

leads messaging you as long as you've set up a good funnel as well. But YouTube a little bit more difficult as you need to learn how to talk on camera and not be uh really boring.

But if you can do it right, it can be a game changer for your business and completely transform your life as it has for me over the past 18 months. Um, but for YouTube, it's the same sort of deal with

27:59

LinkedIn content and Twitter content. Give out value.

Identify who the people you're going to be selling to and the people you want to engage with. Put their niche or or who they are in the title, in the thumbnail, etc.

It's not really that hard, but I will leave some resources on the school as to how I got started on YouTube and they'll be pretty

28:16

helpful for you to show. I mean, I got off on the right foot immediately and the resources that I used, I'll include on the school community as well.

So getting into number 10 now. We are almost halfway there.

Number 10 is medium articles. Now medium that's like low, medium, high.

If you're not sure

28:32

and you can't read my writing, medium is a platform that allows you to write blogs, write articles, and it also has a discoverability and kind of a an algorithm that helps your content get discovered by people who have never followed you before, seen you before. So in the same way that YouTube when you post a video, it tries to put it out

28:47

there and find people who want to watch it. I think it's actually the other way around.

It finds videos that people want to watch, not people that want to watch your videos. But long story short, there is discoverability on these platforms where if you post something good, it can reach a broader group of people who have never heard of you and never seen seen you before.

Same thing on Medium, but it

29:04

is textbased and you can write an article and give out some value talking about how you've done this for a business using AI or how you created this cool system that does this uh using AI again, but you don't have to put your face on it. You don't have to lug around all this camera equipment.

You don't have to buy a whiteboard wherever you go

29:19

like I do. Um it's a lot more lightweight than YouTube, but you can still get the same kind of result.

Not not the same kind of results, but you can still get results. And if you choose again, these businesses, the reason we're creating these businesses is to build the life of our dreams.

Use AI to create a life that we actually love

29:34

living in. All the all the perks and benefits that we want and the lifestyle that we want.

If you are someone who doesn't want to have to get on camera like this and lug these camera equipment around and buy whiteboards and stuff, this is a very good alternative to YouTube. You can just be sitting on a beach in Bali or wherever you want to go

29:50

and just be typing away in your laptop. I'm a little bit envious of that.

I like writing, but at the end of the day for me, YouTube is a bigger lever. I can put more effort into it.

I get to connect with you all a much deeper level. But for some people, Medium is a good choice.

And I've interviewed SJ, a member of my accelerator who's making um

30:05

as a as a side hustle. And I I don't usually recommend using this this model as a side hustle.

But he's been able to learnmake.com and start posting on Medium and now was making as much money from his AI automation agency as from his job. So he's able to supplement his income and basically double his income by just learningmake.com and then

30:22

posting his learnings and his journey really sharing his journey on Medium, which is what I keep telling you guys to do. Learn something, document it, and then you're going to have two to three months of evidence of why you are the person you say you are, why you can help these businesses.

And that helps with that authority component of landing these deals. So medium like text based version of YouTube if you want to watch

30:38

that interview with SJ I had on the channel recently where he talks about how he's actually using medium and you can see links to all his all his details that'll be as one of the resources on the school community for the medium side of things. Okay, number 11 now is a bit of a different one.

Um it is

30:53

[Music] charities and nonprofit organizations. using charities and nonprofits to get your first couple of clients is actually a strategy that Mark put me on to and I'm going to do a whole video on this a little bit later, but basically uh if you're looking to get your foot in the door and build a bit of a couple testimonials, get some real hands-on

31:10

experience and building AI solutions for businesses. So, instead of trying to reach out to a profit- driven small business owner who's a complete hard ass and is very like bottom line focused, you can reach out to these charities and nonprofits and offer them free services and say, "Hey, look, I would like to build you this website chatbook.

Would you be interested? We're doing a thing

31:26

at our agency where we want to give back to the community for businesses that necessarily wouldn't get access to AI solutions. Would you be interested?

From the screenshots that Mark sent through of the email responses he was getting, which I'm going to again cover in a different video. Um, the response rate was great and he was straight in the door being able to build these solutions

31:41

for charities and nonprofits. So, if you're looking for your first client, that can be a very effective foot in the door uh to get started.

Next, we have a whole bunch of ad platforms that I'm going to separate out because there I don't want you guys to think you can do them all at once. We have uh Google ads as in search.

Then we have YouTube ads. We

31:58

have LinkedIn ads. Then we have meta ads.

So Facebook, uh WhatsApp, uh Instagram, etc. And so all of these, you know, that Google is search by the way.

So I'm going to rub that off. All of these can be learned individually and sent to some

32:14

kind of offer, whether that's a free AI audit, whether that's some kind of lead magnet where you give them an ebook, etc. But each of these platforms offers a very lucrative way to get clients in

32:30

this whole ad space. If you are someone who has experience in digital marketing uh like myself, this is a very exciting place for the AI agency space right now because very few people are experimenting with actually getting clients through paid paid traffic.

So if

32:45

you want to explore something, if you have these the skill set, these are not something you can just casually pick up. It does take quite a while and you are going to need to focus on okay, I'm just going to use search ads.

I'm going to run to this. There's a lot of you're going to be spending money on ads of course.

So this is for people who are perhaps willing to invest a little bit more to get results faster. But if you

33:02

put a bunch of spend behind Google ads or YouTube ads and LinkedIn met ads, etc., and you spend time to focus on just one platform and test this offer to see what's converting the most, you will find eventually you may need to bring in an agency or bring in an expert, get a consultant, etc. But you will find some combination of ad creative and and copy

33:18

and messaging and also the offer that you're making on your landing page that is able to generate you leads and booked calls on a consistent basis. and you can turn up the the ad spend and you're going to get more leads.

So, this is extremely lucrative and this is something that is again still wide open because myself and my business partner Josh run a marketing agency extensive

33:35

marketing experience but because we site all through YouTube we've never had to run ads for our agency. So, we haven't actually explored paid acquisition for AI agency clients.

So, it's still wide open. I'd love to see more.

We see it in the accelerator. It's starting to come up as you'll see a little bit later.

Uh but experimenting with these is is extremely exciting space for me and I'm

33:51

looking forward to seeing how it progresses. But like I said, if you're going to do it, just pick one and do it well and experiment back and forth, back and forth until you're getting a good uh cost per lead or whatever conversion rate you're looking for, cost per appointment booked, etc.

So, number 16, we have school communities. This is one

34:07

that we're starting to see quite a lot in my accelerator where people are using these school communities to find hyperargeted pockets of their ideal uh ideal customer, the business owners they're trying to attract. And then they can go in there and they can build a bit of rapport.

They can make posts. They can network.

They can DM directly and use the school communities as a way of

34:23

just finding a big pool of the people they want to get in touch with and then working some leads in there as well. The guy in my accelerator who's really crushing it and getting a lot of bookings with us at the moment, he's selling an AI calling system to real estate agencies and and agents.

And what he's doing is finding school communities that have the people that he's trying to sell to. He's going in, he's making

34:38

posts, he's sharing value, he's directly DMing people and building up a a bit of rapport in the community and then getting a ton of bookings from there by just sending a l by DM, etc. School communities are great for that and finding a big pocket of people that you want to get in touch with.

You do have to be wary when you're doing the school community strategies not to come in too

34:54

hot and just immediately start saying, "I sell this, who wants to buy it?" Because you get banned immediately. If you do that stuff in my community, you'll get banned instantly.

Um, but if you can go in and build a bit of rapport, you you make posts, you become known as a p, the AI guy or girl in the community that they can go to to talk

35:09

to, you get in touch with the moderators, you get in touch with the owners, etc. You make yourself a a a part of that community and give out a lot of free value and actually add to the net net sum of the value in that community, then you'll be able to generate leads in that community basically whenever you want if you have a good offer and if you have new stuff

35:25

to sell them. a extremely effective strategy because it's hyperargeted and you know if you go into a large school community and you spend 2 3 months even building up rapport and becoming the person within that community they can go to is if it's big enough you have basically infinite pool of people and there's always people coming into these

35:41

communities as well. So you've got a an excellent client acquisition method if you choose to do this.

But again, if you just pick one and do it well, you'll have enough clients um to get you off the road. And similarly to this, we have Facebook groups, we have LinkedIn groups.

All right, so same sort of thing applies here. LinkedIn and Facebook

35:56

groups. Your first thing is finding the group.

You need to find someone that has the people that you want to sell to in it. Um and that means picking a specific niche or a type of customer that you want to be selling to.

Facebook groups, go on Facebook, have a little search around, try to get into a couple of them. LinkedIn group, same sort of deal.

But as I said with the school

36:12

communities, don't come in hot. Don't just come in and start selling immediately.

That's not going to last. You might get a couple call bookings from people who are probably quite stupid if they're just going to click some random guy selling selling stuff in their community.

But if you can build up a bit of rapport, get become familiar with the people in the community, be known as someone who provides value and

36:29

someone's trustworthy. Again, the authority and credibility that you need to be able to close deals.

If you give away some free value in these, you can be sure that you're going to be getting a bunch of interest and hopefully you convert that into bookings and clients as well. Right.

Number 19 is cold calling. Now, this is everyone's favorite.

Uh but it is quite terrifying

36:46

for most people and it is something that if you did choose to do it well and just said, "Okay, I'm just going to learn how to cold call businesses and get them interested in AI solutions." That would be all you need to do. And then you could teach other people how to do it on your behalf as well.

So, while it is terrifying, it is extremely effective. you can in the space of a couple of

37:01

hours call hundreds of businesses and offer them your services. So it's in terms of input output and the amount of time and effort you put in to the potential output.

If you were doing that every single day, there is no way that you would not get clients. So I will leave some resources on how to get into cold calling on the school community as well.

Number 20, again talking about

37:18

input output is expose and events. So, if there is a type of business owner or an industry that you want to target and there is an exponent or an event in a big city near you, if you go in there, it might even just be a local one, but if you go there, you're

37:34

going to be surrounded by your ideal customer, you have infinite chances basically to go and have conversations with them and learn more about them and get in their head. If you are trying to be a niche agency and focusing on selling to a specific type of people, this is a in terms of the density of of how many people you can talk to in a

37:50

short space of time and the effectiveness of that, it's going to be basically unmatched anywhere else, any other method that you're trying to reach out to people, right? So, if you're there in the space of 4 hours, 5 hours, 6 hours at one of these events and expose, you can have conversations with dozens of people, get dozens of numbers and contacts, offer them your services,

38:06

let them know who you are. These can feel a little bit awkward.

you're a stranger walking around a expo trying to sell your AI services, but in the space of just one day of relative discomfort, yes, I know, you can put yourself and your business further ahead than if you spent a month or two doing any of this stuff, right? So, you can get a massive

38:21

leaprog forward for your business in terms of the connections you have and the potential clients in the pipeline. So, while uncomfortable, extremely effective and similarly 21 is walk-ins.

So, in this digital age, we kind of forget that you can just walk

38:36

into a business and and say hi and and introduce yourself and offer your services. All you need to do is search up the types of businesses that you want to find on Google.

You can get a big list of their addresses and then in one day you can go out and walk into a whole bunch of these businesses. Now, the tricky part here, of course, is when you're walking into these businesses, what do you actually do when you're in

38:52

there? What's the process?

If there's a receptionist, what do you ask for, etc. This is going to vary from industry to industry.

So, you're going to need to come up with your own strategy. I can't spoon feed you something here, but essentially if there are businesses in your town or city that are the kind of people that you want to be selling to, you can walk in there and introduce

39:07

yourself and offer your services. Highle overview of that.

Next, our second to last one, as you probably expected, is cold email. Cold email to uh free order slash

39:24

lead magnet slashfree service. So cold email of course pretty well established method for getting in touch with people and letting them know about your services.

Again advertising is just to make known. So we're making our business and our services known to people via these different methods.

And so cold

39:40

email is a way of getting in touch with them using a platform like instantly is the best one to go go with by far. So instantly is a cold email platform and they make everything extremely easy for you if you're looking to use this method.

But the tricky thing with cold email is one how to get high quality leads. So that's an entire problem in itself.

making sure that you're sending

39:55

out to people who really could use your services. But then you need to think what the actual offer is and what you're saying within these these emails, right?

So got a couple options here. Firstly, a free AI audit similar to this.

So it's again similar to these ads here, right? Where you're making some kind of offer.

Hey, click here to do this or in cold

40:11

email. You don't want to send any links or anything in the in the message itself.

You just want to create some interest and say, hey, would you be interested in me sending this over or would you like to know a little bit more about this? Just reply yes and I'll shoot it over.

So in this way you can say, "Hey, look, we do free AI audits for this assist. If you're interested, we have a couple slots coming up next

40:27

week for AI audits. Please just reply to this with a yes and I'll send you some more information on the AI audit and how you can book." So they reply with yes and then you send them the information.

Same goes with the lead magnet. I've personally tested this lead method out and it works.

If you have some kind of ebook or resource that you create, you can send out cold email and people go to reply and say, "Hey, yes, I'd like that

40:44

free AI value ebook for XYZ niche." Or finally, you can offer a free service or product. This is actually a method used by a lot of people within my accelerator just to get their agencies off the ground particularly when you don't have the testimonials and the case studies to have that authority and credibility to get those deals signed.

Right? So that's

41:00

third technical expertise, lead flow and then authority and credibility that when you start out you don't really have that third one because you haven't done anything. And that's why if you create content documenting your learnings, you have some you at least you have something going into it.

Whereas if you're starting out where a lot of these guys did, they had nothing. So they had to offer these free chat bots and say,

41:16

"Hey, look, we'll build this thing for you um free of charge." and that got their foot in the door to open up to upselles and further AI solutions for them. So from there, they're able to sell them two, three, $4,000 products or services on top of that.

But the free service is another great one and I highly recommend you testing those out

41:31

if you choose to do cold email. Again, if you just do cold email and do it well, test all these different offers and test a bunch of different lead sources.

I promise you, you will get results if you're sending out enough emails. And finally, lucky last, saving potentially the best for last.

23 is a webinar funnel plus ads. Now,

41:49

this is an exciting one um that's come out of my accelerator. We've got some people in there who have experimented with this and are seeing success running ads to some kind of webinar signup where it's like an AI learn more about how how AI can help your business.

42:07

them to see if they're actually willing to pay at all. So, you can put a micro commitment down where they have to pay $3 to sign up and get access to the webinar.

And then when they host a webinar, they're sitting there, they do a live event, but they're going through and explaining them. They get a chance to build trust and and authority and credibility with the people who have

42:23

signed up. And then this person from Accelerator was able to convert that into a $10,000 sale.

So, they've signed a client for $10,000 based off running ads to this $3 micro commitment um and getting a chance to show their expertise and what they know about AI and how it can benefit businesses through a

42:39

webinar. Now, if you're not entirely sure what a webinar is, I'll put some resources on the school to to let you know how a webinar funnel works.

A pretty popular method of selling things online. Russell Brunson was really the guy who just made these things massive and got them super dialed in.

But this is could potentially be put into

42:55

something here, but I want to keep it separate cuz it is a really new and exciting one that that deserves its own its own category here that I wanted to dive into a little deeper. And so, that's about all for the video.

As I mentioned, all the resources for these under each of these different methods, I'm going to provide some YouTube links, some free resources for each of these if

43:12

you want to learn how to go deeper on them and actually learn how to do it and implement it within your agency. So, um, I hope this been valuable.

There's a lot there. Again, you only need to do one and do it well, whether that's a Fiverr, whether that's Medium, whether that's YouTube like I've done.

If you just pick one and spend a solid 3 to 6 months

43:28

really working on just getting the results out of that platform, then you will see results. But if you keep chopping and changing and you're doing a new one every 2 weeks, you're not going to see results.

If you jump in and do cold email for a few few weeks and it's not working well, it's cuz you didn't actually push through and continue to absorb more information and seek seek

43:44

expert advice, find niche YouTube videos on how to get the most out of it. You need to keep assisting on one of these platforms in order to get the most out of it and for you to create a system that's going to bring you leads consistently.

So, all of it's on the school community that's down below. I know a lot of you guys are already in there.

Um, we've got an excellent

43:59

community over there. The link to join the school community is going to be the first one in the description down below.

So you can join there. I'll see you in there for my Friday Q&A if you guys want to ask me questions directly.

So over the Christmas and New Year break, I did a bunch of surveying in my school community and elsewhere

44:14

asking you all what your biggest problems were in in the current moment with your AI automation agency. And one of the biggest problems that uh revealed itself is that you guys are struggling with consistent uh lead generation.

and you might have just started the business and you've got maybe your first client or two, but you don't have to take it to that next stage of saying, "Oh, now I've

44:31

got a consistent stream of bookings coming in so that you can actually start to hire a team and and have some kind of consistency so that you know you can actually build this business on a longerterm basis than than just like one client to the other and always worrying about where the next one's coming from. So, in this video, I'm going to be walking you through basically the exact

44:47

system that I've used to generate thousands of leads for my AI automation agency morning AI and uh really just give you a bit of a marketing masterass if I do say so myself. Um, from my six years in in digital marketing, I've done everything from like running paid ads to sell physical products through like

45:03

Shopify, drop shipping, etc., U marketing agency um sort of typical way we make and more importantly and more recently uh organic content funnels and how to make content like this um and on other platforms and to consistently this says infinite leads if you can't see it

45:19

but to consistently convert strangers into uh leads and then ultimately to sales as well. So I'm not going to be touching on the sales section of this video.

I think that deserved its whole own own video entirely. But I'm going to focus on the lead generation portion of breaking down exactly how this works.

45:36

And I think a lot of you want to do this, but you don't quite understand don't understand how this mechanism works. So it's actually not too complex.

And I'm going to break it down for you. And at the end of the video, I'm going to be giving you a a resource that you can take to put this into plan.

So I know you guys might look at what I do on YouTube now and think that's that's sort

45:52

of a bit more advanced than I'm unable to do right now. But I'm going to boil this down to if I was starting again.

Um, and I mean, I've generated like 10 10 million plus views or something. I got a lot of subscribers next to my name.

So, I know a decent amount about this. And, uh, I'm going to give you

46:09

what I would the exact strategy and the sort of blueprint for starting a a organic content funnel like this that I would do if I was getting started again with my AI automation agency. So, to get started, this is going to be a bit of a slower pace video by the way.

Um, this is Sunday afternoon here. U and guys out

46:24

there building a sauna. So I thought this is a good chance for me to give you guys a breakdown of the marketing side of things.

So it's not going to be super Tik Tok brain optimized. I'm sorry, but I promise you it's going to be some extremely valuable information for you if you are looking to scale your auto agency in 2025 by generating consistent

46:41

leads. So the whole process of of lead generation and I mean the the entire client acquisition part of a business is to turn strangers into customers, right?

So that's like the whole thing. Stranger, never heard of you before to customer.

So we can call these cold,

46:59

these people are cold, right? They have different um temperatures.

You have cold and then people will call it warm and then you can call it hot. So these are different audience temperatures.

And this is pretty fundamental marketing uh terminology.

47:17

Cold audiences, never heard of you before. Warm audiences, people who have heard things before, maybe they've been referred to you or they've engaged with your content before, they've given you the email, etc.

They're warm. They've taken some kind of they're no longer strangers.

And hot are people who are showing extreme or like serious buying intent and they are likely closable if

47:35

you make the right offer or get in front of them in the right way. So that's first things first.

So up here, this represents all the strangers. And so when you are trying to market your your business or regardless of if it's AI automation agency or other you have these strangers and what content allows you to do and this is being an organic

47:51

content funnel I think that that term was coined by Matt Gray um and he's done a lot lot of stuff in sort of explaining how this organic content funnel works and it's been very helpful for me to understand what I've been doing all along and and putting into a bit more of a a framework like this. So shout out to

48:07

Matt great for that. What we're trying to do is turn these changes into into these are book meetings.

Let's call these bookings on your calendar and these are closes. The first thing you need to do when it comes to content is to get

48:24

awareness. Right?

The first problem is let's write this up here. Problem one is awareness.

No one even knows who you are. And awareness step is taking these

48:40

strangers and putting them into this first one. So we can say this is going and converting them into this little one.

So the thing with content is that certain platforms have discoverability engines. Like say here on YouTube, if you make content that is

48:57

talking about how uh builders can use AI or the best real estate AI systems, YouTube has an algorithm that allows you to be discovered. So it'll try to find people or either through YouTube search or uh just being recommended on their on their brows that will try to convert or

49:13

at least show those videos to these strangers and if you are appealing to what those strangers are interested in say these are these are red dots might be your builders right and this is just the millions of people on these platforms. There are red dots in that audience.

You just need to be able to attract them and convert that uh convert

49:30

them from strangers into people who are aware of you. So this is the uh awareness problem and the way you do this is by making content that is targeted to a certain group of people.

So top five AI automations for builders in 2025. Simple like just more ideas

49:46

like that. And this goes for the same thing for if you're posting on LinkedIn or if you're posting on X etc.

But you need to solve this first problem of awareness and that's done through creating content and posting on platforms that allow you to be discovered. So and Tik Tok is a great example of this because they were the first ones.

Uh if you go back a few

50:03

years before we had reals on Instagram, if you made a new Instagram account and you started posting the most amazing content ever, but you had no followers, you weren't going to get any any engagement because there's no discoverability. You're not getting yourself in front of anyone new.

So this is when for you pages and stuff like

50:18

that were popularized through popularized through Tik Tok and uh Instagram of course with that and YouTube's always been kind of a discoverability engine like that. So, if you want to solve this first problem of turning strangers into into paying customers, you need to think about how you solve this awareness thing.

And

50:34

that's going to be done through using a platform like YouTube or through Instagram reels or whatever where they have an engine that can allow you to be shown to people who are not your followers. Otherwise, you're going to have a much harder time.

Say if you started a new Twitter account and you got zero followers. I believe they may be incorporating more of a a

50:50

discoverability engine into Twitter. Um, yeah, I think there's people you follow and then like general posts as well.

So it seems like they have integrated that as well. But that's the first problem is getting them across here and these guys to see your content and ideally follow

51:05

you. So I'm going to say this first step from completely cold into this sort of warm area.

These are people who have um seen your content um followed

51:22

you followed/subscribed and this is basically victory number one for you. Have you made something that is appealing to the people that you're trying to find and it's converted them from a stranger, it's gotten them to click or to stop scrolling and they've

51:38

watched your content and ideally they've followed your subscribe. So, this puts them in kind of the holding bay of like, okay, now I get a chance to keep sending more sending more uh value and passing more value that way through my posts, right?

So, um you can be found on on YouTube and they subscribe to you. And the way YouTube works is that it's going

51:54

to provide it's going to push those videos onto their uh their browse page and also in the subscriptions tab. But the main thing is that if you're subscribed to someone, like many of you subscribed to me, my videos are going to pop up in your home feed a lot more because you're subscribed to me and I I thank you guys for following me and

52:09

watch my videos, I hope you get enough value out of it because I I really try to pack as much and and thank you for all the nice comments on some of the recent videos. Like I I really do appreciate it.

Um, and I hope you guys know that I'm I'm really trying to put you guys on here and yeah, I I'm really trying and um I I

52:28

know a lot of you see that and appreciate that. I'm trying to be straight up with you all about things.

Um, but yeah, I just appreciate you all for for everything you've done for me and my team and stuff like that, but I don't want to get all mushy on you, but um allow me to do this stuff and this is

52:43

what I love. So, so your content and you've solved that problem.

So, problem number one, awareness is solved and that is they've got you've got them on some kind of holding platform. Now, the important thing to understand here is that this these are called rented audiences, right?

These are bad. Well,

52:59

they they're better than cold. It's obviously better than no one knowing you exist, but these are rented.

These are rented audiences. rented, meaning you are a guest on the YouTube platform or you are a guest on

53:15

the X platform or whichever one you're you're on. Basically, at any point, they could turn the lights off of your account.

All of your access to them is determined by the algorithm and by uh staying within the bounds of of what's allowed on that platform. So, it's rented.

While this is good, you can have like Oh, I'm just going to ditch these

53:32

down here. By the way, you could have 10,000 followers or you make content that allows you over the course of a few months.

you eventually g 10,000 followers, 10,000 people who want to be basically subscribed to see more content like that. Um, and this can also be done

53:48

through what's called a CTA. So, this is a bit more marketing CTA, call to action.

Say in this video, I could say if you enjoy this kind of content and you want to learn how to build AI businesses and and make an impact in the world and uh see the the best version of

54:04

yourself through this awesome vehicle, then subscribe to the channel. See, I just did a that's called a CTA.

So, I just did a call to action to get you to subscribe to the the channel so that you see more content like this. Pretty basic stuff, I know.

Um, but you can do this in written content as well. So, the CTA here would be, hey, subscribe to me for

54:19

more content like this, which is what I just said to you. And hopefully some of you have subscribed if you haven't already.

And this is how you get your your followers or whatever the the platform specific one is. And then we need to convert these rented audiences which is good to have but

54:34

still not uh not what you really want um and can be taken away at any point as we saw through I know the whole co thing certain people getting completely taken off and and various different platforms if you say the wrong thing you're gone. So if you're running a business you want to have diversified or definitely

54:50

factored in that risk that you could get nuked at any point. And so this is when we get into what's called um this blue one doesn't work that well.

Oh, sorry. A red a red tick uh of owned

55:07

audiences. Now, this is the really really really important thing.

So, say we're doing the building example and we've gone and we've got we've managed to pull a bunch of builders out. We've made some really good stuff that appeals to builders on YouTube or maybe you've gone on Instagram cuz you realize that Instagram is a better platform for finding builders.

Um that is something

55:22

you need to factor in if you are doing a content system like this. Um, if you're trying to find a certain type of person, it's like, would Seale execs be watching YouTube and picking around?

I'm sure there's some, but you need to make sure you're using the right platform to find the right people. So, that's a that's an

55:41

ideal line of getting awareness with my content that YouTube has served to these builders or they found it through the search engine like top automations for builders or like five things every builder should know about AI moving. Y and so we've got them in this rented

55:57

audience. Now we need to try and move um so let's say this is all full of them.

We now need to try to move some of them across this and into our rented audience. Now what is a rented audience?

Typically um general marketing is just the email. Can

56:14

you get their email? So this is there's email and then there's SMS and then obviously there's like WhatsApp and any other things but basically you can I mean WhatsApp also could WhatsApp you're still technically

56:30

using their platforms and you could be banned. So email and SMS are kind of permissionless.

You do need to obviously stick within the the realm of uh good email practices to not get banned and also uh SMS to your list should be fine. Yeah, there's basically nothing at least you're spamming them.

But basically you

56:45

have their number, you have their email and you can communicate with them whenever you want and however you want until unless you make them unsubscribe. Um but that the point is that you have control over it.

They have opted in given you their their details so that you have permission to contact them. And the most important thing about business

57:03

um maybe uh definitely one of the most important things is being able to communicate directly to your customer base. And if you think about it, if you send an email out to a 10,000 person email list, you might get 30 to 40% of those opening.

So even then when you've

57:18

got their email only and then how many of them actually read the whole thing? So then that's when you realize how difficult it truly is to to like get a little bit of the brain space of all the people you're trying to work with.

So whether that's you're hitting them with with lots of content all over the place and hitting them with emails, even with

57:34

all of that noise and all of that value you're throwing at them, it's still quite hard to get through to them. That's why having a direct line to them is such a valuable thing.

And that's why it's important to try to get an owned audience. So, the way you do this, um, and I'm even going to show you how to do it with this video because I'm I'm going to attach the the free resource with

57:49

this for you guys to to build out your own uh your own organic content funnel like this. But, you need some kind of value or CTA or something.

And a lot of the people in my accelerator to do this um are doing very very well at LinkedIn. I'll try to um put a couple of the

58:05

LinkedIn profiles of them down there if I can if I can find some good bots. Um but basically they're doing content that is getting people to engage with it's like hey these these 20 make automations do automate your business in 2025 kind of broad things and you have

58:21

like a a Loom video showing this make automation and fairly fairly standard. I feel like I feel like we haven't made it standard on on LinkedIn because of how much we're pushing it in the accelerator, but you guys probably see it all the time.

If you don't, then hop on LinkedIn and follow a couple AI automation agency owners and you

58:37

definitely see a lot of it. But something that you make some content on here uh on say LinkedIn or YouTube or whatever and then you attach to it some kind of offer.

So, another CTA saying, "Hey, if you enjoyed this, I've actually got even more value or even more stuff to give you, and I'm

58:53

going to put it um just behind this thing where you have to give me your email." And so, that step is getting them into say uh email list. And so, of course, you can just say sign up to my newsletter, but there's not much value behind that.

So, I mean, use an example of of what I've

59:10

literally given to you guys in this video. Um, it's a free resource, what's called a lead magnet.

Um, and that CTA is going to take them from this audience here, the

59:26

rental audience, into your owned audience where you have the email or SMS. And now in here is an important mechanism um that is is probably one of the lesser understood ones in in the entire sort of marketing space.

And this is something that took me quite a while to to realize as well. So there's

59:43

another very very important stage and it's called nurturing. And this is what happens in this section here.

I mean it's

59:58

technically happening here but nurturing is basically just building up sort of trust um respect all those loveydvey words. um uh authority and just like this we do it at at Morningside AI with our uh with

00:14

our customer list and they like the people that would be on sales calls that we would like to close uh at a later date. Um the exact same process works for uh say education businesses like like the the AAA accelerator IRM and more for you guys is doing the exact same thing for nurturing your AI automation agency leads.

Um, so

00:31

nurturing is is a key step and it can be done through content whether like you guys watch my channel right now. If you guys have a YouTube channel, you technically nurture them, but what you can do is you can run emails to push them out of your list to watch the video and that continues to prove your

00:46

expertise, build a relationship with them. They say you need like seven touch points on average these days in order to sell something.

And so if you guys are trying to convert these builders, okay, we're using the builders, bought these builders into people who are uh booked

01:01

onto your calendar. So this is this is book these bookings that I come out the second stage.

Then you need to have some way to prove that you know what you're talking about, that you are someone that they can help. Then then you need to prove that you are someone that can actually help them to achieve what they want to achieve.

And that's the best case of

01:17

being their guide to better understand AI and to use it to improve their business. So this nurture step is is so critical and that's why what it's really important to get them into that that owned audience because you get a chance to consistently nurture them.

Say the the way you put this into your strategy

01:32

for the builders is once a week or twice a week, you talk about one handy or maybe like an interview that you did with the client or a breakdown of a case study that you did or a a list of handy tools or things that they should look into or a you there's so many different ways that you can prove that you know

01:48

what you're talking about or or that you've like an interesting story that that you had when you're working with a client recently. this kind of stuff and providing free value and and really writing a story of how you want them to perceive you is critical.

Maybe you did a did a podcast or an interview with someone and you shoot that out to email list. Hey guys, just had a chat with a

02:04

one of the biggest uh building building contracting firms in my my city and with the CEO and we walk through this this this and you ship it out to email list. Basically, at some point they would be like, "Wow, this guy is the person that I need to to work

02:20

with to get what I want to get done." And that's when you make the final CTA. And this is going to be to um your calendar.

And so at the end of all of

02:36

these these nurture steps when you're shooting out email, shooting out emails, you include at the end of that email or the SMS or they're just going to be the email most of the most time it's going to be your email and newsletter. Um and there's going to be CTA's like, "Hey, by the way, I've actually just opened up a few more spots.

we've just got this great result for XYZ. That's what was in

02:52

the email. A breakdown of a client case study or something you've been working on recently or or a learning that you had.

Is that by the way, I've also got a a few spaces opened up on my calendar. Um we're taking on a few more clients for next month.

Put a bit of urgency and scarcity in there. We find out that morning side that's always always great.

03:07

Um I mean you can fabricate it, but I mean it's we we don't need to fabricate it because because we actually have it, but it would before we needed before we were at the safe. Um we did need to fabricate it.

So, if you need to fabricate scarcity and urgency, but you guys just being absolutely packed out, I

03:23

mean, we had to do it when we first got started. Uh, I don't think it's it's illegal by any means.

Um, but a bit of urgency and scarcity is great to get them to make that jump and book a call. And so, here is when we start getting those infinite leads and bookings flowing out.

And now this is going to be far better compared to say a direct

03:40

response marketing method like cold email where you're taking them from here to here in you're trying to do it in like a day or like maybe a few days if you got if you've got the follow-up sequence going but you see this is a lot slower. So the direct response direct

03:56

response marketing is is um a a style of marketing where you're very much focused on fast ROI measurable results um and always making very strong and clear offers with urgency and scarcity etc. Um, this is a a bit of a combination because we've got these these direct response style things where we're trying

04:12

to push and measure this conversion. Okay, how many people are watching my content and how many people are subscribing to my email list?

Okay, that's a you're getting a a direct response from that content, but more broadly, this nurturing step becomes a longer a longer time horizon where it's not so much direct response and it's

04:29

more so, okay, how can I uh get as many people in here and just over time just pepper away at them. Some people are going to take lower the numbers.

Uh some people are going to convert very quickly. But if you get a good mix of value that you give there and then also offers like you can put in once a month at the end of the month at the start of

04:45

the month and direct a rep offer to your email list saying hey guys we have uh uh just wrapped up three more projects and uh we're actually taking on two more. So um I'd love to work with another another building company locally.

Um you can book in a call directly with me here. Um we can have a chat about how we can help

05:00

your business. So does that all make sense?

I know it might seem like a lot of work, but the the biggest thing that uh you guys were asking about in the the forums I put out is this consistent lead generation question. And yes, this seems

05:17

like a lot, but consistently acquiring leads does take a lot of effort. It's it's one like 80% of your job as the founder in the early stage of the business should be focused on.

It's just this this this like how can I make myself more known? How can I take strangers and make some kind of touch

05:33

point with them and then give them some free value and get them on my email list? So to bring this kind of down to earth for you all.

And like I said, this sales portion after on your calendar is a is a whole other story that I can probably do in another video for you. But you guys really need to get serious

05:49

about setting up something like this cuz the time involvement content creation, if you get it dialed in, uh you can be doing 10 hours a week of of content creation and where you focus and you sit down for two mornings a week and you

06:04

just bang out some really valuable stuff. You look back over your calendar, there's all sorts of ideation strategies.

Um that's I can make a whole other video on that. the exact ideation strategies I used to come up with like 200 ideas for content in uh in a few hours.

But then you can schedule it up. You can say, "Okay, I'm going to get a content manager in or I'm just going to

06:20

schedule it out myself initially and be consistently posting across just one platform to start." That's what I recommend and moving people through these. You may not get them immediately jumping over, but I see so many of you doing like the real really the main thing that I want to talk in this video is that so many of you are doing good stuff

06:37

on the content side and you're getting you're getting engagement. I see a lot of people in my accelerator in the free school community um getting engagement on the social post and lots of people like, "Yeah, send me this, send me that, send me that." But I don't hear as much about it like, "Hey, yeah, I'm just consistently closing these

06:53

deals." like I got a lot of interest but I haven't seem to to convert that into uh into as many clients I thought with and the people who have figured it out and the ones who are really scaling their agencies right now have realized that there's a step where yes you provided value with your content. Now you need to capture that and you need to

07:10

also schedule time each week to manage this owned uh this owned audience so that you've got your list and you're consistently peppering them with value. Even if it's just 100 people or 200 people initially, just start shipping away and building that up because soon enough you will have again if you just

07:25

stick to this for 6 12 months. If you want to do building as a niche, again any if you haven't watched my niching video, I just did it.

It's it really breaks down the best way to find your your perfect niche in 2025 and beyond. This process is going to allow you to consistently pull people from the

07:40

unaware and have no clue, the cold audience who doesn't know who you are down through these with consistent content output and then consistent newsletters as well. And so this is exactly what I've done to generate uh 2,000 or or more leads morning through

07:56

my YouTube channel. It's probably more like 3,000 out.

Um and then also we've got the all the people who book in a call us. We add the email and we do fire emails to keep nurturing them.

Basically, whenever we need more clients, the reason we've always been booked out is cuz we'll either go back to the people who are on the waiting list or we'll shoot out an email to our

08:13

uh the people who we turn away cuz we're too busy and shoot them an email and boom, we're instantly booked up. So, this is incredibly powerful if you do it right.

And this step, if you can really understand it, is the key because you're going to be able to get a more

08:29

cons out of the content you you create more and you consistently build this list so that whenever you need more clients, shoot that offer out directly and most of the other time you're just sharing value as well. So, what I'm going to do as a an example to show you that this stuff works is that I put together a resource, giving you a

08:45

breakdown on the exact strategies I do to the initial version of a content funnel like this. A step-by-step worksheet for you to go step by step through and to achieve something based.

I get it. It may seem overwhelming for you, but if you want consistent leads, you need to start doing this now.

And also, the personal branding aspect can

09:00

completely change your life. Like, it is absolutely changed my life.

And the reason I keep making these videos and trying to help so many of you is because the bigger my personal brand gets, the bigger like the leads we're getting through the doors at Morningside are ridiculous. Off some of these these

09:15

bigger like AI agents videos that are posted, the amount of people who see my face and hear my story and hear that I have a development company and it's ridiculous if you can do it right. Right.

So the bigger my personal brand gets, the bigger opportunities I get thrown at me full stop. And if you guys

09:32

can just get the ball rolling with this, then you get a flywheel. you can just okay I'm making money now let's now let's re-engineer the content let's think bigger let's let's up the production let's let's get a bigger team on then you get in this flywheel and I promise you if you can get a significant personal brand in the AI space through

09:47

your content creation even if it's just within your niche you will have so many opportunities th you want AI right now everyone wants you're like a a mini celebrity amongst the right people because they're just clueless when it comes to AI and they want to be in on it so I'm going to be giving you guys a

10:03

step-by-step breakdown of how to put together this for yourself. And I know that for those of you who put this into action this year, by like bang on middle of this year, you're going to have no more issues.

You're never going to be worrying about getting a client again cuz you'll have a few thousand people on your email list. You'll have 10 20,000

10:19

followers on your chosen platform and you will just be printing. All right, so that's been marketing 101, digital marketing 101, organic organic content funnels.

Um, rewatch this if you need to go make notes. Again, understanding cold, warm,

10:34

hot, rented, and owned audiences, nurturing these key these key things, call to actions, awareness. Actually, I should have done more of these problems, but you get the idea.

Problem one, awareness. Problem two, getting them into your owned audience.

Problem three, getting them into book and conversion.

10:50

So, it's been a bit of a freestyle one for you guys. Um, again, appreciate you all for the support recently.

It's been incredible. Um, I I'm so fortunate to be in this position where I get to make a video and and help tens of thousands or hundreds

11:06

of millions of people. Um, and yeah, I just hope you guys know that I'm I'm going to really keep pushing it this year.

Me and my team are going all in on helping as many of you as possible because while there's massive benefits for you, there's also massive benefits for me and I, like I said, we get so many massive opportunities to meet

11:21

because of how fast this brand is going. So, I just really appreciate all your support and I hope you know that me and my team are doing everything we can to keep helping you.

and we've got a lot of cool stuff in the works for this year. So, um, yeah, that's all with the video.

In this video, we'll be covering

11:38

the fundamentals of pricing your AI products and services, the common mistakes beginners make, and the exact steps to go from offering free projects initially to landing profitable deals down the line. So, we're going to be ripping through the slideshow here, which is going to be available as a free resource on my school community if you want to jump on there and grab it.

So,

11:54

let's get started. So, what are we going to be covering today?

These are the topics. I'm just going to jump straight into them now.

So firstly, why pricing matters? Why is it so important?

Well, it's actually the foundation of your agency because we are running a business and you need to charge a certain amount in order to make a profit. Your price and the price that you charge out at

12:09

needs to be more than the cost that you incur to deliver that service. That's how we make profit and that's how a business works.

If you don't make profit, you don't really have a business or some big tech companies would say otherwise. But for businesses that we want to run, you need to make profit.

And at a basic level, the pricing strategy you use determines how much profit you can make. Secondly, our

12:25

pricing shows our value. So the amount that we're charging out tells clients how good our services are.

Basically, the more we're charging, clients and people in general see price or or high prices as a proxy for value. So we assume that more expensive things are more valuable inherently.

Thirdly, it shapes your work and your life as an

12:40

agency owner. For example, your pricing strategy determines if you're going to be taking on one big project every few months or lots of little ones in order to get that revenue number that you're chasing.

And also, we have things like retainer. So it really shapes the way that your business operates on a day-to-day.

And finally, an effective pricing strategy is what is going to actually grow your business over time.

12:57

Making sure you have enough profit so that you can reinvest into the key parts of the business that need it, marketing, product, team, etc. So the main thing you need to understand when you're pricing your AI services and solutions is what I call the value formula.

So this is a combination of your skills and your experience. And those two added together is what determines your value

13:13

and therefore how much you can charge for your solutions. So this is the frame that I want you to to look through.

It's like okay, what skills do I have and what experience do I have? Skills are your technical abilities like building chat bots on voice flow, automating processes with make.com, etc.

All the other stuff I teach on this channel and then your experience is the actual

13:29

practical wisdom gained from real projects and delivering that in the real world by actually taking your skills and applying them in the real world to build AI solutions for businesses all for yourself. You gain a much deeper and richer understanding of what it actually takes to make a successful AI implementation in the real world.

And so the experience that you gain through

13:45

delivering multiple projects ideally in the same niche or within a a similar similar area. Um the experience you gain increases your value to the client by reducing the project risk because you've been through it before and you see the pitfalls and and the potholes along the way.

Um you can speed up the implementation because you can sort of go straight through and you don't need

14:01

to hit all those potholes along the way. And finally, you can better align the solutions with the business needs from your experience.

So the more experience you gain, that's the way that you can increase your value. And of course, the more skills you have, either yourself or within your organization by hiring other people.

So the skills and the experience is what goes together to determine your

14:16

value. And so now that you understand this value formula, just hold that thought cuz we'll be back to it in a second.

Then we get into pricing basics. So we have products and services.

And services are typically charged by time. So you go to a legal professional and you charge or you ask for, hey, I need these legal services.

They're going to bill you by time. Like how many hours is

14:32

it going to take for me to do the thing you need to do? Whereas with products, it's done by perceived or real value.

So if you sell me a an iPhone or something, I'm not going to be looking at the number of hours it took you to build it. There's a perceived value of that iPhone of value that I can get out of it.

And that's what I'm willing to pay for. So

14:47

products and services priced very differently. And this is important because if you're selling a product and you want to show value, you need to provide some data on how that value was created in a business setting at least.

So, if I'm selling a AI solution to a business, they want to see, okay, well, if you're putting this website chatbot

15:02

on my my landing page, how many people are going to engage with it? How many people are going to provide their lead information?

How many people have based on my close rate, is that going to convert into into closed deals? And how much revenue am I going to get?

So, what is the the data that shows that there is some value attached to this? Because if there's no data showing that someone's

15:18

going to use it, then you're kind of just taking a stab in the dark and making up numbers about the value that this product or that this thing will be able to create for the business owner. So in order to prove or communicate value, you need data in most cases.

But beginners when you're starting an AI automation agency, you don't have any firsthand data or proof of results.

15:34

Therefore, starting out with the AI development services rather than trying to go for products immediately is best. So services, you can charge it based on your time or the time of your developer.

So you can start off with no code and low code tools and operate as an agency where you offer your services. Basically, we can build this thing.

and

15:50

we're going to calculate how much time it's going to take for us and then we're going to give you a proposal or a quote based on those hours rather than this product and value based on which you can we'll talk about later. So getting onto your first project as a beginner with an AI automation agency you'll either be self-d delivering or you'll be delegating it to a developer.

So I

16:06

recommend that you start out by delivering them yourself if possible. It gives you a chance to actually build that experience for yourself rather than relying entirely on other people.

it is not not a great fit for some people. But ideally, you start off with some straightforward projects by posting say in my school community.

Easy way to get

16:22

your first client is just going to my school community and post, hey, I know how to do this or this is what I've been building recently. Anyone interested in something similar?

You'll be shocked how much attention you get and how easy it is to get your first client there. I've heard of so many stories like that in the free community.

Anyway, so you want to be getting started with these straightforward projects that you can deliver yourself using no code and low

16:38

code tools ideally so you don't have any cost associated because if you're delivering yourself, you can go to someone and say, "Hey, I'll work for you for free so that I can build my experience and then become more valuable." And this ties back into the value formula that we mentioned earlier where initially you have some skills. Yes, you might spend a month or two learning uh different AI automation

16:54

tools, but you have no experience. So that limits your value.

Therefore, you should be going in to find these straightforward projects where you can offer your services for free in exchange for getting experience, which in the long run will make you much more valuable. So, starting off with some straightforward projects you can deliver yourself using no code and low code tools is ideal so that you don't have

17:10

any cost. And because you don't have any cost, you're not needing to take money from the client to stay at least at break even.

So, do your first few projects for free if possible if you are self-d delivering to build your experience in order to become more valuable. However, if you must hire and you're one of those people who just refuses to do a bit of tinkering

17:27

themselves and get a bit of hands-on experience, then you should be offering your services at cost in my experience and in my opinion because since you don't have any experience delivering these kind of projects, it's a bit richer for you to go to these clients and say, "Hey, look, I want you to pay me to learn on your business, which is basically what you're saying. So, it does depend on your situation.

If you

17:42

bring on a developer who has a ton of experience, then technically the experience for your entire organization goes up and the skills also and therefore you become a little bit more valuable. But as a rule of thumb when you are getting started, even if you're delegating and hiring a developer, then I recommend that you offer your services at cost just to take the pressure off

17:58

your back as well. Communicate that clearly with your first client or a couple of clients.

Say, "Hey, look, here's what we've built in the past or here's what we've built for ourselves." Just any kind of proof you can get to show that you know what you're talking about and that there's a reasonable likelihood of you actually seeing this thing for you as a beginner. But coming in and offering your services at cost

18:13

and being like, "Hey, I have my developer. I'm willing to do this deal for you at cost because I value your testimonial more than the money that this will make me." And a really key point here at the end, which is by offering them projects at cost, clients will be more lenient with you if things fall short of your expectations, which as a beginner, delivering your first few projects is highly likely because you

18:30

have you you sell them the dream just to get the the deal over the line. And unfortunately, you realize it's a lot more difficult to deliver that than uh than you expected.

So, it's completely normal, but the issue is exacerbated if you've charged them a whole bunch of money and you were going to be trying to pocket a few, thousand starting out. And this kind of thing of rushing to the

18:45

money and trying to skip this learning phase and going straight to selling and making as much money you can out of this AI space is really one of the biggest issues that I'm seeing in beginners approaching this. I was on my free community Q&A in the school school community this morning and there was this guy who came up on stage and he was saying I'm going to be selling gyms this this and this.

I was like well have you

19:01

what have you done? What are your baby steps that you've done to get to this point of selling this big expensive package to them?

It's like oh well like no I've just I've just started like how how hard can it be? But if you're a beginner, just take baby steps and focus on learning before earning because if you try to jump to the earning part,

19:17

you're just going to get chewed up and sped out by this AI space. And I I promise you that.

So taking it slow and zooming out and seeing this is a long process where you need to build your skills and expertise by doing regular deliveries, even if that means taking less money up front so that you can make more money later on. So it's about staying in the game, not maxing things

19:32

out immediately as soon as you get in here. So after delivering a few free or lowcost projects just to get up your experience, you're now becoming valuable enough that you can start to charge for your services.

And when you get to this point, the pricing structure and strategy that I recommend for all beginners is what's called cost plus pricing. This is what I started off with my own agency, Morningington.AI when we

19:49

were first getting started back in early 2023. So after you deliver a few free or cost projects, your experience has increased.

Therefore, you are more valuable. If you haven't already hired a developer, now is a good time to do so.

And so from now on, you should be adding some profit to your deals with what's known as cost plus pricing. In order to do cost plus pricing, you need to

20:05

estimate the time and resources required to deliver a client's project. So they come to you or you reach out to them and offer a service.

And then once you've fully scoped the project and determine what they need and what you're going to need to build, you can do an estimate of the time and resources required and how much that's going to cost you. And then you need to get your developers hourly rate that you've hired on to take these

20:21

projects. And that may be from $30 to $50 an hour depending on how skilled they are and how experienced.

And then you can apply markup to get your final cost. So, for example, if the project was estimated to take 60 hours of dev work with your one dev and he or she costs $50 an hour, then when we multiply these two together and then add our markup of say 2x or 3x, I recommend that

20:38

you start off with 2x. It's what we did at my agency.

So, you just basically get the developer cost and double it. That's a good starting point for starting to actually make profit on your on your deals.

And then you can start to increase that to 3, four, 5x. We eventually got up to six or 7x for some of the larger projects we did.

Um, you can just continue to increase that and

20:53

that's going to give you a nice healthy margin. you've got the experience needed to justify you charging these prices.

When it comes to signing the deal and getting the first uh invoice paid and getting the money in your account, there's a few different ways that you can structure the payment terms. The one that I started out with and the one I recommend to most beginners, um particularly on projects that are kind

21:08

of under 20 to $30,000 is a 50% upfront and 50% on completion structure. Um, this structure is really good when you're starting out because if you're just doing a 2x markup, like I said, like you've got $1,000 of cost and then $2,000 um price that you're charging up.

Um, when you take that 50% up front,

21:24

you're immediately covering what your expected costs are going to be. So, ideally with the 3x markup, you get a little bit more buffer and you're almost always in profit.

Um, but with this structure, if you take that 2x markup, you get the 50% up front, you've covered your cost, and then 50% on completion. But, as I say here, make sure you set the terms very clearly in the contract

21:40

on what is defined as completion. So, that's a whole other story.

I can do a video on contracts if you want, but um make sure that you've clearly stated what the end uh deliverable or end result is so you don't get pissed around on that final payment. And just to reiterate, the most important thing out of this whole video that I want you to take away is that experience is more

21:56

valuable than money when you're starting out. It's really the only way to succeed in this long term.

And if you don't understand that and you don't change your approach, you're going to run into failure after failure after failure because you're trying to shoot too high for your current skill level and then basically causing a whole bunch of issues for yourself and your business and your clients, too. Make sure that

22:12

you're taking on lowc cost or free projects to build case studies and experience early on. Collect testimonials from these early projects and the data of before and after of the real impact that you're providing to your clients so that you can prove that you can create value for other businesses, too.

Um, and my final point here is that every idiot right now

22:28

thinks that they're an AI expert just because they play around with chat GPT and Claude. Um, despite having no experience of actually delivering these things for businesses.

So successful deliveries early on and even into the later stages of your AI automation agency journey. These successful deliveries are really the gold in the

22:44

space and should be your number one goal early on. It's just can I get a handful of successful deliveries under my belt to see things through to completion to work with clients and get experience in dealing with them and then have the data that I can use to go and increase the prices of my services as you continue to take on more clients.

Quick recap of the

23:00

key takeaways in this video. We have experience coming first.

Prioritize gaining experience and case studies over immediate profits, which is easy to do as a beginner. Take free or lowc cost projects to build experience and ultimately build trust and proof.

Secondly, cost plus pricing. So after a few successes, you can add profit to

23:15

your rate by using cost plus pricing with a 2x markup initially. Thirdly, structure your deals with a 50% upfront and 50% on completion uh structure to cover cost and reduce risks initially.

Number four, experience plus skills equals value. Your skills and experience define your value.

Increase your rates

23:30

as you grow. And finally, keep it simple.

Start with basic no code or low code projects depending on your skill level. If you're a developer coming and obviously you can jump up a bit higher in order to minimize your costs and reduce the complexity of your builds and really accelerate your learning before you start tackling complex projects which are definitely out there.

And this

23:46

video is only really just scratching the surface on AI automation agency pricing. There's a lot more to it.

Retainers versus upfronts, pricing per milestone, cost plus versus valuebased pricing, data collection for price maxing and more. There's so much left to it.

I really had to exclude a lot out of this just to keep this short and sweet for beginners. But if you want to learn

24:02

about these topics, you can firstly subscribe to the channel because I might make some videos on it later. Actually, drop a comment below if you want me to make any of those videos or these parts of it that you're particularly interested in.

And if you haven't already, join my free school community, which is my first link in the description below where I've got a free course on starting an AI automation agency that I've just released. So,

24:18

everything you need to start your AI automation agency is in there. So, if you haven't already joined the school, first thing in the description.

That's all for the video, guys. Over the past 18 months of running my own AI automation agency, Morningside AI, I've sent out literally hundreds of

24:34

contracts and only ever had one dispute with a client. And that dispute was resolved positively in our favor thanks to a rockolid contract.

In this video, I'll walk you through the exact contract template that I used to get Morningside AI off the ground in early 2023 and show you how you can use it to start your own AI automation agency safely. Firstly,

24:51

I'll debunk the biggest contract myths that really trip up beginners early on. And then we'll dive into the template, breaking down each section and how you can modify it for your own clients and your own projects.

So, what exactly is a contract and why do we need them? So, contracts are a legally binding agreement between yourself and a client.

And it's a way of both protecting your

25:07

client and also protecting yourself and very clearly stating what the scope of work is going to be and what you're building for them, what compensation you expect, etc. So, there's really a couple key parts with that you're going to see on the template in a second.

But, it comes down to things like the scope of work, what you're actually expected to be delivering, what are the deliverables. You have the compensation,

25:23

the total amount, and then the payment terms. Say it's going to be $5,000 split into two payments, 50% up front, and 50% um at completion.

And contracts often need to include things like what's expected from the client, not just your deliverables and the things that you are delivering, but hey, we need access to your software. We need access to your

25:40

team. We need responses and and stuff back from their end.

we need you to provide your API key, etc. So, not only is it to clearly lay out what you're expected to do, but also the agreement on the client side and what they're bringing to the table in terms of compensation, the payment structure and things that they need to provide to you for successful delivery of the scope of

25:56

work within the contract. So, the most important thing you need to understand as a beginner when it comes to contracts and getting into business is that at the end of the day, a contract is just a piece of paper.

Yes, they are legally binding and technically you can if they have signed it and you have signed it and there's a clear breach of the contract, you can go and try to enforce

26:12

the law on them and say they broke the contract. But there is also an aspect of practicality involved where say if this is a $5,000 contract, the effort for you to go and seek the the power of the law or go to the government and try to get this enforced and saying, "Hey, they haven't paid me my second $2,500 the

26:27

second part of the contract." It is just not worth the effort on your part. you would likely need to spend a ton of money in legal fees just to be able to go and reclaim that $2,500 from them.

So, important thing, most important thing you must understand with contracts. They're just a piece of paper.

People break contracts all the time and there's basically nothing you

26:44

can do. So, with this in mind, it's like, why would I actually be bothering with contracts?

Well, you need to have that in place because by them signing it, you're basically giving the value of their word. And this is what you need to be looking out for when you are signing your first few clients is that shady people with a contract, they'll just throw that up and and walk away.

You

27:00

need to do a bit of a character assessment of your client and being like, is this person someone who is going to once once they put that word and the word and their signature on their document, do I trust that they're going to fulfill their their side of the bargain here? So, there is this interesting human element to contracts early on where you have to essentially weigh up the person and say, do I trust

27:17

this person to follow through on what they say? But there's also another aspect of it of how can I structure this contract in a way that protects me from the the darker side of human nature which exists in all of us in varying degrees.

But how can I structure this deal so that worst case scenario I'm still covered or at least covering my

27:32

cost. And that's what we're going to jump into in this contract template in a second.

But that's what you need to understand is that contracts are a piece of paper. It's only as strong as the person's word when you are dealing with low ticket well relatively low ticket contracts like when you are starting out even as you get up to say $50,000 or $100,000 projects.

the burden for you to

27:49

go and try to enforce that contract or a breach of contract is so great that it is still not worth it for you to do so only when you're dealing with multiple six-figure contracts it really becomes feasible for you to do that. Um those are instances of where you believe that they have breached the contract and you want to pursue them but they can also

28:04

claim that you have breached the contract in their in their eyes and they can come and pursue you for it. So you need to have a solid contract template that you work from and you need to clearly define the scope of work which is what I'm going to walk you through right now.

Here on screen is the exact contract that we used to get Morningside AI off the ground back in early 2023. So I'm going to walk you through the

28:19

different parts of it now so you know how to use it and modify it and I'll tell you how to get access to it. So we have the software development agreement.

We have the parties. So it's an agreement on the contract date.

You see all these square brackets. This is what you need to replace.

And here we have the software development company which is yourself, you, your name or your

28:34

company name if you're just a sole proprietor and you're just doing this on your name for now. Then the address of your company and you're the consultant as you refer to later in the document.

Here is where you need to send it over to your client to fill out their name or their company name, their address, etc. And so then we get to the services section, which is really the most important part for you and making sure

28:50

that you clearly define the scope and what you're responsible for delivering. So here's an example of something you might fill out here.

Um, build a MVP custom launch chatbot that takes prospects through a series of questions moving towards an objective, eg booking a call or purchasing a service, and can provide support regarding the company's products, general information, da da da.

29:05

The application will be deployable to a website widget in the righthand corner of the web page. This MVP will be for one specific client of the client and will have to be duplicated and adjusted in future milestones if alternative versions are needed.

So this is what's defined as the scope of these services here and it's helpful to do this but also you can add in some bullet points

29:21

as well. This is for a very basic build.

Um you can provide a lot more detail and very clearly state out the milestones and the deliverables required. So then as I mentioned you get onto the requirements from the client.

So you can put in here like we need access to this or this. We need your API key.

We need you to join our Slack and answer their onboarding questionnaire etc. The term

29:37

here is pretty straightforward. when you're going to start the project and start building for them and when it's going to end.

You can select one of these on the date and then add in a date that you want to end on. There's other options here you can use.

This one here is the main one you're going to be using. Then compensation is how you get paid in consideration for the services provided.

The consultant is to be paid

29:53

in the following manner uh per hour, which is likely not what you're going to be doing per job contract value. So you can add in say uh $2,000 here in total.

And so this is the total compensation. And then you have the payment terms down here.

So, the consultant shall be paid in accordance with section 4 on a

30:09

weekly, monthly, quarterly basis, etc. And then I have other as an option down here, which you'll typically want to go when you're starting out, uh 50% upfront, 50% on completion.

And these payment terms are great to get started. You get your money up front to cover

30:25

your costs, and then 50% when you actually deliver the value you said you're going to deliver. Um, I've just done a whole video on pricing, which if you haven't seen it, if you're a beginner getting started, you really need to understand it.

I'll put it up here somewhere. um really important you understand how to properly price your services when you're getting started.

Then we have a quick section on expenses. Um so either you're going to

30:40

be responsible for all of them um in the delivery or you can opt to be reimbursed with the client for some expenses. So you can say hey look we'll set it up on our service initially and we'll set it up on our API key but at the end of the project we're going to expect you to reimburse us for the cost incurred to do that.

So in most cases um if you're just

30:56

doing a upfront build where you build it and then sort of leave um you're going to be responsible for all expenses and you include those expenses as part of your pricing. Then you have a dispute section.

So you can change the jurisdiction to be in your country that you'd want to be handling any disputes in legal notice and then a lot of other legal jargon. Then again you've got a

31:12

governing law section where you need to change this to your country or your state. Then of course down the bottom here we have a section for your signature.

So your signature here then the clients you can send this over docyign is typically how you do it. I think you do get 10 contracts for free with docyign.

So you can sign up with docyign. Put a link down below.

Not affiliated. Um but you can also just

31:28

send it to them um and get them to sign it on the on their PDF viewer on their Mac or whatever they're using. Um but yeah, docyign generally comes across a lot more professional because this kind of email they get and then they sign it and it's all feels very professional.

So using this contract and using docyign is how we got morning side AI started. And of course I do have to add in a

31:44

disclaimer here that I am not a legal professional. Um this is what worked for us.

I'm simply giving a recount of what we have done and what worked for Morning Side in our early stages. And this is the exact template that we use to get off the ground.

So just as a final note on contracts before we wrap up. I know it's something that beginners can get quite hung up on initially.

Um, and I

32:00

really want you to just put that whole legality stuff. I need to set up a company.

I do this all official. Need to have all these thousand contracts and a lawyer involved.

You just need to start, man. You just need to take the resources that I gave you, like this contract.

It worked for us. It can work for you.

I know that. Like I said, contracts are really just a formality.

This is all you

32:17

need to get off the ground. And then later on, you can hire your lawyer once you've got some cash flow coming in and you can fully rethink it and make sure it's really tailored to what you're offering.

But this is enough to get started. Forget that whole fancy legal setup rubbish.

You just need to focus on getting people to give you money. That's all it is.

That's all starting a

32:32

business is, is getting people to give you money. Today, I want to make a quick video breaking down the three most important questions that you need to ask before taking on any AI projects to your agency.

Um, now these questions that myself and my team at Morningside have

32:48

had to learn by trial and error. And this is what we've come to and continue to use to this day after coming up with it around a year ago, this time last year.

um and it continues to be the set of questions that we ask during our sales process and also as soon as we get into the actual building of the project. Um that's the the information that we

33:04

need to collect. Very important to understand this if you're looking to build an AI agency and be successful in this space.

So let's get into it. So three key questions starting off.

These are things we'll typically ask during our sales process initially. And this is really how myself and my team figure out what a project is about and what the

33:21

goal is, what who the end users are. And and these three questions are really what allow us to connect all these pieces together.

So the first thing up here is data. Now I know data isn't a question, but what data is this system or is this build going to be using or integrating?

33:37

Um because we're using LLMs and and and chatbt APIs, there's some kind of data that's going to be flowing through and hitting that API at some point and we're going to be manipulating it. We're going to be doing something with it.

It might be a custom knowledge chatbot. It might be an automation where we're passing some kind of data through it.

we need to

33:52

know what data they're going to be using in the system or what we're going to be manipulating with our AI tasks and with our functions. So, first things first is data.

What data are you using or what data is going to be built into the system? Um, next we have

34:09

inputs. So, what are the expected inputs of the system?

Um whether that's an email classification system where it's going to have emails from XYZ inbox that are going to be moving through it or typically in the form of chat bots and agents that you build. Who who's the end user of this?

How are they actually

34:24

going to be sending questions to it? What are they expecting to get out of it?

This is really important to to understand how this data is going to be used. Um and then finally um you may have guessed it, we have uh outputs.

So with this we get a nice

34:41

little triangulation which allows us to understand what this project is and by triangulating these different parts um we understand what they're looking to build because if you know what data they're getting they know what questions

34:57

are being asked and you know what they're trying to output then you have a full picture of okay this is what the system is doing I'm using AI or language models to convert this data given this prompt into this output. Now, this may look like in the form of okay, I'm going

35:12

to be using CSV or I'm going to be using PDFs. Okay, well, what are in those PDFs?

Is it diagrams? Is it going to be just all text?

What is the content of the PDF? And how big are they?

All these kind of questions that you need to ask about the data that's going into the system. And then for the inputs, we'll

35:28

just ask for a list. give us a list of 5 to 10 expected inputs that the user or end user would end up giving to the system.

Okay, great. We've got a list of those.

Okay, now can we also get a list of

35:44

outputs? If we get a list of inputs and a list of outputs and then we know the data that we need to put in, we can then run some kind of test.

Sorry, there's another triangle, but this is supposed to be the system that we put into it. Um, it's flowing the wrong way, but you get the idea.

we can put the inputs into

36:02

this and test the outputs. So we use these questions at various stages of our client life cycle.

So in the discovery call, we'll ask these questions. What data is the system going to be using or manipulating?

What are the expected inputs? What are some of the expected outputs that you want from that data given these inputs?

We get the full

36:17

picture. Um but then we can go into our exploration phase, which I've covered in the in the earlier video that I mentioned.

And the exploration phase is a $800,000 $2,000 milestone. And we've continued to increase the price over time and you guys can too.

Uh but it's a a quick milestone that allows us to say,

36:32

"Okay, give us a sample of the data. Give us some sample inputs.

Give us some sample outputs. Let us mock up a quick system, a prototype of the system." Cuz with LLM apps, it's usually fairly easy to get a prototype up or at least a proof of concept that shows, okay, yes, we can achieve this or we can get to close enough to the end result that we

36:48

can be confident in in the outputs or or in the final result being there if we put in a bit of extra work. So we collect the data, we collect the inputs and outputs.

We run a little exploration milestone and then we can actually do some cosign similarity testing to determine if we're able to make this thing work. So yes, we've had

37:04

on the discovery call, we've learned about it. Is this something like initially is this a project that we're interested in taking on.

Is this data too tricky? Is it CSV or is it PDS with images in it?

Is this data too tricky for the current technology? So if it's not, then we say, okay, sorry, we're not interested in that project.

But if they

37:20

get past step one and they get they become a client. Okay, now we have this discovery milestone which is step two.

Okay, we can do this little test. Does this does these inputs and the data are we able to get a proof of concept or or prototype up?

Okay, yes, we've moved through that. Okay, now we're into stage

37:36

three, which is the actual build and we need to go through and flesh this thing out and really get down to this desired set of outputs. And we build these into the contract.

This concept of these three questions that we ask to get a a a holistic idea of the project that we're taking on is not just limited to to this stuff here. It's actually part of a

37:52

broader broader issue and and thorny part of of running these AI agencies and building AI solutions to businesses and that is expectation management. And this is something that continually will rear its

38:07

head in your journey and continue to cause issues if you are not absolutely brutal on your attempts to squash it and shut it down and get yourself and your client on the exact same uh eye level of of what this project and what the

38:22

project will look like in its final form. So when it comes to expectation management, those three questions are so key cuz initially you're going to be able to say yes or no, we can do the project.

Great on the discovery call, sales call, whatever you want to call it. That gets you into the exploration phase when you can say okay now we're going to try to do a prototype test this

38:37

see if we can get the kind of outputs we want using coine similarity check that they're similar enough then we can move into the final project but before you go any further you need to really be careful about setting these expectations correctly which is using the cosine similarity test so that's one of the techniques we use cosine so cosine

38:53

similarity test during their exploration phase and that's going to let them know hey these are the kind of outputs we can get from this exploration phase we did you show them very very clearly and we do this morning side every time do the exploration, get the proof of concept, get the prototype, generate a set of outputs, hop on a call with the client

39:08

and say, "Are you happy with these outputs?" Everything is based on language. Everything is subjective and they will have opinions and feelings.

And again, you can't build a business based on the the whims and feelings of your clients. You need to have something more solid than that or you're going to be dead in the water.

So co similarity

39:24

test at the end of that exploration showing that yes we've met the input and output requirements to to be similar but also showing it to the client and getting feedback and saying hey what do you think of this this is going to be what it looks like in the final version can you please confirm that this is what you're happy with and that's what we're

39:39

going to use based on the uh the final contract is going to be the results like this but more recently and something I really want to introduce to you guys now as as myself and the team at Morningside have just started to experiment with it but also mock-ups

39:56

where the client will see the end result in some kind of graphical mockup of of what the display will be like because yes, it's one thing to get the outputs, but often times you'll send them back the outputs and and something that doesn't look too flashy. It's it's like a bit rough around the edges cuz it's a

40:11

prototype and then they look at it and they go, "Oh, that's that's not what I wanted at all." Because you hadn't managed the expectations of what it was going to look like. We're experimenting right now with sending over graphical mockups and doing a little design and sending that over to them and saying, "Hey, look, this is what it's going to look like.

This is how the answers are

40:28

going to be displayed within the window. This is what the overall UI of it on your website is going to look like, etc." Um, so mock-ups and giving some kind of flash forward to the end product, not just in terms of the outputs, but also in in terms of the optics and and the visuals of what it's

40:43

going to look like is further going to help your expectation management so that you don't get to the end and the clients go, "Eh, I'm not happy with this." So that's all I want to say in this video. Expectation management, the three questions.

What data is the system going to use? What are the expected inputs?

40:58

And what are the expected outputs? With those three, you can eyeball a project very, very clearly.

That's that's all I use to to survey or analyze a project before we take it on. But then when you get further down the sales life cycle towards an exploration phase, content similarity testing and even giving mockups just to really manage the

41:14

expectations, show the client that this is what you're going to get because unfortunately Chat GBT Open AI, they have such amazing AI experiences that they set the bar way up here. And us as AI agency owners, while we love chatbt, it is our worst enemy at times because it's such a good experience for people

41:30

and they a lot of these early adopters that you'll have coming to your agency, they use chatbt heavily and they go, "Wow, this is really cool. I want something like this for my business." And then for you as an agency owner with one developer trying to replicate CHBT level polish is very difficult to do.

So this is your saving grace. So that's all

41:46

for the video guys. Today we're going through how and where to hire your first developer as an AI agency owner.

Now, this is an extremely important and crucial step in the journey of any AI agency owner because if you're not able to get this right and and start to bring in external

42:02

talent and expertise into your agency, then you are never going to be able to free up your time to focus on more important things like actually growing the business. So, it's so important that you get this right.

And this is the the hurdle that many people never get over and stops people from going on to become successful with this business model longterm. So, I wanted to make this

42:17

video really breaking down everything that I've learned over the past 14 months. And this is going to be probably one of the most important videos you watch this year if you're serious about this business model.

So, let's get into it. How and where to hire your first developer as an AI agency.

Firstly, my expertise in this topic comes from hiring and firing over 15 developers for my own agency in the past 15 months,

42:34

which is a bit of a a weird flex, I know. Um, but it shows the kind of turnover that you can see if you're very picky about the kind of talent that you let in.

And I've learned a lot from from going through 15 developers. So key takeaways from this video for you is firstly going to be determining what developer you need for your agency to succeed this year.

Secondly,

42:49

understanding what makes AAA developers different from regular developers. Um thirdly, knowing the easiest way to find AAA developers for your business.

And finally, knowing how much to pay your developers so you don't get ripped off. So very important things.

Um we're going to get to all of these by the end of the video. And here's um DJ Calib with the

43:04

major key. If you are new to the channel and don't know who I am, my name is Liam Mley.

I'm the creator of the AAA or AI automation agency model. I'm the founder of my own agency, Morningside AI.

I've generated over seven figures with my AI businesses over the past 15 months around the largest community of AAA owners in the world and I've hired all of my friends and live an awesome life

43:20

that all thanks to AI. Just a little bit of transparency about why I make these videos as well.

I know there's a lot of skeptics out there now. So, um this is it on screen.

I have software products that I make for AAA owners and my community. And if you become a successful AAA owner, then you'll become a user of my software.

And eventually, if I do things right, um I can sell my

43:35

software. So without you winning and and succeeding with your own agency, you will never use my software and I will never make the reach my end goal.

So we're kind of aligned on this. So let's do it.

So the first thing we need to ask ourselves is why are we hiring? What's the point of this in the first place?

Um and this comes down to a few key things.

43:51

So finding and hiring the right developer is a crucial step in your journey as a AAA owner. Um failure to do this and and hire correctly and bring expertise into the business so that you can work on more important things is the killer of many aspiring AAA owners.

Um they all try to get going. they're doing it themselves and they never get find

44:06

the right person or understand how to hire in the right way. So, they never advance past that where you can actually start to free things up and scale the business more.

Um, and the key thing here is that delivering highquality services is hard in the AI space. I'm not going to sugar coat it.

You need to have a capable team and capable

44:22

expertise within your within your organization to deliver quality services because there's so many people trying to start this right now. But the number of highquality service providers who can give a great experience for their customers and create value is limited.

And that's limited to the people who have been able to successfully hire and delegate it off to capable teams as

44:38

well. And full transparency, this is what completely changed my agency from us struggling initially.

It was bringing in the right talent. We had some really poor talent initially.

And when we hired the right people, it just completely opened things up for us. I could suddenly work on building my personal brand further so that we could get more leads.

And it really just set ourselves

44:54

up for success as we have had over the past 12 months. On the right here are some examples of people winning within my program.

And if you're doing these $20,000 projects, you have to have some kind of talent to deliver this stuff for you so that you can focus on more important things. So if you want to get to these levels, you need to get this first hire correct.

Which brings me to

45:09

the AAA model itself and the opportunity that this entire thing sits on and your role and my role as as AAA owners. Um, and the first thing you need to understand is that there are a lot of developers rushing to this promised AI land with all the money so that they can cash in on their on their share as we are trying to cash in on our share.

45:24

They're trying to cash in on their share um by running and upskilling to this to this promised land, right? But of these people that are rushing into the space as developers, very few of them actually have the skills and knowledge to create value in the business with their skills and and use this technology to actually solve a real problem and create value, which is where your job as an AI agency

45:41

owner comes in. And that's to identify opportunities for value creation with AI and deploy the team and the resources required to deliver it.

Kind of like a general in the army. Um, you survey the situation and then you deploy the resources or troops to solve that particular problem.

So you are the brain and they are the sword. And this is

45:57

where you create value as the AI automation agency owner. So the first thing you need to understand when you are hiring developers is there's a there's a whole lot of different types of developers.

Um it's not just one. And so you need to understand where you're you're targeting your hiring efforts so that you can get what you need to to grow your business.

So there's front end

46:12

developers, backend, full stack, devops, there's a lot of different types as you can see in this diagram here. Um so we need to know what we're looking for in particular so that we can actually grow our business.

Um so I've got this little diagram here of these engineerospheres or the spheres of engineering um different areas uh basically and we've

46:29

got no code developers which have their own little thing going and they have had for the past while using things like zapia and make air table bubble etc. And then we have the more traditional AI ML developers who are traditional software engineers that know how to use Python.

They've used things like PyTorch or TensorFlow and more recently they've

46:45

been using things like Lchain to build LLM based apps um with with Python. But what we're looking for really is this the sweet spot of AAA developers or AI automation agency developers that combine both of these worlds.

Um both the no code low cody stuff and the

47:00

traditional AI IML expertise and that's where we get this middle area here. So, using platforms like voice flow, which is our go-to chatbot builder, relevance AI, which is great for building AI tools, um, and particularly connecting them to your GBTs and and AI agents, and then platforms like my own Agent, which

47:16

allows you to build chat GBT like experiences for your clients, and then some expertise in how to use language models, prompt engineering, and things like this. So, there's a sweet spot where these two words overlap, and that's ideally where we want to be hiring.

Not only are there different spheres of engineering, though, there's also levels to the game, and there's levels of software engineers going from

47:32

entry level to senior. So you've got a bunch of different factors when you're thinking of hiring which you need to understand before you go and start offering money for these positions.

So with these things in mind, what are we actually looking for in our first hire? So going back to the question of why are we hiring in the first place?

We're either hiring for a lack of technical

47:47

expertise that that we are missing. And you need help to be able to plan and deliver the solutions because without this expertise, there's no there's no knowledge gap within your agency between you and and the person that you're you're trying to help, right?

you need some kind of expertise and you're you're making money by bridging that knowledge gap for them and delivering solutions

48:03

that they wouldn't be able to do themselves. So you may need some technical expertise in the business or it may just be a lack of time where you need to delegate project delivery to allow you to focus on growing the business um eg by making content like I do on YouTube taking sales calls etc.

So it's either one of these two problems

48:18

and based on your situation whether it's a lack of technical expertise or just a lack of time um that determines whether you're trying to hire a senior developer or a junior developer. So seniors are able to lead a team.

They're able to lead and manage communications with your clients. Uh they're able to architect and plan solutions.

They're able to

48:34

innovate and lead product improvement. They're able to solve problems when they occur.

And finally, they're also able to just be used to uh build and deliver the projects that you say you're going to do. And senior developers like this are contrasted against junior developers, which are basically just good for building and delivering projects or

48:50

updating clients on what's happening. So they can't really lead communications.

You wouldn't want them hopping on calls one-on-one with the client and sorting them out there. That's where the senior guys come in and they have to be able to manage a team, lead the project, etc.

And you can really hand things off to them. So to illustrate when you need one or the other, uh we've got some

49:05

scenarios here. So scenario one is a technical AAA founder.

Say you've got some background in software engineering yourself. Uh that means you're comfortable in planning the solutions and leading the development.

So you you act as a senior developer, but you hire one or two juniors below you that you can kind of delegate to and rotate them

49:21

as they're available. Um so you can delegate the actual delivery of it and manage the client communication yourself.

In this case you're serving as the CTO or the lead developer of the organization and this is quite common for the people who are tech professionals who join my program my accelerator. Um and they come in and they say hey I want to I have the

49:37

capabilities and the expertise to be able to lead the team myself and that allows you to run a little bit leaner because as you'll see in a little bit the pricing of developers of course juniors are going to be cheaper. So, if you do have the skills and you want to start an agency like this, you can serve as the the lead developer, the CTO, and just hire some juniors underneath you.

49:52

And a good example of this is Mark, a member from my community. And and I've actually got a podcast here with him on my channel.

If you haven't watched that already, I I'll leave that link down below. But Mark is a is a software engineer by trade.

He came into the program and he's now done over $50,000 with his with his AR business, but he's serving as the lead developer and he has

50:08

a team of juniors underneath them. So, that's one way of doing it.

Um, but secondly, if you're a nontechnical AAA founder and and some of you, I know you're coming into this opportunity and you don't have a software background, which is completely fine, but it's a little bit different to how you would approach it as someone with that background. In this case, you'd have a nontechnical founder who understands the

50:24

problems that the clients are facing, but lacks the depth of knowledge required to actually plan how you're going to deliver that. So in this case, you would hire one senior AAA developer and then the owner can work alongside the dev and the client to make sure that the expectations are aligned and then they can delegate the delivery and

50:39

communication to that senior developer cuz as we said these seniors can actually lead and manage the communication with the client and also deliver the products themselves. So in this case, you hop on sales calls with the client.

You bring them in, you connect them with your developer, you make sure that everything's all good, and you allow them to manage the delivery of those services. And this

50:55

gives you more time to bring more business into the business. And a great example of this in action is my co-founder Josh at Morningside.

He came in completely clueless when it came to software and building AI solutions. It was just completely foreign to him.

But in the space of about 2 months of being on sales calls with me, he was able to

51:11

learn, okay, these are the questions you ask. This the kind of solutions that we offer.

Okay. Okay.

And then I was able to fully hand off sales to him and then he's able to get on these, hop on a course with our developers, connect them up and do the process that I've just gone through here. So, it is possible.

And Josh to this day still does not know how to code, but he leads all of our

51:26

sales and all of our operations at Morningside. So, it is definitely possible.

And don't let your self-limiting belief stop you from achieving something like myself and Josh have. Your next question might be, okay, how much does this cost for a senior developer or a junior developer?

I know what I need now, but how much am I how much am I on the line for here? So, um,

51:41

there's three tiers of AR talent that we've seen and and we've hired at Morningside, and let me just tell you right now that you don't want to be dealing with the low low tier talent there. So, just take that off the menu completely.

For less than $30, they're likely low tier talent and not something that you want to get involved with. I mean, at your own

51:58

risk, you can you can ignore me if you want, but this is from my experience that you don't want to be touching anything. You get what you pay for um if you're good on the vetting side.

And these tiers of talent translate nicely into these price brackets for senior and junior developers. So the senior developers, they're likely going to be

52:13

$70 to $100 per hour. Ideally, they've got some kind of traditional development background because they are going to be leading the team and you are trying to bring in if you're going to be buying and bringing in expertise.

You don't just want to bring in a sliver of hey, he can build chat bots on voice flow. You kind of want to get the whole picture because um you probably don't as

52:29

the agency owner have much uh expertise. You want them to compliment you, cover off the areas that you're not familiar with, um, and understand what production applications look like, not just gimmicky little chat bots and stuff like you probably can do yourself.

There's a big difference between tinkering around with a prototype and a production grade

52:45

solution. So these guys that you bring in as a senior need to cover off that area for you within the business.

So a traditional developer turned AI solution specialist where they understand voice flow, agentive, all these different platforms, relevance, make, etc. Ideally, you can get that hybrid.

um you're not always going to be able to find it, but the hybrid senior developer

53:02

who could do both sides of that is really what you're looking for. And ideally 5 years of experience in a development role.

And then you have the juniors and we split these up into two categories really. U guys who can do the only AAA related services.

So whether that's voice flow, relevance, etc. Only the low code, no cody stuff.

Uh they're

53:18

only worth about $30 to $40 an hour from from our testing. Uh but if they have the traditional background and they're able to combine it with the AAA solutions that we typically sell and they understand everything that I talk about here on the channel, then they're worth more like uh $50 to $70 per hour.

And the reason for this is that if a

53:34

developer can also leverage these no code, low code tools at the right time, you can deliver services with far less time invested. So, for example, if you wanted to build a web chat widget chatbot and put it on a customer's website, um, and you tried to do that all custom, it would take a ton of time

53:49

and cost you a lot more than if you had a guy who knew how to use uh, these AAA platforms that we talk about so often here on the channel and was able to just go, okay, I can put this on voice floor. I can build this out in a couple of hours.

You're actually getting more value out of them because they're able to deliver the same thing for less and less time. So you paying $50 to $70 per

54:06

hour if they're able to at the right time use low code and no code tools combined with their traditional background, you're getting more bang for your buck, hence them being more expensive. And these guys here, the juniors who have traditional and AAA experience and knowledge, they're essentially a a baby version of the senior, right?

They're just missing the

54:21

managerial capabilities um and the the ability to actually plan these solutions. So these guys are highly valuable and can be trained up as you'll see just here.

You can turn your junior developers into senior over time. Um, so they are the talent that you're looking to develop and this requires zooming out a lot more in your agency and and not

54:37

seeing them as a static part of your business, but seeing talent as a major part of how you're going to grow over time. Um, and picking the right things and planting seeds and and watching them grow over time is really important.

So when it comes to your senior developers, you need the strong technical skills, of course, the 5 years of experience, deep understanding of traditional code, um,

54:52

and also ideally some of the newer stuff that we talk about on this channel. uh interpersonal skills, being able to talk to your clients, being able to deal with the team, uh being able to communicate with you about what the hell's going on in the business, which is so key.

Um and the ability to mentor and coach your juniors, which is really important. And for juniors, you just want to pick rock

55:08

stars that are just starting off. They natural aptitude towards the the stuff that you're building, potential, and the ability to learn as well.

So, juniors, they're not by definition, they're not garbage or or not useful. They're just people who are earlier in the journey and you can with the right training and

55:23

with the right senior developer can really bring them up into a super high valuable part of the organization. And just quickly I want to introduce a few uh considerations when you are hiring and that's the type of agency that you're running will determine the type of developer that you need to hire.

Um so whether you're doing a niche or general agency because there's a big

55:39

difference in picking that picking the right type is so key to your success in the space. So uh basically are you building from scratch every time or are you using templated solutions?

So, if you're general agency, you're likely going to be doing custom every time. And if you're a a niche agency, you're likely going to be replacing or or copy

55:54

and pasting across multiple clients a considerable amount of the build. And that determines the level or skill level of developers that you need.

As you'll see in a second, reusability is a key concept that you need to understand. And secondly, are you just selling low code or no code solutions or are you also throwing in some customcoded aspect to it as well.

So, do they need that

56:10

traditional background? And these are things you need to keep in mind.

usability. As I said, um, planning and building from scratch is difficult and prone to more errors.

The fact that you can copy and paste across clients if you're running each agency allows you to minimize the amount of brain power required to think like actually planning

56:26

and architecting a solution is difficult to do every single time something new comes in the door. Smart developers can handle these errors.

That's why you hire the senior because they can solve. Um, but if they're just modifying from a template and you're a niche agency, um, then lower tier developers will do and

56:42

will suffice in most cases because they're not having to rethink or reinvent the wheel every time they do a new project. Therefore, you don't need uh as expensive or as intelligent or or skilled developers.

Now, the key question, you know what kind of developer you need, you know what level you're looking for, you know what's missing in your business. Um, where the

56:57

hell do you find them? Which is a question that I get a lot.

And I just want to remind you quickly of these engineer spheres where we've got no code developers, these traditional guys on the right and then the AAA developers which are kind of this hybrid in between where they haven't been watching my content introduced to the the concept of this AI automation agency model as a whole and they understand okay chat bots

57:14

and automations okay tools etc. This is the kind of stuff that we're delivering on and these are the tools that we and platforms that we use to deliver them.

So you need to find people who fall into this AAA developer category so that you don't have to bring them up to speed on all of this information about this is the model that I'm running. These are the tools that we use.

These are the

57:31

kind of things we sell. You need to find them ideally where they already understand that and they've already built with the tools that we need to build with.

And the best place to find these AAA developers is in my free school community. Not to just shameless plug here, but we do have nearly 15,000 people who have watched my videos, understand this, and a huge portion of

57:47

the community members in here are developers and do have a development background. I've heard of people hiring ex postman head of engineering and now they have an incredible partner within their agency.

There is incredible talent that floats through and watches my videos and floats through my community looking for people and looking for opportunities. There's so many people

58:03

coming out of big tech at the moment who are looking to get into this AI space and the AI agency model is such a a good thing for people to get into because if you're developer, you can come in and give give value and maybe partner on the agency. If you're a sales guy, you're a you're you're an entrepreneur, you can come in and lead the agency and and

58:18

identify problems to solve with AI. It's it's so exciting for so many people which is why we have so many people coming through and link to join in the description but you want to come in here and make a post and say I am this here's my background I am hiring for this this is what I'm looking for either hey I'm looking for a partner or I'm just

58:34

looking for an hourly basis at the moment I have some clients you do need to sell yourself and and pitch yourself within the community so we have a bunch of hiring going on in the community already you can see every one of these posts is getting like five to 10 different responses on it so I urge you guys if you're looking to hire join the free community it's down below first

58:49

link in the descript description, make a post, pitch yourself, say, "This is what my agency is. This is what we're doing, and be really and and you do need to sell yourself in order to attract the best talent." So, get in there, drop a post, and also, if you're a developer watching this, get in there and start replying.

Um, engage in the community. And there's so much value to be creative

59:05

by connecting the right people together. And that's what I want for most of you is that if you can't get this right, if you can't find someone to hire, um, or you can't pair up a a sales guy, an ops guy, and a a developer, then you're likely never going to succeed longterm with this business cuz it's so crucial.

something that I found and I've seen time and time again with people in my

59:21

free and paid communities. So once you've got into my school and posted, hey, I'm looking for a junior developer who knows this, this, this, familiar with these tools, we looking to sell these, etc.

Um, then you need to know how to sign and what deal to actually close these guys on, close these guys on, but what contract are you bringing them into your business on? How are you going to be interacting with them?

59:36

What's the compensation structure? Um, which is a really big question I get as well.

So, uh, the contract progression that I recommend and that we've used at Morningside is is starting off with a fixed contract. Then we don't do it anymore.

But when we very first started our agency, we were doing it on a fixed contract where we'd go to have

59:51

conversations with a bunch of developers and and AI specialists at the time who really weren't much specialist at all, but we'd go to them and say, "Hey, we have a client here who needs XYZ services. Can you give us a proposal on how much time this would take and how much it would cost you?" We'd get proposals back from our different developers, mark it up 2 or 3x, go to

00:08

our client and say, "Hey, this is the price of the build." Very easy way to get started. you're not necessarily putting cash up front because the client's then going to pay that invoice or pay half the invoice and you can pass it to the developer.

So, as long as you got a margin there, you can basically never lose money as long as a project goes through without issue. And then after that, if they've shown that

00:23

they're good and they know what they're doing, you can move them onto an hourly contract and give them a starting wage. Say, "Hey, look, we agree on $30, $40 per hour.

We're going to do a 30-day free trial." So, you can basically cut them off at any point. Um, I mean, you can put in the contract that you can end it at any point.

Um, so this trial period will allow you to test them

00:39

further. And what you want to do is put Time Doctor.

Um it's a it's time tracking thing that monitors their screen and then you can see how many hours they're logging and paid them based on those hours. Um now if all things go well and after that 30-day contract um everything checks out and they've delivered good services for your on behalf of your agency um then you can

00:55

start looking at a full-time contract um and you could lock in a salary. So you're getting $3 $4,000 a month um and expected hours associated with that contract.

Um full-time contracts are of course a big jump and spending $4,000 a month every single month to have someone on might seem daunting. Um, but it is really key um, in a number of ways.

One,

01:11

them working full-time for you is going to make sure that all of their focus is on your projects and you can put in the contract, you are not allowed to work on other things. And you will find if you're working on Upwork or or even people within my community, if that juggling multiple projects at once, they're going to be giving you a fraction of the energy and and time that

01:28

is required to really deliver what you need to deliver and meet that standard that your clients are expecting. So full-time contract, you get their sole focus.

And also, if you do it right, you can make your agency far more profitable by using salaried employees rather than hourly based on. So full-time contract is ideally where you want to get to once

01:44

you have a consistent flow of leads as well that are going to make sure that you will always have the money to pay them. Um, that's what we run at at Morningside for basically all of our developers unless we're trailing them.

Um, and finally, you can offer a partnership. this is something that might be a bit more lucrative.

If you are making those school post and and putting yourself out there and saying,

01:59

"Hey, look, I have a bunch of leads or I have connections in XY industry. I'm looking for a technical partner to do this." You may need to go the partnership route and offer some kind of revenue share on all of the projects you do.

So, okay, you're going to get 30% of all the revenue for the projects and this will attract far better talent um because they're going to be more

02:15

incentivized. They're actually tied to the earnings rather than just being paid paid a wage or paid a salary, right?

So, that's contract progression and that's about it. So key takeaways for this video.

As I promised in the intro, you have determined what developer you need for your agency to succeed. It's a AAA developer, whether it's a junior or

02:30

senior, depending on your situation. You now understand what makes AAA developers different, and that is the platforms that we use to deliver our specific solutions, and that kind of crossover between the two worlds of no code and traditional AI development.

Um, thirdly, you know how much to pay your developers and those different price ranges, whether you need junior or senior, etc.

02:46

And finally, you know the easiest way to find a AAA developer for your agency, cuz you just need that one person to get things off the ground. Really guys, it's so important to get that first hire and it's it's one of the biggest steps for you in succeeding with this long term.

So go on my school community if you're not already. Make a post, network, show up to my calls.

It's another great way

03:01

to do it. I host a live Q&A every week on Friday within my free community.

So you can hop on there, have a chat with me, and if there's an opportunity for partnership, you can put your your email or your contact details in the chat and so many people have been connected by that way cuz there's 100 people watching, chances are there's someone who can help you, is interested in partnering with you. So a great way to

03:18

find good talent is to hop on those calls and participate in the discussion. I wanted to make a uh sort of looking forward video into 2025 for those of you with an AI automation agency who want to

03:35

really be on the front foot. And I'm going to be sharing what I have seen significant shifts in the market on my end um at Morningside AI and what I suspect to be one of the driving forces of change and uh really where everything is going with the space um within 2025 and beyond.

And so I wanted to make this

03:52

quick vid just breaking down what we're seeing on our end and how you guys can start to position your agencies to benefit from what I think is going to be the big shift in the market in 2025. So um this goes right back to what I've talked about a lot on this channel.

Basically technology is adopted in

04:08

different phases by different groups of people who have different inclinations towards the technology. Right?

Maybe they're an early adopter and they see they like to take a bit of a gamble or risk on new technology or they're in the early majority which are people that need to see a bit more proof and evidence before they can make a jump and

04:24

take the investment. Um but all of this is based around us trying to sell AI systems and services and solutions to businesses and you're going to get a spread of business owners who fall into different categories, right?

And how this relates to the big shift we're going to see next year is that for the

04:39

most part we have been focused over the past 2 years since I really talked about this model and and it's gained so much traction. In the past 2 years it's been primarily focused on the implementation section and this is because we've been primarily dealing with uh early adopters and by implementation I mean

04:55

implementing AI into their businesses like actually building systems for them and saying this is going to make some kind of meaningful difference in your business. So that's implementation and that's what we've really been focused on is can you get these early adopters or business owners who are interested in AI and basically profit off of their

05:11

interest and willingness to spend money on this on this new technology that excites them that they want to get ahead with and that's what the AI automation agency model up to this point is largely being based around which is there's a bunch of early adopters who want to spend some money we can market ourselves through personal branding through YouTube through if you're doing like

05:27

cold outbound as well basically get yourself in front of these people or try to find those who are interested in it and offer your services and say, "Hey, look, if there's something that you wouldd like to build um we can do it for you or even identifying a more specific offer that you sell um that you've really dialed in and you found, hey,

05:42

this is a great offer to sell and you're reaching out to businesses and trying to say, hey, I can do this for you." And then providing a bit more proof. So, that's more so dealing with the early majority and trying to sell to people who aren't necessarily implementation or or ready for AI systems or aware enough

05:57

about the problem and or about the benefits they provide. The key is that the implementation layer that we've been so focused on is actually what we've realized at Morningside AI uh over the past say 3 to six months as we've been working with our our consulting division that we've set up here in New Zealand is that the implementation step is actually

06:14

kind of way way down the pipeline and it's really a late stage way of capturing value in the AI space as an agency and you've got a lot that happens before that and while it has been good to start off initially and just deal with the implementation uh and selling implementation for businesses who are

06:30

ready for it and and are eager for it. Sure, that's been a great way for us to get our agency off the ground and as for many of you guys as well, we see that there's a much bigger opportunity going into 2025 and a slightly different model.

And I mean, if you go right back to when I first started talking about the AI automation agency model, it was

06:48

aimed at small to mediumsiz businesses and helping them to implement and integrate AI into their business. And it was always really leaning towards you are going to be there in the same way that social media marketing agencies were the people who helped businesses to move online and start uh not necessarily move online not like set up their

07:04

website but when they do that sometimes but move into social media marketing and start start being their guide to getting into the uh digital marketing era and that's what the AI automation agency model is ultimately going to move towards uh in the long run but next year is when I really see that shift taking

07:20

place and that you're going to see us moving more towards or the agencies who really succeed, moving more towards being the AI transformation partner for businesses. And whether that's being general, which may be quite difficult, or niching down to saying, "Hey, I I'm the AI transformation partner for," and

07:35

then I'll explain exactly what that means on a implementation and on a like operational standpoint in a second, but saying we are we help plumbing businesses transition into the AIH. It's basically the the offer that you're you're helping them out with, right?

Or that you're pres you're presenting to them. And so the way this would look is

07:52

we see that Morning Side AI, we're starting to identify these real key areas uh that your agency can can focus on and can provide value to businesses. And this really allows you to tap into a much larger chunk of that market of of business owners, right?

The technology

08:07

adoption life cycle. We've got these big chunks of the business owner population in in your given niche who are not ready for AI implementation yet.

But this strategy that I'm talking about right now essentially allows you to tap into pretty much the entire uh spectrum and everyone in the market because you're

08:23

taking a different approach than going straight from implementation. Right?

So this strategy this AI transformation partner kind of offer starts with basic education. Right?

So that's taking businesses. We've found in our own consulting business that we've started here that you go to some of these

08:40

companies and they just know absolutely nothing. And even at this point, they still at the starting blocks and this is in New Zealand.

We are not on the most on the front foot necessarily with AI here in the States. it might be a little bit uh more common for businesses to be making moves, but I'd say on the most

08:56

part, if you go and start knocking on doors around your your city, if you're living in the States, if you're living anywhere, and you start knocking on doors of businesses and ask them about what do you know about AI and uh what benefits does it present? What are the risks?

Um have you thought about in implementing it? You ask them all these basic questions and the business owner

09:12

just like, "Mate, I have no clue what you're talking about and I'm not really that interested in it. Sure, I'd like to make more money and spend less.

Um, but I don't know what this AI stuff is. So, step one is that there's a huge opportunity for just basic education.

09:27

And there's the whole population of business owners need to be brought up to speed in it just like they did with what is a website and why the hell should I put it in? Why the [ __ ] would I spend money on getting a website set up?

Right? This we have the same opportunity now.

And yes, we've been focused so much

09:42

on implementation, but you go back like two steps. I I'll explain the rest in a second.

And the first thing is just what is the technology? What what what does it actually do?

Uh what are the risks with it? And like what are what what's the difficulties of me getting to the point where I actually get some value

09:58

out of it. So, we see there as as being a big opportunity if you're really looking to scale into 2025 and beyond so that you can tap into say your entire niche, not just the plumbers who are and I'm using plumbing as an example, but not just the plumbing businesses who are watching my videos or are kind of really

10:15

really techy and and they're ready for implementation and they're aware of what AI is, which would be obviously a very small portion of the the plumber business owner population. But by positioning your business in a in a in a way that says look we can actually do the education section so we can start to convert that 97% of people who are not

10:31

interested and start to move them down the the pipeline towards being implementation ready. That is step one.

So step one would be education. Okay.

Can you go I use plumbing as an example again but this is for any niche. This is when being niched down is probably going to be the significant advantage because

10:47

it's going to vary from industry to industry, right? We're saying we help XYZ types of businesses to transition into the AIH.

There's there's different wording for that. I mean, that's probably not what we would ultimately go for for the the offer that we're working on in Morningside AI, but that's the the main concept of it, right?

So, you've got

11:02

education first. What is a tech?

And then the next step after that is once they've got that foundational understanding, it's like, okay, now let's go into use case identification. And this is what we see as the kind of consulting portion and where we've learned from our own consulting team that there's this really key need of use

11:20

case identification with the businesses and a team that can go through and do a really rapid and efficient AI audit and that we see as a second layer of of this this new kind of AI transformation offer where you've educated them okay now we can actually have a proper productive

11:35

discussion about what this stuff can do for your business. So you've understood the foundations.

Now the next layer on top of that is what can it actually do for your business. Let's run through some of the systems you have right now.

Let's identify any of the lowhanging fruit. Let's do a breakdown of okay well

11:50

these big opportunities the the uh the difficulty value matrix which I've talked about on the channel here before. Again I'll link a video to it in the description or somewhere here.

A lot of the stuff I've already talked about before. Um but I know we often need to be reminded uh more than we need to be.

12:07

How how does it go? We often need what is that saying?

We need to be reminded more than we need to be told. Oh, no.

We need to be reminded more than we need to be taught. So again, I'm just reminding you of the things that I've

12:22

I've talked about here before, but basically walking through use case identification with them. Where do these things that we've discovered and identified within your business and where do they fall on the difficulty value matrix?

like how there's some low hanging fruit, some some quick wins that are not very difficult to implement but

12:38

are hugely valuable and what are the longerterm projects that we can look at that are going to be high value but also high difficulty and take time and so being able to make a bit of a road map or a timeline and how they can start to take those off then you are ready for the implementation section and then we get to what we've all kind of been

12:53

familiar with with this AI automation agency which is actually using our development teams to build the systems for them and then go through the the cycles of iteration to get them performing and then managing that system moving forward. So I guess implementation would be one and then you've even got another step after that which is ongoing optimization and

13:09

maintenance. So, so technically there's four parts of that, right?

The education, what is the stuff, consulting, and use case notification, how can this actually help my business, how does it apply to my business, implementation, okay, let's actually build this now, and then the

13:25

ongoing maintenance. So, there's four different ways that you can create value and sell things to them, right?

And that can either be sold as a package where it's like, okay, this is going to be $15,000 for me to we help plumbers to move from here to here. we have this complete offer and we're going to walk you through step by step by step or you

13:42

can start to like kind of make that more peace meal and you can say hey we have this free education offer and then you can advertise directly to plumbers you can go to you can go to plumbing conventions again plumbing as the example um and then you can say okay well I'm going to do the education I'll actually give the education away for

13:58

free and build some trust with these plumbers and say I am the go-to guy for AI and your plumbing business and then you can sell them on the use case identification you oh actually we've got a 200 00and package for um use case identification. You'll work with our consultants directly.

We'll run through a whole process and identify the best

14:13

ways that you can use AI within your business. And if you are smart about it, you do stay niche down cuz you can just keep doing it's based like how how different can one plumbing business be from the other.

You actually aren't having to reinvent the wheel each time with this use case identification. There may be some differences, but for the

14:29

most part, it would be like booking systems or, you know, like optimizing schedules and and stuff like that. So the use case identification package could become pretty lucrative as well.

And then you have the team as well to sell it. And whether you are, this is when it becomes actually really good for people who are non-technical because if

14:46

you get to the point where I'm like you're really good at selling, you might be good at getting on camera or writing and you can really market yourself or you've always been very much on the sales or or marketing side of of a business or that's just the way you lean kind of naturally. You can do your thing.

you can become hey I'm going to be the educator and I'm going to have

15:02

this team of consultants and then when it comes to implementation I'm not going to have my own team of devs I'm going to be passing off to dev partners say you go into my free community or if you're part of my accelerator you can network with the the guys who are really doing numbers in there and you find capable development partners who don't want to do the marketing who don't want to do

15:18

all this selling crap that they don't that's never really part of their mo and stuff that they want to do as a developer and then you can just pass them off and say hey look we'll take 20% of any deals we send you And these are going to be our implementation partners. And that way you get to flex this

15:34

business model to what you need. And if you're a development partner, you can find people who are doing the strategy and doing the educating and you get to just get the leads that you want.

And if you think often if it's custom development, your margins maybe, I don't know, 50 or 60%. And so if you are a

15:49

markety sales person who's going to be doing that education and priming them for that implementation step, the actual real value creation and how sort of you get hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings and you're passing it off and getting 15 to 20%. I mean like that's you're almost there.

If a project runs

16:05

runs along and you end up going uh over over um the expected timeline, you could only end up profiting 20% and you've had to have the whole div team and do all of the management yourself. So, it can actually be pretty like if you're just getting 20% pure profit for just passing it off, it's not actually that much

16:21

worse. You're making like half the profit that a full dev agency would be making, but with 0% of the headache that comes with running the whole div.

So, it's not to say I highly recommend you should just go and sell it and then pass it off. That's just a strategy that you can adopt.

And my point here with this

16:37

whole video is that I think this is where this is where we see it going. This is where we are moving our agency.

And I'm going to update you more on that next year. But we see this as really the uh the opportunity to scale hard into different industries because once you have that offer, you've got I have education for them.

I have a great team

16:53

of consultants that I can or a consulting strategy at least like a system where you can get one of your team on and they go on and they walk through this this this this great we've got that that's a you can sell that as a package or you can just have it as part of this whole package as well. But then you get you unlock that technology adoption life cycle.

you unlock a

17:10

significant chunk of the market when now you can market to any business owner because you have something for every stage of the readiness like hey okay let's do a quick questionnaire do you know about AI and what are things yeah I've got a pretty good idea okay great well do you know where it can best help your business oh no yeah that's really

17:26

where we're stuck but not sure okay great well we've got a consulting package we can get you straight onto that and then after that we've got some great partners that we can help you uh connect with or we can actually build it for yourself and then there's another opportunity that comes off the back of that that we are eyeing up particularly at Morningside AI and that's if you did

17:42

have a group of dev partners say you were doing this make me make a package that's say 15 or $20,000 for this AI transformation that's end to end you've taken them from basic education you've even got maybe a layer of staff education in there as well where it's like upskilling them as well consulting implementation maintenance etc and then

17:59

if you're really smart you can hand off all of the kind of lower ticket smaller stuff to your dev agencies that you identify with them your partners and then if there's one really interesting thing that you're like wow I think we could build something around that and actually start to sell it to other businesses within that niche. Then you say we're going to put our dev team on

18:14

this one. It might be like a really complex sales system, but you know it's going to drive a ton of value.

Or we've had things that have popped up recently in the consulting we do around say like a computer vision inventory management system and say, well, if we build that, we could actually then start to sell that to other businesses in that niche and you start to build up a bit of a

18:30

portfolio of these software solutions, AR software solutions that are massively useful and you've got a great case study to then go and sell it on to other people. So that's how you can start to build a bit of a software portfolio as well.

So, I I don't want to go much deeper on that cuz I'll I'll take a window out of

18:46

my sales for next year and what what we're doing at Morningside, but I thought I'd put you guys onto a bit of game there as to where I see the market moving. And I think this is something you should all be considering if you you might have a good thing going with the implementation already and you got a good good amount of momentum.

But looking further ahead

19:04

and if you really want to unlock a bigger chunk of the market now that we are getting a little bit more competition, there's more people trying to come after this. That's not to say we're late.

I still think we are so so bloody early to this. When you when you again when you do the knock on the door test and there's like no businesses using it.

Um it shows that we are still

19:19

so early. Uh but this is something you should look to be doing.

Hey, how can I start to unlock and tap into more of this untapped market? And it's not just those early adopters who are really ready for this technology already, but I want to start accessing that bigger part of the early majority and even the late

19:35

majority by being able to give them a much more beginner friend for anything and say, look, hey, AI is really going to appreciate the industry. I know it can seem quite scary and daunting, but if you give me I've got this free program or this free little course that's going to walk you through or we've got a paid course, whatever it is, that's going to take them through to the

19:51

stage where they're ready for use case identification. And you got to start thinking about it in these different layers of of value that you can provide.

So, that's my little message for 2015. Um, I'm super excited for this and I can't wait to see some of you take this kind of offer and just absolutely crush

20:07

it and and dominate niches um either within your within your country or internationally as well. I'm just so excited because there's so much potential left like we have just just got started when you're seeing that we're now developing the model to this point and the all these companies are still starting at the they're still at

20:24

the starting blocks. So, um I hope you guys are excited for 2025.

there's so much opportunity and so much to be gained um here monetarily but also just in like self-actualization and I like building something building a business

20:40

in the space and feeling like you've achieved something feeling like you're proud of yourself and I think that is as much of a part of entrepreneurship as just the money like once you make the money you then need to find some other kind of purpose so yeah this is me for the year signing

20:55

out in this video I'll be breaking down the simple change that I made in my agency to allow us to scale past 10K per month and how you can do the exact same in yours. It's relatively easy.

It's just a simple tweak within the sales process, but it made a complete like a world of difference for us in terms of

21:11

our closing rates and the amount of effort and and time we're putting into dealing with people who are never going to pay us any money anyway. So, this is something that I've I talk a lot about in my accelerator, but I thought I'd bring it out here and do sort of a a whiteboardy session on YouTube so that you guys can get some of the some of the source as well, cuz it's so important and made such a massive difference for

21:27

us. So this is a a graph here showing that you keep getting stuck at the 10K per month mark.

Um a bunch of reasons why this can happen but uh I want to break things down a little bit more granularly first. So first thing first let me illustrate this and how I came across it and how we made this discovery at my agency with a bit of a story.

21:44

back in middle of 2023 uh middle of middle of last year when the AI automation agency boom was going crazy. I just started talking about it a few months earlier and suddenly everyone was talking about it and it was the hottest thing in online business at the time.

Um, and there's so much attention. I can probably draw the the graph from

22:01

the last video if you guys remember that. Um, but the Google trends for AI automation agency had this massive spike and then it sort of flattened out to where we kind of are now.

But at this point, Morning Side and my agency, we were getting about 20 20 leads per day, inbound leads per day via our contact

22:17

form on our website. So, we had so much attention and so many people who wanted to work with us um that our sales process and our sales pipeline really started to get choked up and it really pointed out the the main issue that we were facing which is a low close rate despite all of that attention.

Right?

22:34

So, we were getting these 20 leads, 20 leads per day, LPD. But when you looked at our actual close rate and the amount of people were and businesses were converting into paying clients, like 20 per day, that

22:49

might result in like one client. And now, that's a shocking that's a shocking close rate.

And uh we we realized that pretty quickly. We said, "Wow, this is a really terrible conversion rate for the amount of attention we're getting." Um, but we realized that we were doing a few

23:05

things wrong in in our sales process. And there was a few things that we tested and and played around with to try to fix that.

And what I'm about to break down is is the one that we settled on. So the the sales process that we had at the time was an email would come

23:21

in from our uh our contact form submission. So the email would come in.

It would have information like um name um budget, description of the project. And then on

23:37

that alone, my business partner Josh would go in and just evaluate some of those emails and go yes, no, yes, no, delete them if they're not interested interesting for us. Um but then if they were kind of a good prospect, a good lead, we would then send them a discovery call link.

So then they'd book a Oh, can I do it?

23:54

Oh, and they book in a discovery call with us and then we'd have a 30 minute discovery call with them 30 minutes and then from there let me go you realize how complex this thing was at the time. Um and from there then we'd

24:10

need to go to my my CTO Spencer. He would have been on most of those discovery calls and then he would need to analyze how we can how we can build that project.

Right? So he needs to go and and do a full analysis of okay, this is what the client this is what the the lead wants.

This is how we're going to approach it. This is the opening stage

24:27

of the project. This is the middle.

This is the end. This is the amount of hours that are going to be for each of them.

And then we could go back to them. Um we can do sort of a a calculator here.

Let's do a bit of a calculator. We needed to calculate how many hours it was going to take to do that.

And then we'd create a full

24:44

proposal. I'm changing colors here.

Then we need to do a full proposal with like all of the the jazz on it which is okay this is the this is how much the stage of the project's going to cost. This is the final scope.

This is the cost etc. This would take I don't know like three

25:00

three plus hours. I'm running out of pen here.

But this whole process here of getting on discovery call 30 minutes taking that going to Spencer and say hey Spencer can you come up with can you figure out how we'd approach this build um and

25:15

determine if if how many hours it's going to take then that information would need to go to my business partner Josh and he'd create this from a template all be it but then he'd have to create a proposal saying this is how we're going to do it this is how much it costs and then we need to book in another

25:32

call I'm getting pretty good at drawing these phones now need to book in another call and that's going to be a proposal call where it might be 30 minutes to 1 hour and now look at all this time we're taking just

25:47

to get out get to the point of proposal. Then on that call they'll either say sort of yes or no or make a verbal agreement and if at the end of the call they say yeah yeah sure sounds good.

We found that there was a massive drop off between the people who we actually pres presented proposals to and the number of

26:03

people who actually ended up signing and and paying us an invoice. All right.

So, this drop off between proposal and and actually uh how can I draw this? Make this a we skip a couple steps in here like sending the contract, going back and

26:19

forth on the contract, you would go back and forth and back and forth um flopping around and then by the time you've gone back and forth with the contract three or four times, then they're like suddenly not as interested in the in the project anymore. They've lost the buzz.

uh you really need to get as quickly

26:34

from this point of saying, "Hey, I'm interested. I want to work with you." And and getting them signed as fast as possible because in here, anything could happen.

They could something in their business could blow up. Suddenly they're not interested in AI anymore.

They read an article and they're scared of it. All sorts of crap.

So the longer this was, the the higher the drop off we saw here.

26:50

But the really the key drop off point was this proposal here cuz they go from someone who's filled out a form, don't have really any idea how much this is going to cost them. We go through all this time and we invest all this time here in calculating, calling, writing the proposal, then we get on the call

27:06

and present it. And a lot of the times like this stuff a stuff isn't cheap.

If you have a development team like me and our developers cost quite a lot of money per hour. We have to mark our services up significantly.

It's it's like very expensive projects a lot of the time. And when you then present that to them,

27:22

they aren't are nowhere near ready for that kind of price point. Well, in in most cases.

So, it's really an issue of the lead quality and we weren't checking or or sort of price testing them beforehand and we're wasting all this time and getting to this point at the end where we've we've pitched them and

27:37

then they look at it and they go, "Oh, w like um no chance no chance I'm paying that." And they go, "That's way too expensive for what I'm looking for. Thank you.

Have a nice day." And so we got this big drop off where you might get I don't know you make six proposals and get like one of

27:54

these guys coming out the other end and they're actually interested in signing for the for the project. So looking at this we realized we are spending so much time on this step here of hopping hopping on calls with basically everyone and then allowing these tire kickers let me draw a tire.

tire kickers are all

28:11

over the AI space that business owners who are interested these early adopters if you remember the tech adoption curve we're in this early adopter phase we're getting a lot of early adopters especially earlier on in in my journey last year in the first sort of 6 months of starting my agency we were getting a lot of these early adopters who didn't

28:26

really care much about the the functionality of it just wanted to feel like they're building something cool and and being on the front foot with their business so these guys do tend to be tie kickers they because they aren't seeking some really really businessch changing

28:41

implementation, the the rate of them being tie kickers and just kind of wanting to to hop on calls and learn more and feel like they're in the space is is much higher. So tie kickers, they're just coming in and we're spending all of this time 30 minutes and then Spencer is having to do uh I don't

28:57

know maybe like 1 to 2 hours here and then Josh has to put 3 hours in here and then we have to put Spencer and Josh on this call for a 30 minute to an hour call. so much time just to find out are they or are they not a tire kicker?

And so what we did to change this is I mean

29:12

it it was kind of like a Hail Mary. We were just saying look these close rates are so awful there has to something has to change.

Let's just like [ __ ] it. Let's just let's just throw a a low ticket offer at them to get them started and and see who gets through.

So what we did is implemented what we now call an

29:28

exploration milestone. And this this may be standard for uh development companies all over the show, but um until about a year ago, I wasn't some development company CEO as many of you guys won't be.

So, we were definitely learning this as as people who've just been online

29:44

business entrepreneurs and having to pick up how to run these development companies. Um there's there's nuance to to the the sales process as you can imagine.

So, we tried this thing. We'll call it an exploration milestone.

And if I rewrite this this flow, uh the email

30:01

still came in. Uh we still approved or disproved it and then disproved it, declined.

Uh and if it was good, we probably have a thing here where it's like, eh, we don't want to work with them. We book in the discovery

30:17

call and that's going to still be 30 minutes. But then at the end of the discovery call, if we've qualified them and vetted them out properly and that they seem like a good client, there's a like when we get we get so many leads coming to us that we can be quite picky about who we

30:34

work with because there's nothing worse than I mean I built my business to have a income stream but also to enjoy what I do. And if I'm dealing with clients who are an absolute pain in the ass that is working against what my goal was with my business, right?

I I don't want this to feel like a trap and my business partner

30:50

and the whole team don't want to work with awful people. It's so bad.

It's it's like multiple levels of of of of badness. There's multiple levels of of destruction and damage within the business because not only you are dealing with this this bad client, but

31:06

everyone in the team is. It just brings it's like an anchor that that brings down the whole team.

Um so we get very picky here. Um, and at the end of the discovery call, if they have a clear solution that we can solve, if they are someone who we want to work with and

31:21

overall seems like a good potential client for us, then we will at the end of the call, we will transition it transition it. That's a transition to at the end of the call, I'll go to my business partner, Josh.

So, hey Josh, yep, everything checks out for me here.

31:37

I think it's good for us to just jump straight into an exploration milestone uh and kick things off next week. Boom.

Now we've gone from just talking about, hey, AI stuff is cool. Yeah, tie kick at this, Tai kick at that.

We're starting to put the heat on them and say, hey, look, we're looking, we need some money.

31:52

Like, you've got your free discovery call. We've had a chat with you, and now you're going to cough up to keep working with us.

Now, this does come down to some degree to the brand that that you've built. For me in Morningside, we have a a considerable brand position as a AI solutions company because of the stuff that I do here, waving my hands

32:07

around on the camera, because it shows that I know what I'm talking about, right? And you want to work with people who know what they're talking about, which is why you should consider making content either YouTube, LinkedIn, whatever it is.

I can't even explain. I mean, we're getting 20 of these a day.

We still get quite a lot of them. And I don't even post nearly as much as I did

32:23

back in the day. So, getting a little bit off track, but then we say explo exploration milestone.

That's what we're looking to do. We end the call and straight after the call, well, we get them to agree to it and we say, "Yeah, well, if if you're happy, we can we can start what we call an exploration milestone." They might ask some

32:39

questions say, "Well, that's when we just uh go in and we do a very quick sort of prototyping, scoping, specking, determining how much this is going to cost for you. We can't give you an accurate quote on the whole project until we've gone in and done some exploration and done some tests cuz we need to actually cuz the clients will

32:55

want certain kinds of outputs from the system and because we're going to get into this in a second, which is a really cool part of this video. So, stick around.

Um, but clients want specific outputs from their systems as as anyone would. And if we aren't able to get those kind of outputs, then we shouldn't take on the project.

Right? So exploration is kind of saving your ass

33:11

and also making sure the client and expectations are managed correctly because you get a chance to go, okay, let's very quickly spit up a prototype for okay, pass me your data, Mr. Client, and let me give me some examples of input and output pairs and and responses that you want from it.

Okay, I'm going

33:26

to take those in, give my to my dev team, and they can whip it up quickly, sort of determine if we can get kind of close to the outputs they're looking for. If we can, great.

Yep, that system works to some degree. Now we're good to take on the full project and we can be confident that we can charge you x amount of dollars and it's going to come within this time frame.

So it's really

33:43

such a key thing and mass like an absolute game changanger for our business. Um, so how do we go from here?

Expiration milestone. Uh, we send that via email.

So we'll send a templated contract. We send an email just saying, "Hey, just following up on, uh, on on the call you we just had um that the

34:00

expiration milestone is going to cost X amount." And we started off with ours at uh $800 and that would be sort of a 3 to 5 day exploration and on a usually more it usually ended up sort of closer to five than three. Um but the $800 expiration was a good price point that

34:16

we found people would be interested in and and they took the bait they took the offer pretty often. So right here you're asking them to cough up and you're saying sorry buddy no more tire kickers beyond here.

you are not going to get a single second more of my time until you've given me money to compensate me

34:32

and my team which allowed us to then only make presentations to clients who are actually qualified to some degree financially qualified. Um so by bringing the price uh the time that they had to cough up some money from way down here to up here we had just saved ourselves

34:49

all this time and that that was a absolute game changer for us. my business partner Josh instead of working on it being on the sales call hamster wheel of proposals we'd go through these cycles of oh yeah cool there's this big client in the pipeline who w and then next week yeah they didn't reply to the

35:04

proposal so it happens to it happens to me it'll happen to you but you can do things with your sales process to try to split split the whiff the wheat from the chaff a little bit sooner so you want the you want the good guys to make it past here you want to give them a chance to show that they are serious and this

35:20

this amount is is a good way of doing it Now, for full transparency, we now charge most recent one we did was $2,000. Um, we've actually charged right up to $5,000.

Now, that may sound ludicrous, but when we do $100,000 deals, $5,000 expiration uh in order to

35:37

scope it all out. There's a lot of work involved for us, but the client would rather pay 5 grand up front and determine, hey, is this feasible?

Uh what kind of what's the actual budget going to be at the end of the day? And and are these kind of systems actually something that are a good match for my use case?

So you can charge up to $2,000

35:54

$5,000 for the expirations that take these these do take sort of 2 to 3 weeks though. Uh just being fully transparent.

So it's not like it was a 3day and 3day. These are definitely big boys for bigger projects.

And then expiration milestone,

36:12

you send that off via email. Say, "Hey, look, it's going to cost 2 grand or in your case might be $800 to start.

It's going to cost $800. uh let me know if that's all good and I can send over my we can send over a templated contract.

You just change a couple little things. Uh and once they've signed that, you send the send the invoice with the contract as well.

Once it's all paid,

36:28

then you go sweet straight into Slack. And then you go, hey, send requirements.

And that's when you ask them, okay, in

36:44

order to do our our expiration, actually I missed the best part of this whole thing. Let me go back a step.

This is when it gets real saucy. So, not only does expiration give us a chance to weed out the the guys from the

37:00

split the wheat from the CHF, we also get an opportunity to set expectations with our clients. And AI systems are inherently random and hard to predict.

They are non-deterministic by nature which means that the same input can create different outputs and this is due

37:16

to the sort of randomization of the next token generation. We are trying to give in in many cases reliable and predictable outcomes with technology that on the most fun most fundamental like foundational level is random and and tries to be random.

So in order to

37:35

solve uh in order to get client satisfaction and set expectations right, we have also had to deal with uh let me let me give you an example actually this is a better way to do it. This may sound familiar.

So client uh client uh you say you're building

37:52

some kind of chatbased system for them. client uh doesn't like output.

Say that you're building a system, a chatbot for them and they say, "Oh, I don't I didn't like the way that it says that." And you say, "Okay, well,

38:09

they provide ideal output." And you go, "Okay, well, I'll I'll tune the system to try to get it to output output that kind of output." And

38:33

then it outputs the correct one. Maybe four out of five times.

client gets

38:49

mad because it's not always consistent. Now, this this four out of five times, the the other time, the one out of five times that it doesn't say

39:05

it, it might just slightly reward it. But this client is looking for exact outputs and you're trying to he wants exact outputs.

For you to get the money from them and finish the contract, you need to give them this five out of five perfect exact same outputs every time. When in reality, the system is putting

39:20

out one and five times something that is a slight modification of it's still saying the same thing. It still means the same, but it's a slightly different wording.

And this client goes, eh, client gets mad because it's not consistent. um demands

39:39

refund because I don't like the way it talks.

39:55

So here you have a feeling I don't like the the way that the client feels about the outputs is now determining whether or not you get your money which is a a bad place to be. So we have tried to solve this problem in a number of ways and eventually in combination with the

40:12

exploration milestone we came up with a method that solves all of this while also allowing us to do the exploration and solving downstream issues with client satisfaction as well. So, I'll now get into that cuz I know you came for the sauce, but I'll uh I'll give you a double serving cuz you know that's how we work

40:28

on this channel. So, the issue here is as I just pointed out LLMs are you're dealing with two problems.

One

40:46

LLM LLM uh non deterministic. They are by nature random and they they spit out different outputs from the same inputs.

And then two,

41:02

you're also fighting against client feelings and subjective opinions. Now, these two when you're trying to

41:17

build a business selling AI solutions, these two go together like Mentos and Coca-Cola, um, they they don't get along. Uh, and this is a an awful mixture of things to build a business on.

And we at Morningside realize this pretty quick that, okay, well, clients

41:33

are going to have feelings towards if we're building any kind of chatbased or or even just it's it's a content generator, how they feel about like, uh, I don't it's not really what I like. there's something about this.

And sometimes we get to a point where a client is, "Yeah, this system's cool. Yeah, yeah, it's good.

It's good. It's good.

It's good. It's good." And then

41:49

the next week they'll say, "Oh, no. We need a big change." Like, I just suddenly don't like this anymore.

And you're dealing with emotions, uh, emotions and opinions, and you're trying to make money and have some kind of consistent and predictable business. Uh, but you're also now now at at the at the

42:05

whim of these client emotions and also these inherently random systems. So, these two problems, we realized pretty quick that if we don't solve these at Morningside, we're going to be we're going to be in the [ __ ] and we're not going to have much of a business.

So, how do we solve this? Well, my uh my

42:21

absolute whiz and genius of a CTO uh we sort of tasked him with this and said, "Hey, we need a solution to this." And he came up with a now widely used system. Um can I rub this off?

No, I still I still have a bit more to go. uh

42:37

that we call I it's not we didn't it's been a thing but the way that we apply it I believe is sort of a industry first it's called co sign similarity similarity so what cosine

42:54

similarity does is it's a test that we can run that allows us to determine the similarity this the semantic similarity of two sets or or any number of set of of uh actually I believe it is just for two um the the the similarity of two pieces of text. So whether that's a

43:09

word, just apples and oranges, whether that's phrases, whether that's whole bodies of paragraphs, whether it's a whole book, uh you can use co similarity to get a a tangible metric is really the key thing here. A tangible metric that you can point to and say yes, these two things are similar.

And for us with

43:26

these exploration milestones, we started integrating cosine similarity testing as part of the exploration milestone. Determine if we can get the the the right mathematically most similar types of answers that are going to be satisfactory to the client.

So we can kind of make sure that we know what we're doing ahead of time and be like,

43:43

"Yep, we can get a we can get pretty close to this." Uh but more importantly, it gives us a a metric that we can use in our contracts to stop that subjectivity and oh I like the I like it but like it could say this and this or hey it's giving the same answer four times but there's one that's different.

43:59

It's like well mate at the end of the day our contract says it's the semantic meaning of it and the similarity of the text. If there's if it's one word changed this thing protects us.

So let me let me break down how this works. So cosine similarity uh this is going to get a little bit technical but I do

44:16

quite like getting in this and it's important for you guys to know this to some degree. So, K similarity.

This is going to really challenge my uh my art skills. Oh, um

44:34

down. Oh, okay.

So, that's a three-dimensional space. And we're going to have So, it's kind of going backwards, by the way.

It's not facing us. So, we have one point over here.

We have another point over here. And we have another

44:49

point uh up over here. And so what these are is coordinates in a multi-dimensional space.

In this case, we'll just do three dimensions so that it's easy to understand, but in reality, this is happening in in I think 8,000 or

45:06

was it 8,000 dimensions? It's impossible for the human brain to comprehend, but uh this will this this will suffice.

Um so we have this 3D space. We have 0.1 point 2.3.

And what co similarity allows us to

45:21

do is determine the similarity of these three points. So this might be a word of of beans.

This might be peas and this might be car. And so what the coine similarity test does is that if we go to our client in

45:38

this expiration phase or in the the actual contract, we will ask them for hey can you give me uh five to 10 examples of inputs and outputs that you would like out of the system and when they give us the inputs and outputs we then have something to grade our AI outputs of the system against. So say

45:55

they have a chatbot and it needs to be outputting a certain type of answer. We can run their 11 inputs against our system.

So we have our system here. We take the 10 inputs.

We run them each through our

46:10

system and it outputs 1 2 3 etc. And then we have their original 10 inputs and the well this is the system that they used to create which is their own brain of okay what what should this

46:25

thing be answering? So this is a human.

This is an AI. And then it's going to output the well it's not really outputting the brain has outputed it.

But we have 10 and 10. And the 10 that we create from our system we can then use cosine similarity to get the average or we can

46:41

we can compare the similarity of this one to this one and determine if yes our AI system is creating outputs that are similar enough to this and we average them all and then we can get an overall similarity score. So coming back to the graph here, say we have this one here

46:56

which is is one input. It might be uh how do I change my password and then this one will be the AI output one and this one will be the human one.

They might say in order to change your password you need to go to XY Z website and then based off the AI system that we built it might say in order to change

47:13

your password please navigate to this. So they are fairly similar and then when we run them through the cosine similarity test it's converting these words and it runs it through an embedding model and the words get converted to a a

47:30

set of coordinates that might be like 0.1 0.5 uh 0.9 uh and it goes on and on and on and on and on but in this case we've just got three coordinates because we got a threedimensional graph. So what the

47:45

cosine system does is it converts words into their numerical equivalents within a vector space and by having these coordinates it can plot them in the vector space by their similarity. So in this case you see beans and ps are are close.

That's because the embedding

48:01

model that we use and run the beams through. It's going to give out a coordinate and then we run PS through it.

It's going to go hm okay that fits there and they end up being close to each other within the vector space. And so how does what does cosine similar similarity actually mean?

Well, it's the

48:17

measurement of the angle between these two bad boys here. So the smaller the angle, the more similar they are.

The larger the angle, see if we go from PS to car or from beans to car, the angle here is much larger. Ooh, I'm getting

48:33

back into my my uh what was that? Calculus and trigonometry and whatnot.

Um but yeah, beans to car is a much larger angle. Therefore the co similarity is going to be lower than these two P's.

That make sense? So this is taking

48:49

the subjective opinions and emotions of people who go h but I like the outputs. I don't really like the outputs.

I don't care. You have told us these in the in the expiration milestone.

We won't necessarily hold them to that in the contract of the expiration milestone. It would just be hey look give us some

49:06

outputs and we'll compare them to it and internally we can check and use that in the end of the report. So at the end of the expiration milestone you'll give them a report in a proposal which we'll go into in a second.

But the numbers that we get back from our testing if we say okay look by the way coine

49:21

similarity goes from zero to one. Um so a high a good range uh we go for in expirations we might be looking for 0.85 85 or or uh or higher.

But for our final builds, we'll be going for anywhere from sort of 0.9 to 0.95 in most cases. So

49:39

that means it's it's highly similar. And when we do our expiration milestone, we'll be looking to see if we can get this sort of number and say, "Okay, give me those 10 10 outputs and 10 inputs.

We're going to run it through the system, see what we get. Okay, yep, we're around 8.0.85 or higher.

We're

49:55

confident that we can build the system for you." So, it's as much of client satisfaction as it is for our sanity. We don't want to be taken on trying to take down a mammoth with a slingshot, you know, like we need to be taking on clients that we know that we can deliver for because I tell you what, these guys

50:10

these these early adopters have huge expectations. Um, it's actually it's more the people who are the sort of early majority who have the bigger expectations cuz they they're like, "Oh, well, I've heard all the stuff about AI.

Let me give it a try." And they expect it to just completely change the business. So you need to make sure that they're not expecting too much and given

50:26

the data and the kind of inputs and outputs they have provided we are able to get close enough to it that we can feel confident in going for a complete contract a full contract on it. So that's custom similarity you can convert the 10 inputs or five to 10 inputs that the client gives you into uh or the

50:43

outputs sorry into a set of coordinates or or numbers that a computer can understand and when we convert these over we can plot them um automatically. We have a tool for this that we give to our accelerator members so that they can do this testing um for their clients.

We have an internal one as well that we use at Morningside. And you just run these

51:00

run these outputs through the the cosine similarity system. It's going to determine the similarity of them and then we'll average it out and say okay what was the average number?

So that's coound similarity might sound a bit complex but we are dealing with complex issues and complex technology. So, uh, and complex emotions of clients,

51:20

too, and so how does this tie back into the exploration system and how it changed our our sales process and sort of revolutionize their business and how can how can you you use it too really. So, now they've paid us, we've done the

51:35

exploration milestone and the uh we then need to present the the findings to them. So once you've done all this work and you've you've created your uh you've given this to your devs, they've gone and that's a that's a that's a coding symbol.

Uh they've gone

51:51

and done the work, they've done the expiration, we've got the cosine cosine similarity scores out pretty confident we've done enough of the expiration that we can get to a point where we're confident in pitching uh for the full project. Now uh this comes out and we now have a proposal that we

52:10

put together which has let's just go half and half here. The first half is going to be the findings the findings of the exploration which is hey look we did these tests and these are the kind of outputs we're really happy with this we were kind of concerned about this.

So this first half

52:27

is the findings and then in the second half you're then going to be pitching your proposal and in this proposal we need to have that's when you get your your developer either you do it yourself or or the the lead developer on your team then you need to get them to create that

52:43

proposal which is what Spencer was doing earlier in the in the older system which is okay what are the sections how many hours 3 4 etc. How many hours is each of these things going to take and that's going to determine how we can price it within this proposal.

So you just we typically just mark up we get the our

52:58

estimates from our CTO Spencer and then we just mark up based off our kind of inflating markup rate that we apply to our our services. Um so whether that's a few hundred now whether that's you get into thousands of dollars uh you can just kind of mark that up and and apply that overall and then that proposal you

53:14

will also include gosh makes me realize how much how much [ __ ] there is to cover in this stuff. Uh I thought this was going to be a quick video but inside the proposal then you have the cosign similarity score that you agree on.

So this will become part of the contract and that is

53:31

what's going to save you from the subjective opinions of clients who are unhappy with I don't really like how it sounds that kind of rubbish. First half the findings of the discovery and here is we get to there's so much for me to talk about on this I probably can't squeeze all into this video but there's

53:47

a number of different factors as to why this works and why it's so important. Uh, one of them is that you get a chance to build trust.

You get to show them how you operate. And this right here is the most important part because they've just paid you $800.

It's basically like a like they're just sort of having a dig

54:03

and saying, "Look, these guys seem professional. Let's see if they really know their stuff and they've given you a small amount of money and you've gone away that should pay your developers and hopefully give you a bit of extra." So, you've again, you're getting cash flow here, which is great.

Even if you don't end up taking the project on, you can just get paid to do exploration for

54:18

these people, which cash flow early on in your agency. That that kept us alive.

I [ __ ] you not. But then you come down here and you get a chance to show them who you are.

Show them how you operate. Show them your level of professionalism and the findings and the way that you do this presentation is going to be key.

54:34

this is actually done on a call. Oh, let me see if I can get this again.

This is done on on what we call our proposal call. So we'll get them on a call at 30 minutes to half an hour.

We'll go through the findings of it very professional. Hey, this is what we did.

We're concerned about this. This is the kind of outcomes we got.

This is the

54:50

coim similarity scores. And we you can kind of introduce this as a concept on these calls.

We can say, hey, look, given the the inputs and outputs that you gave us, we were able to get to a 0.85 similarity, which means it's very good. Um, and and with a bit more bit more funding, a bit more effort, we can

55:06

get this to a point where it's it's far more similar. It's up sort of the 0.90.95 range.

Um, so you get to give them the findings and then you give them the proposal based off the estimations that your your lead developer or yourself have come up with. And that goes in the second half, which is a proposal breaking down each of the parts

55:22

of the full build and how much that's going to cost them. On the call, you need to have the contract ready.

And in the contract, um, if they're all good to go and there's no complaints, then you send them over the contract, get it signed on the call if possible, cuz as soon as that call ends, your chance of

55:37

closing them just just goes through the floor. um try to get them to to sign that contract on the call because as soon as they signed it, doesn't matter about the invoice really.

If they've signed that, they've made a a commitment to paying that invoice as well. So, as long as you can get it signed, walk them through the contract, handle objections, whatever you need to do.

Point out that

55:53

the cosign similarity metric is in there and say, "Hey, look, because these are kind of subjective outputs, uh this is something that we do to both safeguard ourselves and to make sure that you are protected and that we have a level of of standard, a bar to work towards in the quality of outputs that their system generates. So having this concept of

56:09

similarity, pitch it as a benefit for you and them, which it is, and say, "Hey, look, this is the this is the agreed one. We're going to be aiming for 0.9.

Anything more than that might be overfitting cuz you can make the system too good at giving certain answers. Um, you want to keep it at around that 0.9 to 0.95 range.

Um, and that's what we'll

56:26

put in our contract." And that is the way that we can stop this. If you've ever done these kind of projects before where it's custom custom builds, uh you'll know that it can just kind of go on and on and on and it's like review revision hell.

We call it review hell

56:42

and it just goes on and on and on and it's so painful when you have a chatbot system that you've created and then you send it off to them and they send back like a 30 40 minute loom and you just especially when it's a low ticket client as well. If you've been paid three or $4,000 and you're sitting there

56:58

on your Saturday afternoon, going through this guy's revision notes and and then having to go back and fix the system up and man, it is not pretty and it's not the kind of lifestyle that I want for my business. And so, we try to avoid as much of this crap as possible by saying, "Nope, we have the cosign

57:14

similarity. This thing is performing as expected.

We're done. Send me the money.

Send me the money." So, yeah. Hope I uh got all that across, but the exploration milestone has been a complete game changer for us.

And if you

57:31

want to incorporate something similar into your business, while while you may not do the exact same thing as a as an AI agency owner, what you do need to think about is this line and how do I spend less time talking to tire kickers who are going to waste my time and how can I push quickly

57:48

to start filtering out? cuz you guys may do some inbound lead generation, you may do LinkedIn, whatever, and you may have having conversations, but you'll pretty quickly realize that a lot of these are just conversations.

And you need to start finding the the guys with money to spend. These are the guys you want to be talking to.

And this the longer you give them, like there's billions of people on

58:05

the earth, and don't assume that all of them are like you and I and are rational and and don't want to waste time. Some of them are deluded.

Some of them have mental issues and they will happily sit on these calls and waste your time. And that's it's not going to help your business.

you're going to end up spending so much time talking to people who are never going to be clients. While

58:21

it may be good sales practice if you need that, but talking to a loony is maybe not the best kind of sales practice you you should be after. But yeah, take this concept whether you apply it bar for bar or whether you just take the kind of distill it down and say, "Hey, look, I need to put some kind of filter earlier on, whether that's a

58:37

early on in my when I was doing calls for my consulting calls on my channel, I would have a $300 or $500 consulting call and that those are the people that would then take on as dev clients. So, if they came through my consulting calls, they'd already kind of pre-qualified or pre-selected themselves saying, "Hey, look, I'm willing to spend

58:53

$500 on this." So, that was kind of our earlier exploration milestone, but we started getting leads directly through our website, not just through my uh through my channel and through the through the consulting calling. So, yeah, take it, apply it, and this is

59:08

particularly good for for general agencies like myself who are doing custom solutions every time. if you are a niche agency um and you have the same thing to sell every single time maybe a little bit different but I think this is handy to have in your back pocket either way and it will help you get past $10,000 a month which was a a major

59:24

issue that we had and the rest is history. So hope this been helpful guys.

Um I certainly enjoyed making it and yeah exploration milestones and co similarity. I hope you got it all.

Uh and I will see you in the next one. Keep going.

Uh you can do it. this

59:40

opportunity is not going anywhere, but you need to make back. You need to make moves on it now if you want to get there.

So, I'm rooting for you and keep going. Ciao.

So, what is the difference between a $5,000 AI agency project and one that's worth

59:55

$105,000? In this video, I'm going to be breaking down two client projects from my own agency, Morningside AI.

And you'll get to see the differences in resources and sort of effort involved in each of these because you're probably thinking that bigger is better, right? but that's not necessarily the case and it really comes down to what you want to

00:11

achieve with your agency. So, in this video, I really want to give you a clear look at the upsort of the pros and cons for each of these because it's not all sunshine and rainbows.

And there are reasons why you wouldn't want a bigger client and you would want a $5,000 one instead. So, I'm going to try to break things down, the factors involved in making these decisions so that you can

00:27

better aim your agency in the right direction. whether you want to do one that's cash flowing and sort of fairly hands-free or you're trying to build a large AI development company and start to get bigger and bigger projects and you're betting on the long term.

So starting off with the $5,000 project, this was a client who had a business base around helping people pay less on

00:43

their car insurance claims. So if you're in an accident, you go to a repair shop, they try to see or the insurance company wants to try and put as much of it as possible on you.

Uh but there's a process where you can go back and forth with them and say, "No, this should be covered by insurance." And that's what the business was based around. and they had a a human operated system for doing

00:59

the sort of back and forth and analyzing if there's anything in the in the invoices that they could sort of dispute. And we were able to set up an AI system to do that for them.

So that was a $5,000 project. The $100 to $5,000 project was a complete AI SAS platform build that we did from start to finish.

We did all of the AI backends, planning

01:16

systems, built it from scratch, all custom coded, and we also built the front end as well. So, we call this one a car insurance claims and this one

01:33

full AIS and this was in the healthcare industry. It was uh for nurses.

I can't go into it too much uh but it was in the healthcare industry helping nurses to come up to speed using these AI systems that we could train them faster on. Um, so that's the two different size projects so you got a bit of context.

01:49

And for the I'll put bing bing some some some screenshots on on screen. There was just a single payment for this I believe.

Um, and for this it was three different three or four different payments. And this is now on a maintenance package with us who we get paid monthly to maintain it and sort of add add not add features but we're just maintaining it for now.

Um, and also

02:05

being there on hand to fix any bug fixes that come along. So there's a couple key areas that I want to break down for for these so you understand the associated sort of pros and cons for each.

Right. So, a $5,000 project by nature, uh, let me draw up a bit of a table here.

So, I have a table here. We can start to sort

02:22

of lay out the difference between the two in a number of different areas. Then we can have prod here.

So, the type of project, we can have admin, we can have sales. This will make sense in a second.

Give me a minute.

02:37

Sales. Uh, then we can have the case study value.

We can have the profit. And then we could have the duration that's a clock.

Um and then we can divide these up. So these are the different sort of factors or or cost

02:53

associated with them. We have the project itself.

We have the admin time. We have the sales time.

We have the case study value. We have the profitability or profit of the of the entire build.

Then we have the time that it takes. So uh there's also other factors which are going to but this is this will get us

03:08

started for now. So we have the project here.

We have the 5k. Oh, 5k.

And this one down here, we have the

03:25

105k. So, just putting these on quickly.

We had 1 hour here, we had here, and then we had 3 hours here, and we probably had about 15 here. So, this is the time involvement on the sales side and on the admin side.

So, just to uh get this 5K

03:43

deal, it's not $5, it's $5,000. Just to get this $5,000 deal closed, we had to do an an hour's worth of sales.

So, that might be just two two calls, one discovery call, and then one follow-up call just to get started. And then that went into about 3 hours of admin.

So, throughout the duration of the project,

03:58

which I can put down here, uh, which was 3 weeks, um, and this one was, uh, sort of three and a half months. So, a lot longer, right?

So, you can see off the bat that the smaller project is easier to get on,

04:14

easier to sign. Um, there's less admin involved throughout the duration of the build.

Um, and it's done in a in a faster amount of time, right? 3 weeks to get the money.

Um, and in this case, we spending over 10 hours of messing around with proposals and going back and forth and identifying the scope. Because it's

04:30

such a big project, there's so many more questions you need to ask about the from the client and do far far more discovery and digging to really plan out, okay, this is the scope of the project. this is what we're going to do.

Um, and then there's this kind of awkward stage where like they know what they want, but they kind of want to see the designs and see the plans and it's like, well, you need

04:46

to pay us for that. So, we need to do an exploration.

Uh, there's quite a lot involved here as you can imagine. So, for the customer to be willing to get into a $100,000 contract, there's a lot of work and sort of relationship building that needs to be done as well.

Then we have a factor here called the case study grade. Um, and because this is a fairly basic AI sort of system

05:03

that's not too flashy, um, you're really getting it might be handy. case study is always going to be handy.

Um, but this one is not hugely. Um, in terms of impressing other clients, like, hey, we built a $5,000 system for this kind of client.

It's not, at least for what we're doing at my my company, it's not

05:18

hugely impressive. Um, but a complete AI SAS build is let's well, you can always be better, but we'll give it a 9 out of 10.

We can show our clients that we built this end to end SAS, and they're like, well, well, if they can do that, then I'm sure they can do everything everything underneath that. Uh then we

05:35

have the actual profit for this. So on this build it was oh it was 3,000 and on this build it was 31,000.

So you can see 5,000 into 3,000 105 into 31. You can see the profit

05:50

margins on these are very different. Uh this is over over 50%.

And this is like 30% profit margins right? So, uh, for the amount of time you're putting in, this is when you need to start evaluating, okay, well, do I want to be getting sort of better returns on my time here?

Cuz this is 3 weeks. You did

06:06

a quick maths here, and you said, okay, this is going to be 1,000 profit, PPW, $1,000 in profit per week. Um, 3 and a half months.

I guess you can say that 10k per month. um go down to what two 2.3 maybe 2.3

06:22

um KP week. Is that right?

Something like that. Maybe about 2,000 profit per week.

I'll get Sean to check the math on that. But yes, so keeping these in mind, you're going to make a lot more money

06:37

per project in terms of profitability. But this is going to take a lot longer.

You're going to get better case studies. You're going to spend a lot more time going back and forth.

And this doesn't even factor in the the the fact that in order to get this, you might have had to have three to five of these in the pipeline. We've had lots of people interested in building these AI SASes

06:53

with us, but very few get to the point of completion because there's a 10-hour sales process and then they have to make these big commitments of $105,000. So, this doesn't even factor in the sort of fail rate of this.

So, we might have to put like times five on this cuz there's five times it's failed before we even get to one. But, in this case, we might

07:09

have just had five of them and it ends up being 5 hours total. So, hope that gives you a good idea of the different pros and cons.

Uh, obviously bigger clients, bigger projects going to take more investment on the sort of relationship building and sales side. There's bigger proposals to do.

There's more refinement of the proposal,

07:24

agreeing on scope, much larger timelines just in general. This is going to take you like a month and a bit or more just to get them to the point where they're willing to commit.

Um, you can use what we like to do, which is an exploration milestone, which I think I'm going to cover in another video, but that can actually break down the sales process and get these bigger clients on board a

07:41

lot sooner. But you'll have to subscribe or or like or something to catch that next one cuz I want to do a whole video on exploration milestones.

I don't want to get sucked into it on this. And there's actually one more thing that I want to add on here um which you can call sort of company culture um and the way that these different projects have an effect um

07:58

culture. Um I'm going to have to do a bit of a quick job on this one, but the effect on company culture.

If you're trying to build a development team and a a a collection of people who are inspired and feel like they are working towards cool things, building $5,000

08:14

chat bots or in this case sort of automation systems is is a way to get money in the door, but it's not going to fire up your A players when you're trying to bring in attract and retain highquality talent. There's only so many $5,000 little chatbot builds you can do before they start going, "Hey, look, I

08:31

want to either be get paid more or I want to go somewhere where I'm feeling more fulfilled because they have the skills to be able to go anywhere and get hired by anyone." So, they're really looking for what you can add on top of just monetary, which is adding some kind of interesting aspect to it. Like, hey, look, I just built out an entire AI SAS that could revolutionize the healthcare

08:46

industry, or I've just built these chatbots. So, you have to look at culture here.

Maybe I do red. Um the culture and the effect of it on the company culture goes down.

So we saw our team, our development team was extremely fired up throughout the the entire build

09:02

of this cuz it was cool. We're working with a client that we really liked.

The our client is awesome and we've got him on retainer now. So he's we're continuing to work with him and we're like going to build future features into the platform longer term.

Um but our developers got to work directly with a really cool client who had great values and was excited to work with us as well.

09:19

And the end result was such a great outcome for our team as as us as this this start AI startup that started 12 months ago, 14 probably about 12 months ago now. Um, we were able to go from these small basic chat bots right up to knocking off a complete SAS build that

09:35

the client was absolutely like wrapped. They was so happy with the outcome and for myself, my business partner Josh, my CTO Spencer, for all of us to be working on this project to completion and see it come together uh was a really really great moment and a high point for us as a team and and seeing that we could do these large projects and we could pull

09:51

it off together. So, uh, the culture and the effect of these larger projects cannot be understated.

If you want to attract quality talent and retain them, you can't just be feeding them sort of small projects constantly. So, just keep that in mind.

And this brings me back around full circle to what I was saying before, and I can rub this off now,

10:07

which is which kind of project should you be aiming for? And that comes down to what kind of agency you want to build?

What are your goals with this business model? What are your goals with the AI space?

Are you looking to create cash flow and just get off the ground and be able to make money online so you

10:22

can go live as a digital nomad and and go to Bali and do all this cool stuff? Or are you looking to build enterprise value, build a valuable team?

And in that case, we can kind of plot it on a bit of an axis here um between okay, over here is someone who wants maybe

10:38

cash flow, freedom, etc. And over here you want in to pro value

10:54

um great team culture and really highly

11:11

capable. So, if you're just looking to use one of these businesses to get yourself making money online and get started, then you need to potentially focus on these lower ticket clients first, right?

You I mean, by first, you kind of you can't really just jump to this. You're going to have to do these first anyway in order to get up to the

11:27

stage where you can have enough credibility and evidence that you are able of able to develop one of these. Uh but when it comes to picking where you want to fall on this on the scale, you need to keep in mind that this is not these kind of businesses are not going to uh scale to these sort of valuations and exitable sort of valuations that you

11:44

might be looking for here. So it's more of a a self-awareness thing of knowing what you want out of this opportunity.

Um and in this case for for myself there's costs that are involved here. As you saw the there was lower

12:00

profitability, there's higher admin and sales. Sorry, that's really ugly.

But there are pros and cons to these. So in this case, you're sort of betting on a longerterm play in that look, I'm going

12:16

to sacrifice some profitability and I'm going to have to deal with more admin and longer sales processes, etc., But I'm going to be able to create more value through the team that I build and through the culture that I'm building and the enterprise value overall of the the organization. But in this case, your

12:32

profitability is going to be going way up. While while net profits may not be uh be drastically different, it's still in terms of input and output.

You're getting more more juice for the for the amount of squeeze you put in. If that's a good analogy to use.

Um and in this

12:48

case, uh there's less admin admin. So, there is a opportunity for you to create one of these lower ticket agencies.

So, we can say that we wanted to niche down to these car insurance claims. Um, it's actually quite a small market, I believe.

So, we didn't bother niching down and morning side to do

13:04

something like this. We could say, "Okay, I just want to do five of these a month or let's let's say three of them a month, 15k in rev." And that was $3,000 profit a piece.

That would probably increase over time because the first time that we built it is the hardest and we had to come up with all these systems. But if I was to replicate that over to another person's uh build, I've

13:20

already got all the systems. I just need to tweak it a little bit.

So the profitability actually goes much further up. Um let me do like an extra big arrow there.

If you're going to niche down, so in this case, I haven't talked about niched and general agencies for a while on the channel. Um but I do throughout my community and ALM and things like

13:37

this. The difference between a niched agency and a and a general one is that you're going to be able to focus on just one particular solution or or niche.

In that case, you're going to be able to roll over the tech that you've built for the prior clients into the future one. So that it means there's increased profitability because you're not having to come up with a new solution every

13:54

time. Um, now very few people get to the stage of doing this properly because we like to jump around and go.

I mean, we were even doing the same thing at Morningside because of the leads that come from my channel. We like to stay general and do sort of cool things wherever we think we're a good fit for them, right?

But if you're just looking to start off, get a cash flow business

14:09

and be making 15, $20,000 a month, then looking at, okay, I can just focus on these small lower ticket clients and try to get cash flow and the freedom that I want. And then maybe later once you've got a bit more experience, you can try to go for the more custom projects and uh and make more money that way.

But it is a longer term play. And if you think

14:26

AI agency as a as a sort of development company is the play for you, this is what you need to go for. But if you're trying to jump to some kind of SAS and you just want the cash flow and sort of the basic team needed to do it, uh this can also be a good option too.

So hope that's been a breakdown of the difference between the low ticket and

14:42

high ticket clients. It's not bigger is not always better is what I'm trying to point out here.

And it does depend entirely on your on your goals in the space. And one more point that I want to make is that if you were to do like why $5,000, why not a $1,000 project?

Well,

14:58

you'll find when you do the old grid automatic like I did before, you'll see that the admin involvement of doing a $1,000 project is about the same as a $5,000 project or even a $10,000 project sometimes. So, there's this this kind of goldilock sweet spot zone where you're doing the same amount of admin for more

15:13

money, which is why at Morningside we have a minimum of $10,000 project. So, we just ignore anything that's sub $10,000 uh just cuz it's not worth the time.

I don't want to be getting on sales calls. My business partner Josh doesn't want to take them.

if we're going to make $5,000 because we

15:29

know how much time discovery call sort of closing call, write a proposal, write the contract, send it off, build it, review it, build it, review it, we get involved, something breaks, it's like not what I want to be involved in, not how I want to run my business, which is the point here, which is you need to choose the client size based on your

15:45

goals with the business. I don't want to be taking a ton of of sales calls with these guys, but my my team would much rather be focusing on hey let's build one or two really big things occasionally rather than doing a sort of high frequency style style model here.

So keep that in mind that the admin you

16:01

will find um there is a certain threshold at which you don't want to take the project just because you know how much admin is involved. Um so yeah that's the last thing I wanted to mention but that's all for the video.

Um, if you've liked and you like seeing me walk around here in a in a singlet, um, you can leave a like down below and let me know. Also from my drawings as

16:17

well. So, that's all the video.

Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one. In this video, I'm continuing on from where I left off on my general versus niched agencies video.

This is based around the difference between niched and general agencies and how you can use this difficulty value matrix to

16:33

decide when to transition from general to niched agencies. There's a lot to get through.

It's very important if you are looking to be in this business model long term and you're looking to optimize how you build your business over time so that you can scale it as easy as possible. So the difficulty value matrix is where we're going to start here.

Oh, and it is freezing cold here in South

16:49

Africa. So I am wearing a a hoodie.

It's a little bit more casual than usual, but I'm sure you guys will appreciate the value rather than the uh attire. So let's get into things.

So first thing we need to go through is a little graph like this. All right.

All right. So up

17:07

here, all right, and up here we have 50K, 100K, and say this is 300K and this is monthly rev. So we have

17:25

monthly revenue of 10K, 50K, 100K, and 300,000. Now this is not retainer income um necessarily.

It's just the amount of cash collected each month that you're doing. And we have option number one here which is the niched agency niched and here we have

17:43

general. So this is step one um is understanding the difference between the two models and when you should pick one, when you should pick the other and when you should look to transition your general agency into a niche agency.

Because if we're looking to scale, which we're going to get to in a second, the niche agency is superior in terms of

18:00

scaling. operationally, you are going to be running into less issues.

You've got less complexity throughout the business. You're going to be selling the same thing to roughly the same set of people over and over and over again.

So, it makes it much easier to repeatedly sell that thing and dial in your marketing and your messaging over time, start running ads, etc. So, scalability.

The

18:17

niche agency has the the crown here um as you'd expect. Uh but the general agency is where most of you are going to be starting.

The niche agency is only really ideal for people starting out who have connections or experience in a given industry. So if you have connections in say the home services

18:33

industry and you have experience and you deeply understand exactly how those businesses run and the problems that they face then you can go in and either use your own experience to identify a niche solution and build that out. Maybe hire a development team or try to build it out yourself or you have your own experience from working in that industry

18:49

and you know everything and you don't need to go to anyone else. But also the connections are going to be helpful because you can then go and sell it to business owners in that space using your warm connection.

So niche agency because you have to come up with a product or a service and an offer initially. It's a lot hard to start as a beginner.

Um but

19:05

longterm it is superior if you're looking to scale aggressively. Right?

So the general agency which is what most you're going to start which means you don't need connections. You don't need experience.

This is kind of a a longer process to get started but it's a it's a way to ease into the model and ease into running online businesses. I know many

19:20

of you are new to online business in general. and easing into it.

It took me 14 months to make my first dollar in profit when I was doing online business in the e-commerce space. And that was because I had to ease in and pick up all these other skills that are necessary to actually succeed.

It's it's also it's mindset, it's habits, it's there's a

19:36

complete transformation of you that needs to happen. And the general agency is a way that you can ease into it uh without having to go through all the all the difficulty of coming up with an offer, identifying a problem to solve etc.

So general agency is where most of you are going to be starting. Um, but that is not where if you are looking to

19:52

scale, which is the whole purpose of this video, you're going to end up longterm. And as I mentioned before, the operational streamlining that you can have from a niche agency where it's like, okay, we have built this one this one product or the suite of products for a certain niche or for a certain avatar,

20:07

it's much easier for us to sell that repeatedly and also to acquire customers because we can run ads etc. Gone in circles here, but you get the idea.

The point of this video is to give you a framework, the difficulty value matrix to let you know when to transition this general agency into a niche agency.

20:24

Because the good thing about a general agency is because you are working uh with a various different types of companies. You're taking requests on things that they want you to build for them like Morningside AI, my own company.

We are in the process, the reason I'm making this video is because we're in the process of doing this right now. So, we are looking to we've been

20:41

trying to scale the general agency which is taking custom projects past six figures per month and it has just been an absolute nightmare. Like it is pushing [ __ ] uphill because there's so much operational complexity of running these custom projects every time because every time we go to take on a client, there's this gigantic process.

There's a

20:57

lot of exploration. We need to do an entire exploration milestone with them.

That's going to take a week. Then we need to hop on do a proposal, write the whole proposal up, do the contracting, custom every time, go back and forth on the contract.

A lot of stuff goes on just to get one client signed because there's so much. It's custom.

We're doing custom development. They do it on

21:13

request. They come to us with something that they need.

They've watched one of my videos where they've seen something elsewhere and they come to us and say, "Hey, can you build this for me? I'd like a I'd like a quote or proposal." So, and then because every time you go to build a a project as a custom AI solutions company like Morningside, we are solving problems

21:30

that we potentially haven't solved before. So we have a a a track record of previous projects we've done and we can draw from that how we can execute on these new ones but at the end of the day we haven't covered even a fraction of the potential use cases out there.

And so for us every time we go into a project we are dealing with an element

21:46

of unknown and that means there's a a a risk factor that there's going to be issues that pop up in the project that's going to take longer than expected. There's more managerial insight involved.

Um and so it's difficult has been difficult for us to get past this this 100k per month mark. So, we are in the process of niching down Morning

22:02

Side. This is a little bit of an announcement.

I'm going to do a whole video on it. But, we're in the process of niching niching Morning Side down into a specific niche.

I'm not going to tell you just yet. You got to wait for that video.

But, we're going to niche down to scale past that six figure per month or low six figure per month cap that we've been facing. So, for those of

22:18

you who are starting off agencies, I want you to get this very clear in your mind right now. Even if you're just starting, even if you haven't started, understand that this dynamic is at play where niche agencies can sort of scale right through because they get to all the hard work early.

General agencies get the taste all the way along. So, they're doing little all these different

22:33

projects that you do at the time. At some point, you're going to find something that's going to allow you to niche down.

And that's what the next part of this video is about is how do you know when you've found that? So, let's go into the next part now.

So there we have the difficulty value matrix, a framework that I've come up

22:49

with for looking at the solutions that you provide as a general agency that you can pass through this this as a as a filter or as a lens uh to determine if the solution that you're providing is something that's potentially an option for niching down towards. So I know it's probably not rocket science, but we have

23:05

value along the bottom in terms of the value to the client. So if you create something inherently the solutions that we build, our whole job as AI automation agency owners is to be able to use AI technology to create value in businesses.

So that's our skill. We need to identify opportunities for it.

And then we need to deploy the resources and

23:20

the team necessary and have the managerial oversight to see that uh that project delivered and and executed so that we can create value for their businesses. And we're going to be able to extract some of that value back for ourselves in the process of creating it.

So that's how we pull and siphon out some money from this AI wave and the AI

23:37

revolution or whatever buzz word you want to use. We need to create value with AI and we get a share of it of whatever we're able to create.

So the value that we create for clients it can either be low and something that's quite small and and more of a quality of life thing or it can be a serious uh impact provide a serious impact to the business

23:52

and drive massive growth or cost savings etc. So high value low value not too complicated.

Then we have difficulty in terms of the difficulty for you to deliver it. There's low difficulty and high difficulty.

This might be a little automation. This might be a custom

24:07

platform. The the high difficulty ones might involve a lot of moving parts and different integrations.

The low difficulty ones might use a very basic setup with just one or two software. So I know you you guys are smart enough to to understand the difference between hard and easy projects and also low and

24:22

high value projects. But in the middle here is where it gets good and this is the lens that you can look through to identify what solutions you should consider niching down towards.

So first we have in this bottom corner low value solutions. Low value to the client but also low difficulty.

So it's easy for us to deliver but it's not providing that much value to the client. These are kind

24:38

of quality of life little they can be good for upsells where if you're targeting a certain niche, you can say, "Hey, look, I'll also throw in this this this and this. It's easy for us to do.

It's like not much not much cost to us, but we can throw them in there. It's not going to be the main driver of value for the offer, but they can be handy things to get a deal over the line or just to

24:55

provide some extra value um for the client on the whole. So, low value and easy.

Next, we have solutions that are of low value to the client and are hard for us to deliver. So, I'm not even going to continue talking about that.

Let's just cross that off. that's not what we're interested in here.

And if you've delivered one of these, you

25:10

probably want to put that on a blacklist of like, let's never do this again. Um cuz providing not much value to your client and making it very hard for yourself and your team is not the equation that we want out of these businesses, right?

Personally, I'm trying to build a business that is it's to some degree a lifestyle business as well that allows me to live the life

25:27

that I want to. And if I'm taking on a bunch of stress, stressing my team out and not delivering much value, I can put my time in in I should be spending my time on different areas of this quadrant uh in future.

So jumping across to here, we have high value and hard solutions. So these are these custom platforms that

25:42

you have to put a lot of effort into. Like the biggest project that we've done at Morningside is now uh over $120,000 or so.

Um and it was a a complete SAS AI SAS buildout that we've done that was both high value for the client and also very hard for the team. So there was the most difficult project we've done by

25:58

far. It took basically all of our resources for a while, but we're able to deliver that.

And so while these can be good at certain stages of your general agency, it's likely not something that you want to niche your agency down to unless you want to end up like in our case being like the AI SAS specialists. Personally, I wouldn't be trying to

26:14

niche down to it. And that's why us as Morningside didn't we did consider it of saying, "Hey, let's just keep doing AI SAS projects cuz they're quite large.

They're high ticket and we can get a nice track record up of like clear definable platforms that we built." But on the whole, we weren't interested in doing that. We're looking for a sort of smaller win that we can scale a bit more

26:30

aggressively because this hard we are in a stage with the AI space right now where we have the luxury of being early. We don't have to at at a at a later date people are going to solve these problems because hard hard is all was all kind of relative, right?

People can solve hard with good systems and good processes and

26:47

really talented teams. So hard can eventually become like medium if you've done the same thing like 20 times and you've really dialed in the process on how you execute on delivering an AI SAS platform.

But on the whole we are in the early stages of this AI revolution and we have the

27:02

luxury of picking the lowhanging fruit. So you watching this video right now as opposing you have the luxury of picking a lowhanging fruit that are easy to deliver and high value which is our next one.

So this is not a complete no. Neither is this, but this is high value to the client plus easy to deliver,

27:18

which is a big big check mark from uh Mr. Mr.

Otley here. So that is exactly what we're trying to go for.

If you are niching down to a specific type of solution that you want to sell repeatedly, for example, you may have found an automation or a chain of AI automations that when applied to a specific type of business can completely

27:34

change the the way that they are acquiring clients. And that's a massive value ad for the client, but also easier for you.

In some cases, the strengths of generative AI and LLM can just be applied perfectly to a specific use case and you're able to get a a situation like this where high value to the client

27:49

and easy for you to deliver. So, if we are talking about when to go from niche to general and you remember on the uh the little thing I had all these lines and then what's this big star moment where we're going to actually go up to the niched route.

This is what you're looking for. This is the lens, the high

28:04

value and easy to deliver. So, just to recap, high value and easy is what we're looking for.

Low value and easy are good for upsells slashbundles. So, not something you should completely disregard, but keep them in the back pocket if you want to add more value to a deal or offer them to your client as a as an extra.

Um,

28:20

high value and hard can be good. Um, and you can turn this hard into medium over time.

Um, but we are in the early stages and we get to pick the low hanging fruit. Here's a little tree.

The low hanging fruit is what we're trying to get there. And that's what high value and easy to deliver solutions are.

28:36

moving on from that, I want to point out also something that you may not be aware of when you are building these solutions and and working as a general agency in particular. uh there is no contractual obligation unless you put it in the contract that if you build a high value and easy to deliver solution for a client that you can't go and then take

28:53

this and go okay how can I find more businesses so you've delivered a high value and easy to deliver solution

29:09

for a specific type of business you should be asking next if you're choosing to niche down here or want to explore it further, do a couple more iterations and and implement it in businesses a few more times and get a bit more experience. Your question should be, how can I find more of these businesses?

Because what you've just built here, unless in the contract with the client,

29:25

they ask for exclusivity where if you build this for me, you're not allowed to build it for any of my competitors or anyone else in the space. And for them to ask for that on the in the contract, you will need to put your price significantly up because if in most cases, AI is quite a broad field right now.

There's a lot of overlapping solutions. It might be an AI automation,

29:41

it might be a chatbot. If you as an agency say, "I will never build another AI chatbot for this," you're wiping out a massive potential chunk of revenue for the foreseeable future.

So, in unless they're willing to pay five, six, 10 times more than what you actually put on the regular ticket price for a project like that, you're entirely allowed to

29:58

take that exact same solution that you built for them and then go and find other people like it. You go on Apollo, you go on use instantly's lead finder, you go on any of these lead finding platforms, you go on LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you can try to find other business owners like that using any of the lead generation methods that are out there, right?

And then once you take

30:13

that, you've already got it built. Now you can just try and copy and paste it to some degree.

There's always going to be some complexities and replicating it across to another business, but for the most part, you've got a significant chunk of it done and now you're able to take it across. So these businesses that you work with, unless they ask for it explicitly in the contract, you are able

30:30

to go and find more businesses like them. And then you have the ammunition required to say I built X for Y.

Do you want it? And then once you do

30:47

this, you have the ammunition when you are reaching out to them to make your outreach so much more effective because you can say, "Hey, I just built X for Y, your competitor. Are you interested in learning more about it or do you want to hop on a call to discuss how it could change your business as well?" This is tapping into a the sort of psychology of

31:04

business owners right now where they know AI is is the wave. It's coming.

Many of them are skeptical about it. They're not ready to invest in it, but this is the kind of thing that can nudge them over the edge.

So being able to say that, hey, your direct competitor, I just built this crazy AI system for them and it's getting insane results for

31:19

them. Would you be interested in hopping on a call to learn more about how it could potentially help your business?

If not, uh if it's not a good good fit, no problem. But you've just learned a bit more about how AI is helping businesses in your industry.

So I want to link this very quickly to some of the the research that I've been doing. I'm always uh

31:35

furiously researching the macro environment behind the scenes because if I'm going to be giving you guys information, I want to make sure that I'm giving you relevant information given the the macroeconomic context and all the trends that are going on. So, based off a report that I was reading, I'll put it up on screen now so you can

31:51

read it. It says, "The tension between the push to offset slowing labor force growth with automation and the pull to slow automation's rollout to prevent massive disruption will play out over the next 10 to 20 years.

But once the first companies begin deploying new forms of automation, others are likely to rapidly follow suit to stay

32:06

competitive. This ties directly into something that I've talked about a lot before, which is this tech adoption life cycle.

So we have bam, bam, bam, bam. The tech adoption life cycle.

Not to hop on about this over and over. We have the innovators here.

32:23

can ignore them. We have the early adopters, which is where we're selling most of our AI solutions right now.

So early adopters are this segment here. And then we have the early majority which is this big chunk here.

And then we have the late majority which we're not too interested in right now. But we are in the stage in the AI space right

32:39

now. On the consumer side it's a little bit different cuz chat GPT is allowing us to the early majority is getting into chat GPT right now.

But when it comes to business adoption of AI solutions, I can tell you firsthand and from all the thousands of people in my community that we're still in this early adopters category. And this is what they call the

32:55

the chasm, crossing the chasm. So, I didn't really draw it as you would, but there's a there's a gap between early adoption and early majority.

And it's the businesses right now who are able to jump from these early adopters who many of you are probably talking to when you're doing your lead generation, you're making content, you'll be talking to a lot of early adopters in the space,

33:12

who are interested in just trying AI out in their business because they know it's the future and they're willing to experiment and they see where it's going to go. They're not as worried in direct ROI, but more on just being in the front foot.

So they will take a bit of their profits and reinvest it into AI just purely on the potential for what it could do for their business long term.

33:28

But this early majority take a lot more evidence and data. They're going to wait for the early adopters to have a go with it.

Let me know. I want to see some data.

I want to see it actually working and then I'm going to jump in and start using it. So that's what this chasm is.

And this is the information that allows

33:44

you to start tapping in to this early majority. You can say I bought this system for your competitor.

Do you want it? Are you interested in it?

he is or she is an early adopter. you've sold it to this person initially that you've used their money basically to build the thing out and do all the R&D for it and

34:00

now you can go to these early majority and start reaching out to a much broader part of the the business owner population and start sending this these kind of messages where it's hey you are in this category and you need information like this here's all the proof here's how it worked here's a demo of it would you be interested and now

34:16

you are able to start tapping into this much larger chunk of the business owner population or business owner market globally wherever you want niche that down to. But broadly speaking, this section of the early majority is what you're able to tap into.

And that is really what the race

34:31

is on for right now between you, me, everyone else in the AI agency space, the small group of us that are after this opportunity right now. We are gunning for this.

And so if you're able to build a solution for a business that is high value and easy to deliver, you go and find more businesses like that. You start to send messages and let them

34:47

know that, hey, I've built stuff for your competitors. Would you be interested in learning more about it?

you are going to see a sizable increase in the response rate when you are reaching out to businesses. So, I think that's all I want to cover for this video.

I know that's been quite a synthesis of all the different stuff that I talked about on the channel. But if you're new to the channel and you don't know who I am or what the hell I'm

35:02

talking about, then go back and watch my other videos. There's plenty of stuff on the channel talking about this, me in front of the whiteboard, waving my hands around.

But this information is so important for you to understand. If you are looking to do this longterm and scale your agency, as myself and the team at Morningside are doing right now, we are looking to break past that ceiling that we've hit for so long.

And

35:17

to do that, we need to niche down. We've realized that and this is the way that we've done it.

I'm just sharing with you what we do so that you guys can do it in your agency as well and see similar success. So, aside from that, if you've enjoyed, leave a like.

Uh, subscribe to the channel for more videos like this and leave a comment if there's anything that you want me to cover in future. If

35:32

you have any questions about any of this, please drop it down below. If there's good questions, I will go and reply to them.

If it's just rubbish, then I'm not going to bother replying to them, by the way. So, yeah, that's the difficulty value matrix.

That's all for this video. See you in the next one.

Summary

Transcript