Why Starting an AI Agency is the FASTEST Way to FAIL

The fastest way for you to fail in the AI arena is to start an AI agency. Everybody falls into that trap and that dream of having an agency where they're hands off and all the developers are working. The fact of the matter is, until you've put the groundwork in that is going to cause you to fail. Right. I have built multiple seven figure companies. I'm a top 1% freelancer on Upwork with nearly half a million earnings. I understand what it takes to sit on both sides of these fences and I'm going to explain to you and share with you in the next 10, 15 minutes why an AI agency is the wrong approach. This is a step by step guide for aspiring entrepreneurs and tech professionals who are looking to get into the AI space and how you monetize that which is extremely important. Firstly, stop dreaming of the agency now and start building a real business. And by a real business I mean you need to start generating money because everybody's looking at creating an AI agency before they've made a dime on, on, on AI. It's just because it's the wave. There's a simpler, faster, much more efficient way to sell AI workflows. But what that also does is it gives you the capacity to be able to build. If you think about it from a perspective of like this here, the agency trap. So the, the problem is, is that you, the myth is build a team scale fast, make millions. That's that, that's the myth. Higher, higher, higher, fast. Fire fast, get people in and out, find good developers, build up a team, bring on all the clients, make millions. But you're trying to run before you can walk by taking that approach. Okay, right. There's a few key problems with it. You don't have experience. Even if you've built a few flows out already successfully and sold a few, you don't know how to price, scope or deliver projects accurately. Yet you don't understand exactly how you should be able to look at a project and be able to not only quote it based off of work required, but see what value is provided to the business that comes with experience. The margin meltdown then happens where you're paying developers a project overruns, then you're out of pocket, even in some cases where you're at a loss because so you don't understand the numbers properly. And obviously one of the things which is the biggest thing with any sort of consultation slash agency service is client chaos. Client management. Being able to ensure you manage clients effectively is key. And you can't do that until you Understand exactly how you should build, deploy, scope. Well, let's start from the beginning. You know, sell, sell to a, a business, scope a project out properly, quote accordingly, bring them on board and deliver until you know how to do that 100 accurately. You're in a, you're in a massive, you know, you're, you're in a massive black hole. And on the left you can see the trap. You know, bad scoping, bad margins, low margins. They equal unhappy, you know, they, they deliver unhappy. I don't know what I wrote there. Televisions edit that. Unhappy delivery and poor clients. Right? So that is where you, and you know, once you get into that position, you're in a worse position than you are now. Even if you're making money, even if it's profitable, you're in a worse position than you are now. Think about it. Okay, let me just get rid of that. Now. If you think about it like this and you look at the actual, you look at, sorry, you look at the actual process. This is you, right? And you're on your AI journey and in your brain you've got the thought of an AI agency. Right? Agency. Yeah. So you think that building an AI agency from the ground up is the best way you could see. You don't want to learn all the skill sets required, maybe, or you just think that you see the wave and the trend of AI being put into businesses and you think that the agency route's the best route. Well, it's not. Because unless you, unless you can showcase deliverables not only in the form of things such as testimonials. Right, testimonials. And importantly a catalog of already pre built systems. So systems that are in place already, that have actually saved businesses time and money. You're never going to get into a position where you can sell, where you can sell to the volume that is needed to have a big agency, it's not going to be possible for you. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how you know how good you are, how big you think you can, you can get with sales, how, you know, effective you are. Even me with my, my platforms, YouTube, Upwork, you know, my network of individuals, even. I started out as a, and still technically am a, a full time freelancer. And the thing with it is, is that when you get to the agency stage, you should have all of this in place, all of this successfully done. Be able to quote the correct dollar amount at the right time for the right client, for the right project size, take on the right projects instead of, because you'll kiss a few frogs along the way, believe me, you will. You will. You will have a few clients that you shouldn't have brought on, you took on for the money. Maybe it was a small project. You allowed the scope to extend and continue to expand without. Because you wasn't clear initially about what you were going to deliver. You find yourself out of pocket in time. Whereas what you should be thinking about is, you should be thinking about, okay, so the AI wave is going nowhere, right? It's gonna, it's gonna develop, it's gonna improve, and I need to be at the forefront of that AI is gonna be something which powers my future. That you are correct on. You've got that, you've got it nailed. You know that the AI space is it. Well, you need to go out there, okay, and you need to find a multitude of individual people that you've worked with, preferably reputable businesses, some of the ones like I've worked with, like DirecTV, et cetera. And you have all of these people that you can reference, right? And from these people, naturally, with any service delivery, you're going to have feedback and that feedback is going to be positive and it's going to be negative. Even if the outcome was a success and the client is happy, they might say, well, it took you too long to do this. And like, you know, you scoped, you scope, but you missed different opportunities. For us that we'd like you to now revisit everything here, Everything here. Think about a loop node in Nan, you know, everything here comes back to, comes back to learning. So all of that feedback and information, you just continue to run through this, this weight node, right? And you continue to keep learning. And this HTTP request that you've got here, right, this HTTP request that you've got here is consistently getting that feedback. It's pulling the root. And the status is pending, okay? The status is pending consistently whilst all these people tell you what you did well, what you did wrong, how you should have tackled something differently. You take all of that feedback, you turn yourself into a well oiled machine, okay? You turn yourself into a well oiled AI little robot, okay? This is you. You've turned yourself into somebody who can actually scope and deliver projects. And at that point, that's when you look to scale, bring on new team members, partner with people, put yourself in a position where you can actually deliver. And this is the truth of success. The sexier option is the agency seven figure model. Go for it immediately, jump in headfirst. I guarantee that 99.9% of you will fail if you do that. If you take the below approach and take all the feedback, everything is set out, everything is set already. You have your own AI automations. You have literal live client feedback. You have systems in place for businesses that not only you can sell to other businesses, but that no you can run successfully. They, the team tell you how their system integrates with their day. All of that goes through the feedback loop. You end up in a position where you're in a much better position to start then building and looking at how you develop, whether that be a personal brand, YouTube, like what I'm doing now, whether that be, I don't know, running paid advertisements, PPC, LinkedIn, advertising, whatever it is, what it networking, whatever it might be. Once you're in this position, once you get here and this is complete and this cycle has completed itself, that is when you can go to seven figures. Okay? That's the smart path to selling our AI. And now you should do it. Now your journey as a consultant is going to be, I've put it as a three stage path. Realistically there's going to be little rungs of ladders inside of these paths. But as an AI freelancer and consultant, you get paid to learn, build your proof and confidence. Taking on lower paid projects than what you should, you know, charge less than what you should, knowing that the outcome of the delivery and the client feedback, like I've just shown you, is going to be the most, the ultimate way for you to be able to, to understand how to build the AI agency. It's going to make you an AI individual that specializes in what they do and that is critical. Okay, like that's, that's phase one. You have to be able to take a project on and deliver it. Get paid to learn, right? Don't compare your chapter one to someone's chapter seven. Don't look at it like that. Look at it like you're on your own journey, you're running your own race and you need to start here. After that you sell your brain, not just your hands. So you've taken all that feedback and experience and now when you sit down with a business, they explain what their day to day life is. But because you have sat down with a SaaS business before and you understand their ticket in triage systems, because you have sat in that sales call before with that high C suite, you know, I don't know, CEO who handles 50 million a year, maybe they have a bit of an ego, maybe they don't trust AI. There's Many different things that happen in these sales calls that you have to navigate through. It's a little bit like a boxing match, to be honest. Like you have to read the character because people buy people, so you have to be the person that they want to buy from the most, regardless of whether that's the freelancing step or whether that's the, the, you know, the, the sort of consultancy step. But at this point you're solving high value problems for clients, selling bigger retainers, scoping bigger projects. But when you sit down in those rooms because you've handled the smaller projects, you know how to negotiate, you know how to look at flows properly and scope projects out. You know, you know how to go into businesses and audit properly and to be able to give them this full solid output of what they require. That means what that, what that then means is that you're in a position where you can actually look at the, look at the platform and be like, okay, well I've done X, Y and Z previously for all of those, for those, those people that I spoke to you about, you know, 1, 2, 3, 4. Eight times. Eight. Yeah, eight. These, these eight people. Well, now I've got a large corporate firm on the line. Okay, I've got a larger corporate firm, but if I piece together all of these little knots. Think of it of. No, think of it of nodes if you like, all of the feedback loops, all of the systems that you've already delivered, everything, right, all of that, they are passing information right back to one back to you, but back to one another across this end to end to give you a platform where you get on this call with this corporate client, this huge, big corporate. This is meant to be a skyscraper. No idea. Looks more like a church. But you know, you, you get on the call with this big large corporate and actually you can walk the walk. You can walk the walk because you know, all of these little dots together effectively just equate to what this business wants, right? There will be, there's always differences with businesses. When you quote in AI, there'll be things that you haven't touched before. All you, all you do is check out their API documentation, understand what the limitations are when you're scoping and do it for that. You know, it's not a difficult task in that regard. But, but you've got all of these key and core nodes and that's the trick to be able to then go and sell to large businesses and that they pay more money because you solve bigger problems, you save more time, right? And as soon as you have closed two or three of these and delivered two or three of those, that's the time for you to be able to consider moving onto the next stage. You then go to the scale business and only then should you consider building a team and building an entire agency from a position of strength. If you don't build, if you're looking at starting an AI agency before you've been an AI freelancer or consultant, you're going to fail because you haven't taken the necessary steps, built up the catalog, built up all of that feedback loop, built up everything that is required from a, from a business perspective, from an understanding perspective, an experience perspective in order to make you a success that is going to cause you major, major, major problems. And your business will fail. And you will think that it's AI, but it isn't. It was you. And that is just the truth of the matter, right? In all honesty. So when we look at this, the foundation, so you know, when you're looking at the foundation of a freelancer, what I'm telling you here might be, I don't want. This shouldn't dampen the fire that's inside, right? This should light up because you're not downgrading yourself by choosing to be a freelancer first or be a consultant first. That is the three steps. A freelancer, then a consultant, then a large, large company. But don't consider it a downgrade. You're just upgrading yourself as an individual, right? Secure those three to five solid paid projects. You're getting paid to practice and build your playbook. Build out those individual flows. Often, if you do a good job, communication is a big thing. Just communicate with your clients and you'll do. You'll go a long, long way. Even if you're struggling to deliver, communicate with your clients. But you'll have then the playbook, like I've just mentioned, to deliver for the big corporates. Proof of results, tangible case studies, get video testimonials from them, social proof builds trust with people, confidence that you can deliver inside of yourself. Because you're going to question yourself if you're trying to go straight down the agency route. You're going to look at yourself sometimes, trust me, because you're going to. When you on board like three large projects at once, it's daunting. You've got to deliver, you've got to communicate, you've got to speak to all of their individual teams. It's not easy. You have to have been through it before and understand exactly what's happening to Build your own self confidence and that will give you clarity of who you love to work with, why you love what you do and when you love what you do and you're passionate about what you do. You can speak in a manner that is, it's, it's, it's sort of. What's the word I'm looking for now? It's contagious by the client. It's contagious. People can feel it, they can feel your energy, right? And that is where you need to place yourself. So the first client action plan, niche down, find the pain, identify a specific industry and problem, make sure that you, you deliver that. Now I'm on a podcast with Nick Sarayev coming up in the near future and we discuss niching down. And niching down is really important. But I niche down in a funny way. Niche. Well, it's not funny way, it's just different. People think niche down and they think, right, well I want to target plumbers here or I want to target SAS businesses here. I always advise you go high ticket, go for somebody that sells something that's expensive because that obviously your margins and what you can charge as a retainer slash settle fee will be higher. But niching down can also be tech stacks. And that is my approach and I don't know if that's a piece of golden information I'm giving away right there, but I niche down into tech stacks. So like fresh desk, HubSpot, like these different tools, things that I've worked with numerous times previously, right. I niche that, all the data entry stuff, et cetera, all of that is just you learn that along the way. What I'm saying to you though is like CRM zoho, these different things, once you've worked with two clients in a field, it's very, very similar what the next client's going to want. So when I'm looking for clients and speak to clients, it's music to my ears. When they work in specific businesses and from a cold outreach perspective, I hunt them down because I know that I can showcase to them how people have saved time in your first action plan to the client. Build a simple demo show the transformation, not the technology. You won't be able to do that necessarily with things like HubSpot etc, but there are different individual options that you have for building outflows that showcase saving time for a client, invoices, etc. At that stage, pardon me apologies, at that stage you make a no brainer offer and frame in terms of ROI and time savings, not making a Huge amount of money at the time, at that exact moment, deliver document, turn results into sales assets and move on from there. So that's how you find your, your way through because you can niche down, find a pain point, build something out that fixes it, showcase it to the clients, build a simple demo, doesn't have to be anything crazy, just a simple demo of like the main pain point. Make a no brainer offer. We'll introduce it for free. Like you're going from the ground up here. Well, introduce it for free, let businesses take it, trial it for a month, let make them pay for anything like I don't know if they use Appify or whatever, make them sign up for it and, and do it that way but don't be out of pocket. But you can provide value for free. And it's really important when it comes to getting off the ground to do that. I certainly did that in my PPC career and my AI career. Like when I've gone through those faces, I offered free audits. You do this, you do that, you do lots of individual things to get your foot in the door. And it's about, that's exactly what it's about. Whilst learning at the same time. You want to be a steakhouse, not a buffet. Don't say I come. I can automate anything for your business. You just tell me what it is, right and go through it. This section I put in because this is a common theme right from, from people, but I've just sort of kind of skipped ahead to this, this slide because I've explained to you you don't have to pick niches, you don't have to pick e commerce stores, you don't have to pick real estate agents, you don't have to pick SaaS businesses, you don't have to do any of that. You can pick tech stacks. And by picking tech stacks up, what you'll find is a lot of the time is that you have the individual tech stack one and you've got tech stack two. And obviously right now my tech stack list sits at about like 150 because I've done so much work in the, in the field that it means that I have, I have a, I could showcase to you live examples from a lot of individual flows. But then what I'm doing is whenever I'm onboarding a client or looking especially for cold outreach, which is a big one, especially for cold outreach, I'm looking for people that have used these tech stacks. So business number one might have used these three. Okay. Business number two Might use them all, okay? Business number four, business number three, whatever number it was, might only use these two. But I know that I can benefit their business using these tech stacks plus all the basics of sales automation which is something that I strongly advise that you get into. Because every business, every lead gen business can, can do this effectively. If you look at sales automation right as being the way in sales automation is, is something that you can replicate consistently. SMS, email, WhatsApp, right? There are many great tools out there. Closed bot. There are so many tools you can use, you can build them using AI inside of any in themselves. But automating the sales automation right is one of my golden tips to you. Because increasing a business's conversion rate from a sales point of view is something that is, that is critical, right? It's, it's vital. It's like if you do that, the lifeblood of their business, that's the heart that beats. If you have no incoming customers, you don't have a business mate. So their inbound is really important to them. You're going to get a lot of pushback from sales teams and a lot of pushback from CEOs about changing the funnel. So my pro tip is to offer to start with reactivation. So take their old leads, right? The ones that they couldn't get hold of on a consistent basis. If let's say they don't answer the phone for three days like you at that stage we, it's fair to say that you haven't caught them whilst they're really hot. Maybe it's five days. Start the SMS and email automation process, show them the response rate because it will be high if you write the proper content, have a two way agent, that's that. But I didn't mention that I should have done. This is not just SMS marketing, it's two way, two way AI agent. Get an end goal from the business that they want. Do they want a book call, do they want to extract information, do they want them to upload photos, do they want id? Do they want, I don't know, an address, whatever it might be, a license plate number, whatever it might be like you know, car make, model, anything, whatever it is to extract, train the two way AI system to do it and then have it reactivate first before it goes to the sales automation. I'm giving you your ticket to money here, right? I am because this is how I do it. The sales automation is, is critical and the reactivation is what you offer for free. So everything I've just said, I'm proving To you here, this is how you do it. And then as soon as they see the reactivation percentage from a reactivation percentage from a, from a cold lead standpoint, even if they don't go on to close and they say that you, you were too slow, that's you what you take to the business, you take that to the company and you say, hey, listen, like everybody's saying you're too slow. Reaching out to people. Speed to lead is key. Speed to lead is the number one thing in inquiries. By the time you get to them, someone's already spoken to them. That's why you start with reactivation. You find the pain points from the actual clients themselves. You're not making it up and telling them even though you already know or you should already know. Speed to lead is important. You actually make sure that you deliver that from a reactivation point of view. And you'll be surprised by how quickly they want to move that up the funnel when you do so. Yeah, critical. Manually qualifying leads takes 10 hours a week. So you find one specific issue. Answering the same five customer support questions all day, tickets, etc. Click. Things that can be answered. Maybe they've got a knowledge base that they can answer from. That's, that's important when you are pitching and when you are speaking and discussing with clients. Right. Show the destination, not the car. So clients don't buy AI. They buy the results, but they also buy you. And I can't stress this enough, if you cannot speak and you do not have charisma and you lack motivation of being able to sell, you're going to struggle in any industry. And that's an unfortunate, harsh fact. So the good news is, is that you can improve on that with basic practice. You can practice yourself, you can sit down with people you love and practice. You can try to sell AI to them, sell AI to your friends. Get feedback from clients after you've closed them, not before you've closed the deal. Don't ask them how your sales calls went during the sales call, but once they're gone, get feedback, record the meetings, see what you did wrong. When they ask you a question, how did you react? The key is not to blink first. Like that's how I, I found negotiation. Like I don't blink. I'm in a, I'm in a fortunate position where I don't need money so I can take on the right projects at the projects at the right quotes earlier on. You're going to be a bit more flexible than that. I understand. But, but your sales, the way that you show the destination, not the car by showing them, explaining to them the time saved when you have a discussion with them. It shouldn't be, oh, okay, so you want to take leads that are in this Google sheet here and put them into HubSpot and you know, you put them into HubSpot and give them a score, okay, based off of quality of inbound lead, right? Let's just say that's what happens. Leads come into a Google sheet, they then go into HubSpot, but they want them to go into HubSpot and they want to give them a score out of 10, 1 to 10. Let's say that's the flow that they, they sell you. Well, you're not selling the fact that you can do this in five nodes or whatever. Like that's not what you're selling. That's. That doesn't even come into the matter. What you identify is you identify how much time that business is saving or, or you, or using a lack of utilization, however you want to phrase it, you know, wasting. You find out what that is whilst this sand drips in from here, right? And you work out their time saving based off of what you are implementing and you sell them that. You sell them the time. Time is the one thing you can't buy. Now none of us have got any more time. Like in 100 years none of us are going to be here anymore. So you need to sell time because that's what's important to people. This, there's no, you know, there is no, there's no special ingredient when it comes to that. Just focus on selling the solution. Do not jump straight in saying that you can sell AI, you know, etc, you can do this and that. I'll do a separate video on sales, AI sales because I think it's important and I am a very strong salesman so I can show this to you. But I think that when it comes down to this focus of this video sell the destination of what the outcome is going to be, not how you're going to do it specifically and showcase them the benefits for their team and what they're actually going to achieve. How you do that is by framing your offer in terms of clear return on investment. Once you've done what I've just shown you on the other screen, right. Once you've done that, this manual tasks take. This takes you 20 hours a month, 20 hours a week, 50 hours a month, whatever it is, 5 hours a week, whatever it might be. What are your rate of your sales reps of your HRFs of whatever. $50 an hour, 100 pound an hour, 2,000 pound an hour. Whatever it is, depends who you're working with. You're working with high ticket law firms in America or in big cities in Europe. You're paying big money if that. If they have to handle a manual task and you save them that time, well, you lose 20 hours a month, right? You lose 20 hours a month to this repetitive task. Maybe it's like what I just showed you, whatever. 20 hours a month and you, you literally lose a hundred dollars on every, on every one of those. Okay, 20 hours, you lose a hundred dollars. So you are losing 2000, your $2000 a month negative, right? And to go one step further than this, you're $2,000 negative in time. So let me draw another one of my lovely hourglasses. You do, you know, you $2,000 negative in time. But what you also are not countering here is the positive that comes from those additional 20 hours being brought back. The productivity of, of during that period. This isn't going to be really clear for you to read. Sorry, this is the background should have chose a different color. But the productivity, okay, plus, plus the 20 hours of productivity that you hand them back. So they save $2,000 of actual time and they gain 20 hours of productivity. So when you then sit down to them and pitch them the, the solution, not the car, pitch them the time savings, pitch them that you're in a position where, well, my one time solution costs £2,000. You might have one time solution costs £5,000, it costs £8,000. Whatever it is that you're looking at. You break even in one month of my solution and save 22, 000 over. That's not right. Is it? 10, 24,000 over the course of a year. Yeah, 24. That's wrong. Maths is wrong. AI. So 20, 20, 24,000amonth. You. Yeah, it's 24,000amonth over a year you save. The reason that's written that way is because that's like technically year one because the 2000 comes off of it. But when you're in a position where you actually look like year over year over year, you can, you do, I do this regularly. Say fast forward 10 years, you save yourself quarter mil. There's a lot of things you can do with a quarter mil. I, you know, you don't have to worry about paying my 20005000 pound one one off cost plus my 1000 pound 2000 3000amonth retainer to manage it. The higher end of this wouldn't fit into these numbers. But what I'm saying to you is just like that's the, that's the mindset, that is the scope. When you present value in this way, your price becomes an investment on overhead, right? And that is so key. That's. It's an investment. Everything is an investment. Nothing is an overhead. If you're saving them time and then you, if you're saving them time, then that gives you, that gives you the, the scope for growth. As I've documented before, you need to track the key metrics and document the process thoroughly, even more thoroughly than you normally would expect. Go into real detail. Think about comms with clients, think about the emails, think about those times where you picked up your phone, you did something, etc. Think about those things. And then after you deliver, okay, once you deliver, it's just on that, just on that one note of starting here with the errors, time spent. So that's obviously what I was referencing there, where you're looking at stuff, but errors, errors, look at errors. You'll find mistakes, things that you make, things, problems that you, that you, that you have, right? Just, just errors that you've made during, along that journey. After you deliver, measure the exact same metrics, but calculate the concrete return on investment. Measure the same metrics again against what you set out for and what you put together before you started and ask for a testimonial when your client sees the proof that it works. If you don't believe you can deliver an asset to a client that will save them time and make them money and worth what you're charging them, then you're a fraud. So you, you have to be in a position where you can deliver. And that's exactly why you start on the bottom rung like you know you can do it because you go through these phases and that's. Keep doing that. That is not, that is not it. So you now have proof you've gone through the, the, the, the scoping of the landscape. Tell me what you need and I'll build it. That's effectively the freelancer pitch, right? You, you want to input, but you're learning on the job. The consultant pitch is let me analyze your business and design the system that will be perfect to actually solve your biggest problems, if not all of your problems, using AI, right? And no, AI is not a silver bullet. That if you, if you tell a business that AI is a silver bullet, that's going to solve all of their problems, you're going to set yourself up to fail. AI breaks, AI makes mistakes, but you're focusing on the 90% that it gets right, the 95% of it that it gets right. Certain flows will have no issue with breaking. But whenever you're leveraging AI content production, these things, whenever it's producing anything, of course there will be breakages or lack of quality in comparison to a human. So that's where you need to focus. And the consultant pitch changes. This is where you start to go from the $2,000 retainers to building projects for 20k. Right? This is where this happens. You have to be able to get in touch with the higher quality businesses. You keep feeding these in for as long as it takes you to be able to make that transition. But you should be looking to transition at any point. So you know the $500 gigs, the, the, the 1500 dollar gigs, you have to take them to build that experience. But once you've built up enough of that experience, you have to transition to this. And this is where you've got to be brave and you've got to be bold. Do not be afraid of being able to pitch high retainers when you're selling and saving a business a lot of time. Seriously, there are, there are massive opportunities for businesses right now. I don't think I have gone into a business and not been shocked. Some of them tell me that they've adapted AI already. And when I go in I'm like, oh my days. No, no, you haven't, you haven't done anything like AI doesn't exist inside of this company. And that's what, that's why the, the focus should be on selling the solution, not the car. But that is also why you, you can make the shift from freelancer to freelancer numbers to consultancy slash agency based pictures of high value, high ticket sales numbers. If you charge them 20k but it saves them 50k a month in time, then there's no reason why they, they should back out of that. So yeah, that's the mind, the mind, the mind shift. That's the third time in a row you see if we can get it right moving forward. So at that stage your volume has multiplied, you've skipped the agency route, you've, you've gone on the freelancer slash consultancy path that's taking you upwards. You're no longer selling a chat bot, you're selling a 24, 7 lead qualification and sales system. I touched on the sales thing earlier. 1500 pound freelancer pricing per project, consultant pricing, 10,000 pound plus. Like you're getting into big, big Fish pot, big, big pond, big fish ponds. You're fishing in ponds with big fish in it. There you go, right? And that's where you get. You've got the experience to back it up. You've done it, you've got the use cases, you can now go and sell to them. The shift allows you to charge for the massive business outcome, not the hours it took to build. Think logically. The smaller businesses, as a consultant you take on, they're not going to be the same ones that you take on as a professional. Like, once you can move, I say professional like once you're in the consultancy, experienced field that you're going to be talking to different businesses, they're going to expect a better quality of work from you, but you'll have learned that already and you'll have things in the, in the chamber ready to shoot. So you have to have anything to worry about, no fear. Like, you can do this. And this is goes back. I've just put a short out that goes into this, but it goes into mindset about breaking projects down into small individual tasks. This is where your scoping skills come in. This is why you can do it. If you went to, quote, a 30K project now with no AI experience, or you've built two or three flows right, via an upwork application or whatever, right, you're dead because you are not going to be able to scope this properly and you're going to be in deep, deep, deep water with a big company that's going to leave you a terrible review. Motivationally, you are the solution for 99% of businesses. Big firms are booking millions in AI consulting from enterprises. Small and medium sized businesses have exactly the same needs, but they can't afford enterprise prices. So we fill that gap. I fill that gap, you fill that gap. Nick Saraya fills that gap. Nate Hook fills that gap. All the big boys fill that gap. Everybody within this arena does fills that gap and you, you tackle them. And the bigger you get, the more enterprise you get. And that is something that I've learned throughout my career with my other businesses. Obviously you get access to bigger businesses. You get. Once you've got big business on the book and you've scaled them and you've got POS reviews, etc, you're in a position where you are, you know, you're really pressing forward. And yeah, I think, I think that that is key to understand that you are the solution. So no matter where you are in your AI journey now, this is going to be the future. SMBs need this support like they need it, but they can't afford to go and pay 850k to a, you know, to an enterprise firm. So they're looking for solutions from people like you. Your action plan from here. Forget the agency for now. Master the fundamentals first. Start as a freelancer. Get your first three to five wins. Build your proof. Evolve into a consultant. Shift your mindset. Sell higher value ones. Get two to five of those under your belt first. Then you can look on the right next step based off of how you have found that experience to be. Thanks for watching the video. I appreciate your time. I hope that you've seen value inside of this. Your support does mean a lot watching these videos. The next step for you if you hit the like, hit the subscribe button if this has helped you, motivate you along your journey and share your feedback in the comments with me. Let me know what you think to the evolution of your freelancing journey and how you sort of you go through that step. If you are an SMB and you need support, reach out to me. If you are a freelancer or you are a consultant or you are an AI agency that's watching this video and just looking at the overall scope. This is exactly how you should take your journey to leave yourself in the best position possible. You do not go from playing Sunday League football or mini League Baseball to the mlb. And that's exactly how you should look at this. Okay, my name's Michael Elliott. Thanks for watching. Catch you next time.