How I Use AI To Run My $10m a Year Business

Hello, ladies and gentlemen, James Blackwell here, founder of 3 7-figure companies that started from scratch. And in today's video, we're going to be talking about how to leverage AI as your second brain in your business. I teach every single employee in my business to leverage AI because right now, one person can do the work of 3 people leveraging AI. And in today's video, I'm going to show you how we use it. About a year ago, that's when I really started to get deep into AI, and I made our biggest hire yet in the business, a big 6-figure salary I brought on board. And he actually helps run my Agency Blueprint education company, and he is what I'll call our AI guru. Okay, so he's the one that lives and breathes it. Because when I started going down the rabbit hole of AI, I was like, shiny new object, new tools, like, wow. And then I pulled back because I was like, I am making too much money right now to be actually doing this Could I imagine Felix Dennis or Donald Trump, all these big business people working AI themselves? I understood it and I started playing around with a little bit. Then I brought on an expert in the company that I knew could be the guinea pig testing all of the AI tools, coming to me with what works, what doesn't. And then I'm the one bringing the ideas of like, okay, so George, how do we do this? Can we do this in the business? And that's when it first hit for us in the business of how we could leverage that. And obviously we teach that in our programs and we install AI systems and tools into basically all recruitment companies in the US and the UK. And that was the first time around about a year ago. And since then, wow, like so many tools that have come and gone as well that have like Claude's just knocked out of the park with like all of the updates they bring on. So even at the time of recording this, it's going to change all the time. So this isn't going to be like a how-to video on AI or anything like that. I just give you an idea of like my mindset around how we leverage AI into our businesses and how you should be doing this in yours. So I spend a lot of time in Claude personally. So I'll be honest, like I was talking about in a previous video how I have 20 to 25 hours a week where just free, and I see that now I've developed my Claude AI brain where to unpack all of my IP all of the data, the nuances of what I do in the business, how I think, previous transcriptions, sales calls, coaching calls, emails, like everything that's unpacked in a project folder. So there's different parts of all 3 companies, all of the different offers, the fulfillment, the SOPs, the team structure, the P&L, the financials, everything's in there. So then every day I am just— the dashboards are Cloud can create right now are unbelievable. If like I can plug in a spreadsheet of data and I can just clearly see straight away, nicely visual with Claude, that's helping me make more strategic decisions, seeing around the blind spots I can't see myself. One of the prompts I'll always use is, what are my blind spots? What am I not seeing? What am I not doing well right now that I need to do? And what the gaps— it helps with everything, like creating the offers, looking at the ads, my ad copy, my email copy, the offer deck, analyzing my team performance, sales performance, the type of tasks that they're doing in the business, how they can be more efficient. All of these different things are done with, in AI. We leverage a lot with Gamma, for example, for presentations. So like making sure firstly that you have your employees always having Claude and there's more that they can get good with. So Basically, all good employees need to be leveraging this in their day-to-day responsibilities. And I like to get my employees to think like, how can— AI is not going to replace them, but how can they do more work? So I have them mindset of like, how can you do the work of 3 people now? Because that's what I expect. I'll pay them more, they'll get bonuses, the good employees will get well looked after, but they can take on more now. Most of you probably know about AI and are using it. The biggest leverage you can get as a founder is hiring someone in-house fractionally, what we call like an AI expert, or you hire a remote assistant. All of my remote assistants get fully trained on AI tools like Clay, Stackflow, BD Outreach, and Gamma for presentations and social media posts. You can leverage a remote assistant to be the guinea pig to be that AI expert, or hiring someone fractionally that is very good with AI, because you don't want to go down the rabbit hole of learning that every day. It's not going to get you rich. AI can get you rich, but it's selling that as service or implementing it in your team stack so they can get more leverage. And the same for you. So unpacking your brain. One of the things we do for companies we work with in the agency space is help them build out this Claude AI brain of them unpacking all of your IP, all of your knowledge base, the way you run the company, the way you think, unpacking that. We'd normally do that on 3 one-on-one calls and put that into like an AI agent that's going to help you run the business. So all of your employees use that first instead of coming to you direct. They go there first and that brain will get better and better over time. So that's one thing that you can do straight away is leveraging Claude AI brain off you in your business to help you run the business day to day. And that's going to save you so much time. And then secondly is making sure your remote team is using AI to its capacity. So I talked about it again on a previous video of like if you're hiring a remote assistant, for example, that is $10 an hour, Now with Claude and AI and leveraging all of that tech stack, they can do a 3 to 1 ratio. So you're not even really paying them $10 an hour. It's like $3 to $4 an hour because they're able to do the work of 3. So there's never been a better time to do that. But getting them to understand that from day one and getting them trained on AI is crucial and getting them to get better and better with it. So I run 2 recruitment agencies, both 7 figures, and AI is really changing the recruitment industry for sure. So we have around about 250 agency owners that we work with inside our education program, and we help them scale to 7 figures. And one thing that's really working right now is them selling and packaging together AI recruitment systems and selling them into end-user clients. Normally a client that would normally pay 20 to 25% first-year salary fees for finding talent. We walk them through how they package an offer together to embed that into an external client for their hiring process. Never has been a better time if you've been a recruitment agency founder where you unpack all of your IP in a Claude AI brain and the way you hire talent in your niche, package that together with 2 or 3 AI tools and set that up, charge an install fee around about $5,000 to $10,000 depending on the type of install. Then you charge a monthly retainer to manage that process. They're going to save on recruitment agency fees. So then use a client that might have spent $100,000, $200,000 a year on agency fees. From 10 new hires, they could do that with a $5,000 to $10,000 a month retainer and save at least 50% of their agency fee price. And you are gonna be the one capitalizing on that. So there's never been a better time now leveraging AI, and it's a great hook. Your ads are cheap because anything that you put AI on, people want to download workbooks, cheat sheets, templates. A lot of our ads that are run around like Claude AI, our cost per leads come down massively and we're getting great leads in for really cheap. But embedding that into an end user company, companies know of AI, but they don't know how to put the system together to build it as a hiring system to hire talent. That's a multi-billion dollar industry. You being that consultant to advise them on what to install and manage it for them as a managed service without having to deliver the candidates. So actually doing the full end-to-end recruitment process, that is going to be the biggest leverage for most agency founders right now. It's not just in the recruitment agency space that we help with. I've got friends walking people through how to sell AI solutions into end user companies. So like the agency model right now, leveraging AI. So first thing you need to do is learn AI, either hire a fractional AI expert into your business or have someone that is good at it. You need to just learn the foundational piece and to be able to package and sell it and then making sure you've got someone to do that. Hire someone remote offshore that can learn it from that AI guru and they take that knowledge base and the knowledge base from you and then they're the ones that can do the delivery for $10 an hour and you make a big margin on them when you're selling them into companies. And then the kicker that works really well, particularly in recruitment agency space, because that's predominantly my expertise, is you package together the AI hiring system with an offshore remote recruiter. So like most of them in South Africa that we place that are trained up to do video outreach, voice note follow-ups, and BD outreach. So that's still a real human. So you're mixing AI and automation with an actual real human that's offshore. So it's a lot cheaper. Put them together. And you sell that as a solution, that is the thing that's working really well. So we've got a lot of clients that we help partner with doing this that are making $1 million to $2 million a year recurring revenue by implementing that exact solution. In my opinion, there's never been a better time to build a lean 7-figure business in the agency space because of AI. Like now there is no excuse for people to get to $10-20K months and scale up to $100K months. There's never been a better time because you've got so much leverage. Talked about at the start of the video with like the 3:1 ratio as a minimum. Like your one employee should be doing the work of three now leveraging AI. Secondly, not every business owner will be able to understand what AI and the capacity that it can do. So there's so many older business owners or companies that need it, but they don't know how to use it, package together that service and knowledge base and start selling that as a solution. So you could easily scale up to $100K a month quite quickly without having the traditional team of 12 or 20. You could get to $1 million to $2 million a year easy in your agency with having a lean team of 5 to 6. Forbes talked about having that first billion-dollar business with the company of one. That's definitely true of having a million-dollar-a-year business with one person. And when I say one person, you as the founder, maybe having 2 or 3 remote assistants. It's very different than having onshore, in-person employees, but leveraging that with AI and what it can do, never been a better time. I remember when I started my first agency 11 years ago, there was none of this building lists, buying data, buying emails, trying to find companies, trying to automate things. There was nowhere near the leverage that you can get right now. So there's no excuse. There's going to be more competition, but it's going to make people lazy as well. Now that brings me on to the question of, is it going to replace all employees? No, it's just going to be replacing the companies that aren't leveraging things. And the good employees that bring AI in their toolset themselves to use it, like I said, the 3:1 ratio, they're going to be able to do way more. And AI doesn't do everything. So you'll see, particularly on LinkedIn, I've just replaced my entire team with Claude AI with these agents. Most of those agents don't even work. And it's just a great hook to get leads. So I wouldn't be worried too much about like, is it going to replace all humans? No, it's not. Like, it's just going to replace the ones that are lazy that aren't adapting to it. But you still need a human to do the delivery with AI. So that's why I was saying about having that offshore person that does the video outreach and the messaging with AI. That's the blend that I think works because people still want human connection at the end of the day, particularly in service-based businesses. A company is still going to need to deal with you and your delivery team in order to use your service. If you're using AI in the background, that's fine, but they'll still need front of house. They'll still need people that are going to be delivering and overseeing and managing it. So that's where the biggest opportunity right now is. Not using that as a threat, use it to your advantage. So maybe right now, if you're an entrepreneur, you run an agency, or you want to run an agency, click a link below in our AI Talent Partner Model where I'll walk you exactly through how you can easily scale to $20K, $30K, $50K, sometimes $100K a month. By selling AI solutions as a service. Check out the link below if you're interested in hiring a remote assistant. There'll be a link below, and I'll catch you next Sunday on the next video.