Case Study: Using AI to Add 20k MRR While Working 30 LESS Hours Per Week

All right, what's up everybody? Got my boy Nick Yates here and he joined AI-assisted agency and he was able to add pretty much an additional $20,000 a month to his agency's revenue roughly like 3 months or so. And I want to have him on to talk about what he's doing and kind of his whole journey because he's been in this for like 10 years at this point. He could probably give everyone watching this like an understanding of like how to go about this and really not make any missteps that maybe he made. And before we get into it, just disclaimer for everybody, the probability that you make any money doing any of the things that we talk about here is pretty much close to zero. To make this much money is pretty like insane of a feat. But yeah, Nick, how are we doing, bro? Welcome on.

Good, man. Happy to be here. Excited to talk to you.

Could you let everyone know, like, what's your business? What do you sell? And kind of like walk us through the journey of like what's kind of happened here and how you've got to run like $40K a month now.

Yeah. So my business is more of a boutique e-com email marketing agency. My whole goal was never to have 100 clients with 100 team members. So we're much more on the boutique side, higher retainers, that kind of business model. Typically higher quality clients is the goal. That's kind of how my business started about 10 years ago. I started the classic route, like I was a copywriter, went into basically any kind of direct response marketing copy, and then slowly just found my way into email marketing and then the retention side of things as well.

Now you were in Client Ascension a long time ago, so this is before like AI even started being a real big thing, and then you left for about a year, and then you came back after we launched AI-Assisted Agency and it started like really leaning into the AI angle. Could you walk us through like what happened during that that year break and then why you came back and kind of what happened with all that?

Did about, I think, literally a year of Client Ascension, and then it was ironic, I think I almost rejoined the day that I left one year later. Like, it was almost exactly 365 days. It was pretty weird. My coach called that out. I did my first year and average results that were 100% on the phase of agency owner I was in. I was pretty much stuck in the fulfillment phase and couldn't get past that on my own, so ended up stopping Client Ascension, and then everything kind of hit the fan, for lack of a better term. So within 90 days, I lost about 80% of my recurring revenue. As I mentioned, we have larger retainers, so losing 2 or 3 clients was a pretty big blow to us. Got down to under $10K a month at one point, actually, and just kind of scraped and clawed my way back. And during that time, really went through it just mentally as an agency owner and really realized I was just kind of on an island and needed the Client Ascension kind of group. You know, it sounds cheesy, but like missed everybody in the group, missed the coaches, the accountability, that kind of thing. To where I could just hop on a call and talk through mindset. I can hop on a call, talk through sales coaching. I can message my coach in Slack and like just have somebody say like, hey, am I doing the right thing? Like, that was kind of something that I had to push my own ego aside and figure out and realize just you need the accountability, you need a group like this. And then the AI side of things was like the tipping point for me. Immediately upon rejoining, started moving out of the fulfillment phase. Like this time around was really where I moved into an operator role for the first time in my agency. Like I was fully removing myself, like going into operations stuff with Andre and the other guys. I mean, chatting with you on offers, you know, just really everybody working with David on the sales side of things and then all the AI stuff. I mean, between Lucas and all the other AI coaches, that was just completely eye-opening for me. Like I didn't know what I didn't know. That was the biggest thing with AI. Like use a prompt and talk to ChatGPT. It's like, no. Yeah. And we are now creating full-blown agents and I pretty much have no clue what I'm doing with AI, but it's working. And, you know, like, it's crazy what we can do now. So it's been a revelation to the entire agency space and me specifically.

Are you spending like a significantly less amount of time on fulfillment right now?

Zero time on fulfillment outside of my own outreach. So went through the hiring process. Forgot to mention Connor on the email side. He is the one call that I never miss every single week. I mean, I've been standing in an airport terminal like trying to hear him on the calls. Like, he's incredible on the email side. Like, to have somebody that's 100 times the size of your agency that I can just hop on a call with and ask questions is crazy. That was kind of where like he's like, all right, you need to hire X, Y, and Z at this rate and these are your margins you need to hit. And just really laid out the path for me. And then the AI side, like I remember Lucas just saying like, take a day, document everything you do, and then just start asking AI how to do this and build agents for that. And that was like literally the two-step process.

What kind of AI stuff have you got built? Like what's really saving you a bunch of time?

The big thing that happened, which anybody in the e-com email space will see, is like the repetitiveness of emails. In this with AI, the outputs. So for me, it was creating agents that actually pulled from a massive swipe file of the top brands' emails. So that's one thing that I built that was completely unique. So I have an image file and it basically has hundreds of swipe files in it. Like, it cannot give me an output without referencing some kind of swipe file. So the first thing it does is you'll see it like thinking, you know, whatever. Like I said, I'm not an expert, but like you'll see it thinking in Claude and it's telling me each swipe file it's looking at and it's trying to find the perfect fit for the thing that we're writing about. So that's like the big thing. Yeah, output-wise. And then the rest was like outreach for me, like figuring out like scaling Dream 100 for me is a big one. Targeting niches. I mean, that one video that you did a while back, like just to find like, I don't remember exactly how you phrased it, but just the more obscure niches, like, yeah, I'll just say like I talk to supplement brands. It's like, yeah, that's what everybody in e-com space wants to do, you know? But it's like more niche stuff to where it's, it makes outreach a little easier because you're not e-com email marketer number 74 that day in their inbox.

Before you were using AI in your fulfillment side, was it for you to service a client? Would it literally be like you sitting there like coming up with what to say with every individual email for every individual client continuously?

Yeah, before AI, I mean, you're talking a fast copywriter, probably 30 minutes an email maybe. Obviously I'd done it for 8, 9 years at that point, so like I was pretty quick, but not at this scale, not at this level of like, give me 20 unique angles for Mother's Day for a golf apparel brand. Like, no, I'm not just gonna spit that out, you know.

Were you spending like, with like 10 clients or so or something, I would imagine you were spending like legitimately maybe like 6 hours a day on just fulfillment?

Well, that was 100% of my time. Unscalable at that point. Complete bottleneck. Like, you always talk about like bottleneck thinking and constraints and all that. Like, that was 100% my bottleneck. I was doing fulfillment stuff all day. And that's not answering Slack, that's not emergencies, like, you know, or getting new clients, doing sales, the other thing.

So how much are you spending on average per day or per week on client fulfillment now compared to before?

I have no time on that now. So I mean, I monitor Slack, I hop in Figma and just, you know, make sure the designs are looking good and all that. But my time is spent making my team better and in any way and basically on outreach or optimizing our agents. Like if I see something in our email outputs that are happening, then I'll go in and help the agents and all that. But pretty much no fulfillment right now.

So before it was you coming up with all the emails, doing all that. Now you've got somebody managing that, but they're managing an AI system, right? So they're an AI-assisted employee, correct? Yeah. Okay.

So it is the system that I built passed over to them via Claude Code. So we're actually operating in the same system, which is cool. So previously we would have Claude projects and anybody working in those, like It's prompt-based, like you have your instructions. Well, you know, we got to 7, 8 clients. We had a strategist which would give an email brief and then a copywriter. That's 2 per client with prompts, 30-page-long prompts. So we're talking every time something would go wrong, I'm updating like 16 to 20 different prompts. It's the thing. So now it's like global, like, hey, stop using em dashes for the last time, you know, like that kind of shit. It's like, cool, globally we will never do this again. Awesome. Just like 10 seconds where that would take me hours beforehand. And then the other thing too is like we're using— is it GitHub? I don't know how to say it, but like like that as the repository together. So I don't have to say, hey, I updated 18 prompts, go update your Claude. You know, that's how it used to work with a team. So much, much better now.

What I've learned here with the AI system is the, the swipe files you're using, is that automatically populated from brands that you monitor, or do you like choose which ones to put in there?

Not yet. I want to get to that point. It's not good at like scraping, like they're very really good emails.com, milled.com, they block it hardcore. So I'm sure somebody smarter than me has figured that out. But yeah, it would be cool to have like, hey, monitor these 10 brands and then pull in their most recent emails, you know.

Before it was you sitting there doing client work for legitimately 6 hours a day. I would probably want to shoot myself if I was doing that. Now, with all that additional time, what are you doing instead? And if it's like purely personal stuff, like that's completely fine.

No, I mean, honestly, a lot of it is like, I'm honestly still learning what to do with the extra time because it's like my gut tells me like, okay, go in and like review emails and look at the designs. Like, no, like you have to look like identify the current constraint or bottleneck, work on that, then move to the next thing, you know. So right now for me in this phase, it's dialing in my outreach. Like, that's the main thing that I'm working on is I'm focused on Dream 100 right now, dialing that in, making it perfect, and getting to the point where I'm generating, you know, more sales calls is the main goal right now.

Earlier today I was like, you know, I don't know what to make a YouTube video on. So I go into Claude Code. There's this other service that has like a YouTube API. So I give it my API key for that. I was like, go scrape every single video I've ever done. Give me the full transcript of the video, analyze every single one of them, and tell me what I should make a video on right now. I just filmed 2 YouTube videos before this. What was my issue today? My issue is that I didn't know what to make a video on. The generation of the idea was a bottleneck here. As somebody who does creative stuff for a living, like obviously you do, you probably understand that like you hit a block and it's like you try to like push through that and anything you make is just dumb.

Yes.

Like you could write the email, you could film the video, you just don't know what— you can't like pull it out of your head. But it's like AI just pulls it out for you and just makes it so easy and smooth and it's better existence.

I feel like what you're saying is like now it's like on demand and where it used to be like you had to have like that little spark and you're like, oh, get out your notes app and like, here's a video idea or here's an email idea. That's how it used to be for me. It's like I'd go on like a walk, you know, and like, oh, that's a good idea, you know, or I'd try to record some stuff and like, you know, now it's like on demand. Good ideas are better ideas, I should say, actually.

Let's go back like a year ago when you were spending like 6 hours a day in fulfillment. What would comparing the stress level to that at like half the revenue you are now versus the stress level of you being double that revenue right now?

A year ago, probably like a third of where I'm at now, to be honest. Like it was kind of that like $10K stuck, couldn't scale mark. I mean, stress levels were high. Especially because like back then, I mean, like I mentioned with the bigger retainers, I mean, we hovered around like 3 or 4 clients. So you lose a client, it's like a fourth of your revenue. If it's like the biggest client, it could be like 30, 40%, you know? So yeah, significantly less stress levels. I mean, and for me too, like I'm a new dad, got a kid that's about to turn 3 and another one on the way, you know? Like it's that kind of stuff. I mean, you naturally are, feel as the provider whenever you lose a retainer, it's like, holy shit, you know? Like I'm a failure. Life is over.

And every agency guy knows how that goes whenever you lose a big Where do you see yourself going in the next, I'd say, 6 months from now, knowing what you know and like just the trajectory of how you feel like you're getting more competent in AI? Like, where do you think you can be in 6 months from now?

For me, like, grew my agency doing good work and getting referrals and having organic presence. I haven't even tapped into the cold outreach stuff, which is really you guys' specialty. So like, that's crazy to me. I mean, you could easily double in, you know, 6 months. I mean, my next goal is 50, and then, I mean, there's no reason that we can't get close to 100 with a small team is still kind of my like side goal because freedom is like the underlying thing for me. Like, I want to go golf on like literally in 3 hours, I'm going, you know. I want to have time where my daughter knocks on the door, I'm like, cool, let's go play in the treehouse, you know. Like, that's my goal in life. Like, I'm older than a lot of these guys. Like, I just turned 37, you know. So that's really what I optimize for is freedom. That's the main underlying goal while also scaling. So I'm excited to get into the cold stuff too.

If you were giving advice to somebody who's maybe $0 a month and they're just getting started, or even up to like $5K or $10K a month, what would you tell them as a piece of advice to get to where you are.

I mean, everything's, you know, cheesy, but everything's a lesson that you learn, you know. But I took too long to hire, and I took too long to really find the people ahead of me and adopt what they're doing. I— finding, like I mentioned, like somebody like Connor, for instance, and just literally doing what he does and just listening to him, that was a huge part of what I did to scale my agency. That is one thing, like, there are so many coaches, it can get, like, overwhelming at times because we do have so much help in this group. If they're coming into the group, choose 2 or 3 coaches and just listen to them. Like, if you're an email guy, then why would you you not listen to the guy? It's kind of like that. But that's kind of where I would go with things is like hiring sooner once you can so that you can move out of fulfillment as quickly as possible, like once you know what you're doing and then just figuring out somebody and following the same path that they did, at least to get started.

Nice. Sounds good, bro. Appreciate you coming on. Anybody who wants to connect with Nick, I'm going to leave the links to all this stuff in the description. And if you'd like to join AI Assisted Agency, that will also be in the description. You can come join us and hopefully get results like him. Appreciate you coming on, bro.

I mean, thank you.