How I Built A $500k/mo AI Agency

Starting an AI agency in 2025 is by far one of the most profitable opportunities in business today. And most of the people that are teaching you how to start an AI agency on YouTube today have never even done it themselves. And if you mess up on just a few things, it could cost you years of your life and hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost opportunity. Which is exactly why I'm making this video. I currently do around $500,000 a month to selling AI and marketing to business owners. But I only got here by making just about every mistake imaginable. So in this video, I'm going to cut through all the noise and give you the straightest path to building a profitable AI agency in 2025. All right, so we're going to go ahead and dive right on in. Here's a screenshot that shows we did $495,000 this month. Here's a couple other screenshots. And there's also some wire transfers and. And other payment processors that total up to the full number. So you can trust that what I'm telling you in this video is actually working right now. I don't have a course to sell you. I make my money from actually doing this stuff, and I'm just passing it along to you guys because ultimately, I want to be able to help some people out and also build up an audience by giving value. So what we're going to be covering in this video is the best business model to start when it comes to selling AI. What. What niches to target and how to ultimately pick a niche, what you should actually be selling to these businesses, how to go out and get clients, and how to scale to $100,000 a month and beyond. So let's dive in. Cool. So you've probably heard or maybe even potentially tried to sell some of these different AI products or services or whatever you want to call them, right? Setting up automations, doing voice agents, chat bots, AI agents, whatever. I'm going to show you guys what I actually believe is the best one. But these are some of the most common ones. Now, the way that you need to be thinking about this is it's not actually about the AI. Okay? Fundamentally, what we're doing is we have an agency and we're simply just using AI as part of the service delivery. Okay? When you slap some fancy name on it, like AI agency or, you know, whatever, there's like a new acronym every single. Every single month. At this point.

It'S just ultimately to put more sizzle on the stake. But in all Reality, you are doing a service based business or an agency. And the number one rule of an agency or any service based business is that we are always paid a percentage of profit for every business that we work with. Do not ever forget this. You are always going to be paid a percentage of profit for the businesses that you work with. Meaning if the business is making low profit, guess what? You're gonna make a low amount of money. If the business is making high profit and you're contributing towards it, your earning potential is much higher. Okay. The other thing too is this is always gonna be either indirectly or directly. So directly would mean like you're on a profit share or a revenue share or some sort of percentage based model where that's how you're getting paid. Okay? Okay. So even if you don't have a performance based structure in terms of how you're charging your clients, you're still indirectly being paid a percentage of the profit the business makes because that's all the money they have to pay you. Okay. And I'll tie this all back in just a couple moments. So we can only charge somebody a percentage of the time or money that we either make or save them. Okay. That's very important to remember and it's going to be a key element of how we ultimately decide what business to start. Ok. Okay. So there's essentially two different paths or models that you can take. You can be an efficiency agency or you can be a growth agency. Okay, I'll explain what those mean in just a second. Okay, so this is essentially what efficiency looks like. Efficiency basically means that we are saving a business either time or money and then we are capturing a percentage of the savings that we save them. Okay, so here you can see on a graph, if let's say that this is the amount of sales they're making, we're not directly contributing to them making more sales. However, what we are contributing to is them cutting their costs. So this gap right here of let's say you install some automation that saves them this amount of money. Well, you can charge a percentage of this, of what you save them. Right. People aren't going to pay you more than what you're saving them because they'd be losing money to work with you. So you're always going to be charging a percentage of this. All right, that's key and important to remember. All right. Now with efficiency agencies, you're saving the business money, time or money and improving efficiency. Okay. This could be reducing overhead, automating repetitive tasks. Some examples of this could be like Creating a customer service automation bot, something like that, right? Or an onboarding automation so that it's easier for them to hire employees. Or bookkeeping would also be an example of an efficiency service. Right? You either have growth services or efficiency services. And efficiency services are good, but the problem is the, the amount you can earn is capped. Usually these are going to be actually easier to fulfill on because in some ways it can take less skill, like to be a bookkeeper. It's a repetitive task. No one's ever gonna fire their bookkeeper. Like as long as they're in business, they have to keep the same. You still have to have bookkeeping done no matter what. So the positives of this is oftentimes it's a very simple service to do and it's, it's a high stick rate, right. If you set up a customer support automation and they're continuing to be in business, well, they're gonna need you to continue to man that automation and make sure that it's working properly. But it's not like that's gonna increase their profit a ton. So you're not going to be getting that much money for setting that up, right? It's like if it saves them 50 grand a year, they might pay you five, okay. Or maybe 10. Right. But it's not like, you know, they're going to be paying you tens of thousands of dollars every single month to, to do something like this, right? Same thing with onboarding. So with efficiency, you're, you're cutting their costs or saving them time and you can capture a percentage of what you save them. Very simple. Okay? Now growth is a little bit different. With growth, you're coming in and you're basically driving more sales or driving more revenue. So we're not necessarily decreasing their costs, we're increasing their, their revenue. Okay? So here, if you look, we can charge a percentage of this gap, right? We're going to be able to take a percentage of the amount that we increase their profit. Okay. This is going to be the extra money that they're going to be able to pay us with.

As you can see, this is, this is wider, right? This gap is wider. So we can usually earn more when we're driving growth as opposed to when we are helping them save time or money. The other thing here to remember is you can drive growth infinitely up, but you can only bring costs down to zero, right? You can only bring costs down to zero. That's the hypothetical max in terms of how much you can reduce costs. So with a growth agency, you're making the business more money by driving revenue, you're either going to be attracting customers or making those customers worth more. So remember, it's not about AI, it's about how are you accomplishing either of these things and then what AI tools are you using to do it. So don't lead with AI when you're thinking through this, Think through what are you accomplishing for the business. Okay. That is what. That's why I'm going through this, this exercise with you guys. Example, lead generation sales agency marketing automation that, you know, increases the share rate or a marketing automation that, you know, gets more of the abandoned carts to purchase, for example. So with growth, you're driving more revenue. With efficiency, you are saving them money or time. All right? Now I like to always be in a business where I'm selling $100 for $10 makes it very easy to sell. And it also means that I can charge a lot more. All right? Because.

If I can increase the amount that they're making, I can take a percentage of what they're making. So just wanted to kind of implant these ideas into your head. So there's basically three options that we can do. We can provide a service to businesses that either.

Here we go. Hold up. What's going on with my slides? There we go. We can provide a service to businesses that either a, increases the amount of sales they're making. Right. Decreases their costs, or both. In an ideal world, we're going to do both. And that's essentially what I call the hybrid model. Okay, so you come in, you're driving more sales, more revenue for the business, but simultaneously, because of different automations you're introducing, you're also cutting their costs, saving them time. So basically, instead of the gap just being here. Right, and the gap, when I say the gap, I'm talking about, you know, the money we can charge. Instead of it just being here or instead of it just being here, it's actually both. Right? It's both because we're able to take a percentage of the amount that we're increasing, but then we're also cutting their cost. So now they're making more money, which means that they can pay us more money. And that's the whole idea. Okay, so how do we do that? Well, this brings me to what I believe is the best AI business model, which is ultimately lead generation plus automation. The reason why is because it's a hybrid model. It allows you to bring more revenue to the business, you make them more money, while you also can improve their efficiency, which means you're saving them time and money. The other thing too is lead generation basically gets your foot in the door and then the automations are other things you can sell on the back end. So let me explain. When's the last time you've ever heard of a business that's just sitting around thinking about how they need to install some automation? It is currently not a service that people are actively looking for. They like the idea of AI. They know they need AI, but they're not like going out of their way to say, hey, I need this automation. Unless somebody's already thinking in that way. Then maybe they're saying, hey, I should, I need these automations built. But most businesses aren't thinking I need to go buy an onboarding automation, right? But they are thinking I need more leads and I need more sales. So what this allows you to do is you can basically come in with the leads. It's like, hey, we're going to help you get leads and then we're also going to install all this other stuff to make your business better and more efficient. Right? So that's the key. That's what we, that's what I found works the best and that's ultimately what allowed me to scale to. We're going to break $500,000 this month and goal is to be at a million a month by the end of the year. So this obviously works. So let's talk about the best niche. A little bit of an interesting photo here, but this is essentially what, this is the position that you want to be in, okay. You basically want to be like at a point where you are talking to a niche that is not technologically advanced, right? Like you wanna be the one that shows fire to cavemen. Okay? You wanna, like when you do a demo or explain something to your clients, you want them to think that you're a wizard, okay? That's the type of niche that you wanna be in. So what that actually looks like is we want things that are very high margin services or very high margin products. They're stuck in the past and a lot of their technology is not caught up. And then also they sell something extremely high ticket. Okay? The reason why, and obviously you can see some examples, I'll address these in just a second is for example, let's say we are helping somebody sell something that costs 500 bucks, okay? The, the, the cost to acquire a customer has to be so low for them to be profitable that it puts a lot of pressure on us as a, as a lead generation service, right? There's so much pressure on us as a lead generation service. If they're selling something for like 500 bucks or even a thousand bucks, okay? Because if you're not getting their costs under a certain amount, they're not making that much profit. And if the lead cost goes up, the clients are gonna be freaking out and they're gonna be, you know, upset at you because they're not making money. Whereas if you serve somebody that sells something for, you know, thousands of dollars or tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, you know, they could spend ten grand, get no sales. But they have promising deals in the pipeline and once those deals close, all of a sudden their return is like 50 to 1. Okay? This is one of the biggest things that I had to learn is when I started off, I was selling to people that were, you know, selling like higher ticket than like 50 bucks, but you know, never like sub $5,000. Okay? And so with, with their business model, if they weren't getting a customer for under like 200 bucks, they weren't profitable. So you want to take the pressure off of yourself. For example, people that sell to like construction companies. Well, construction company can get one big job and it makes them like $50 million, you know what I mean? And so if they're paying $100 a lead, they don't care. And that's, that's what you want to look for. So I went ahead and I created some examples of niches that are good. And these are all going to be niches that are in the past technologically. So when you show them something that, you know, you or I might think is simple, they're going to be very, very impressed by it. It's going to be huge for them, right? High margin, high ticket services. And that's what all of these are. So for example, recruitment agencies, real estate agencies, roofers, basement finishers, right? Like basement, you need to get your basement done. Could be like 20 grand. H vac. Construction companies, financial advisors, insurance agencies, divorce lawyers. God, they make a killing. Personal injury lawyers, right? You guys get the picture. So I'll show you guys an example of how I would potentially look at structuring a service if I picked one of these niches. So let's say for example, I was going to go and serve orthodontists, alright? So I did a little bit of research and here's what I found for orthodontists.

All right? So their average sale, like to get braces on average is about 5,500 bucks. So check that looks Good. Usually their cost of goods sold, meaning how much it cost them, the materials and everything to put the braces on, is like 500 bucks. So they're marking it up by like 10x, meaning that their gross profit per sale is sitting around $5,000. That puts us in a very good spot. Even if it cost us 1000, you know, to 1500 dollars for them to get a client, they're still wildly profitable. Right? So the average orthodontist is going to be doing like 15 to 25 new clients a month. This is just from my research with Chat GPT, which would put their monthly revenue at around $110,000 a month. And that will put their profit again, this is just a rough estimate at like 45 grand a month. So if a business is making 45 grand a month and you have the skill sets to come into their business, generate them more leads, get them more customers, you could very easily sell something for, let's just say, hypothetically, $5,000 a month. Right? Because again, they're making roughly $5,000 per client. If they pay you five grand a month and you're able to come in and get them like, you know, let's say instead of 25 clients, you get them 45 clients. Yes, that says 45. That's a very, very positive trade for them. Right? That's, that's wildly profitable on their end, and it makes perfect sense for them to do that. And then also if you're able to go in and decrease their costs and solve their other problems with AI now all of a sudden you could have a client that's paying you 10, 15, even $20,000 a month. So let's look at an example with orthodontist. So I went and did some research. Some of their struggles are, you know, getting consistent new patients. We solve that with lead generation. No. So no shows and consults that don't convert. We can install an AI automation or pass them down. Some of the best practices to get people to show up to appointments, competing with clear aligner alternatives, outdated operations and staff inefficiencies and struggles, closing patients at high ticket prices because of people being broke. So what we could do here, I just, like, literally, this is just research. What are orthodontist struggles? And then I could start and kind of add these services on. So what I would do is I would use Facebook's AI to target financially qualified leads. So I could have a survey where I asked them, you know, and get some financial data. I could use a service like Lead Fi to Financially qualify the leads that come in, and then only send the qualified people back to Facebook, which would then mean that my pixel would start to optimize for qualified people. I can make a tutorial that explains how that works. And then what I could also do is start to build automations that would help them reduce the no shows and improve their show rate. Right. And then I could also help them create value content. I could, you know, put together a PDF using AI that basically educates patients on why braces are better than like the Invisaligner stuff. See, like, I can do all of these different things, but I would get the client in with like lead gen and growing their business. And then I'm adding on all these additional AI services. Right. Again, this, this brings me back to what I was talking about in the beginning. It's not about selling AI. It's about finding a business or a niche, figuring out what their problems are and then solving those problems efficiently using AI. Right. If it's more efficient to have a human do it, just have a human do it. If it's more efficient to have an AI do it, have an AI do it. You're just solving problems. And AI is simply a mechanism to solve problems that in a lot of instances, not all, is the most efficient way to do that. Okay, so here is how that might look if I were to start setting up, you know, funnels for people that are orthodontist. So I could run Facebook ads and Google Ads to a landing page, and then I could build up text and email automations and then hire an appointment setter. Or, you know, I could have a, a voice AI call to confirm the appointments, get them to book on the calendar, have more SMS emails and reminders to get the person to then show up and close. So this is obviously just an extremely oversimplified version of what this funnel might look like if I was setting this up for orthodontist. Okay, so one more thing that I want to add before we jump into how to get clients. Whenever you go into a niche, most people, they think about this completely the wrong way. They think about what's the best service to sell, right? Oh, should I sell automation? Should I sell appointment settings? Should I sell voice agents? Should I sell chat bot? Should I sell. Don't think that way. All right? What you need to think about is find a niche. Like, if you go into orthodontists, you should start going, talking to all of your clients, talking to orthodontists. Go to orthodontics conferences, and just talk to people and figure out what their problems are. All right? This is what I've done in my industry. I serve financial, financial services and financial professionals is I'll go to, you know, probably two to three conferences a month on, on average. I'll talk to people, figure out what their problems are. I'll get clients there. And I'm just learning every single thing I can about my industry. So if some brand new SMMA kid comes into my industry, I'm already, I refer to it as balls deep in the market. They're not. They're good. They have a long way to catch up. And that's the exact same thing that you want to do as well in your market. So once you find a niche, you need to like really immerse yourself in that industry to learn everything about it. Okay. You're going to learn who's making the most money. You're going to learn where all the opportunity is and you're going to learn, most importantly what all the problems are and how you could potentially solve those either using AI, automation, whatever it is. Okay? So again, lead, find a niche and then create the services that they need as opposed to like, oh, I'm going to go sell this service to this niche. Okay, I can say this. Every single business needs lead generation. So if you start with lead generation to get your clients, that's going to get you into the niche and then you're going to branch on and you add on other services that you sell to those clients because it's easier to sell lead gen on the front plus AI in the back. Okay? So that's all I have to say there. Now let's go to talking about how to get, how to get clients. And I've never seen anyone kind of address it and do it this way. This is what worked for me. And if I had to start over, this is literally exactly what I would do if I were to go to any niche, any new niche, and starting from scratch. Okay? So the first thing that you have to do, you must do is you need to get a solid case study as soon as humanly possible. I cannot stress that enough. Okay. When you have a case study, it makes everything a thousand times easier. Okay? Now if you can get people to pay you to get your case study, great. But, but I would rather work for free. Get the case study if. And get the case study if it's going to be faster. Okay. It's easier to get someone like convince someone to let you work for them for free and then get the case study than it is to try to sell something that's unproven to people and then get a case study. All right? So the reason the case study is so important is because it gives proof and evidence to your service. People are so.

Averse to being burned, right? Like, they're so averse to being burned. Even at my company, we've been around for going on four years now. We have tons of positive reviews, tons of. Of, you know, like, we have a very good reputation in the industry. Even still, we get tons of skepticism. And so if you're brand new, if you're just starting out, you have no track record, no one that will vouch for you, nothing. It's gonna be 10 times harder than if you get an initial case study and then leverage it to get paying clients. Okay? The other thing to consider as well is when you start and you go out, I mean, you're probably not that good, to be honest. Like, you probably kind of suck at whatever you're trying to do, which is cool. We all start off in that situation. But the faster that you can get good, and you basically are testing. You're using someone as your test dummy, and they're funding the ad spend for you to go out and get good. Okay? That's just kind of. That's the best way to do it that I found by far, for sure. And I didn't actually realize this. I kind of, like, accidentally stumbled into it. But once you get that first case study and then makes all the other sales come that much easier. So you get the case study, and then what you need to do is you start creating content and talking about the case study, all right? Like, your entire sales message, sales process is going to be like, look at this result that we got for this person. This is proven. If you want to see how we could do something similar for you, boom. Okay? It all comes down to proof. So the other thing, too is whenever you're starting an agency, I would highly recommend creating content, talking about what you're doing for your clients, and talking about the strategy. Okay? This is something that I did, and thank God that I did this from the beginning because it makes it so much easier for us to sell against all of our other competitors in our market. Okay? So once you get that case study, start making YouTube videos, posting content on it, whatever medium you want to use. If it's Instagram, YouTube, whatever. I recommend YouTube. But you want to start making content, talking about your method for getting them leads, and specifically your case study, then the next thing that you need to do is start driving traffic there. Okay, so there's a few different ways, right? So we're getting a case study. We're showing that we can deliver this result for this specific type of person. Now what we need to do is we need to get people to know that we can deliver that result. Right? Very simple. So the few ways you can do it, you can do cold outreach, which, which is just DMing people on LinkedIn, reaching out to them, cold email, all that kind of stuff. Video pitches really work with cold outreach. That stuff works. It's just very tedious. But if you don't have capital, if you don't have money, you need to be doing cold outreach to get, to get these people. Once you start having some capital, then you can go and you can do ads and I can make a whole video talking about how to get clients with ads for your AI agency. If you guys want that, let me know in the comments down below. The other thing you can do, which is something that I did, is I went to influencers in my space and I set up affiliate deals. So I would go on their channel and I mean, it literally just asked. It's nothing more complicated than that in terms of getting these deals. But I would just go on their channel, I would talk about what we do, how we do it, the case studies, right? And then I would make an offer at the end, and then I would get people to go book on our calendar and then we would close them on Zoom. Okay?

Very, very key.

Is you have to get good at sales to do this and any business, okay, you're driving people to a Zoom consultation and that's where you're going to need to close them. And so I put this in here because some of you guys are have, you know, some of you guys are very averse to sales. You have to get over that if you want to make money. There is no way that you're going to be able to run an agency you. If you can't sell. So you need to put energy into learning it. And realistically, the best way to do it is just jump on the phone a bunch of times and build conviction in your process as well as your product. My business partner is a freaking wizard at sales, so I could have him come on this channel and talk about, like our sales process and how, you know, we close 500 grand a month in business so that you guys could learn that. So if you, if you want that, if you want a tutorial on how to sell, just comment sales down below. And we'll make it for you. Cool. So next thing. That's essentially the process. So here's what it looks like. You're running ads, driving traffic. You can literally just sub this here for anything, whether that's influencers or cold outreach or ads, whatever. You're driving them to a page where you explain what you do. You're then following up with them via sms, phone call, email, et cetera, to book them onto a consult. You then send them automations prior to the call to frame them, telling them about your business, what you do, your case studies, et cetera. And then you bring them onto a Zoom consultation and close them. Okay, so this is essentially the base of what it looks like. Now. Once you have that down, this is how you start to scale your business specifically to $100,000 a month and beyond. Okay, so here's kind of a outline of what your business will look like at this point. So you're driving traffic. Again, this can be ads, outreach, influencers, whatever it is. It could also be content, too. You're driving traffic to your offer that's backed up by proof. Then they jump on a call, you close them into clients, and what you're going to start to notice is most of your clients are going to suck and they're not going to stick with you. But a percentage of them are going to succeed and get really good results, right? And those are going to become your next batch of case studies and proof. The clients that fail, they fail. You learn the lesson, you move on. And as the clients pay you, you're then taking that money and reinvesting it back into traffic. So it's essentially this flywheel, right? The flywheel is you get more people to see your proof and positive results. They book a call with you, they become clients. You take that money and feed it back to get more traffic, to get more proof, to get more calls, to get more clients. And then the clients that succeed become more proof. So it just continues to spend and spend and spend. And what you're going to start to realize again is a good percentage of your clients are just going to be absolutely terrible. Okay, that's represented by this red marker here. So these are going to be like your refunds. Your people that come in and don't do anything, you know, they just bitch constantly. That's going to be this red section here, the middle, right? So this is. This is 20%. So you got your 20% that are just terrible clients. You got your 60% that are kind of like in the middle, right? Like some of Them get decent results, Some of them don't really get results.

But, you know, they don't complain. Right. Like some people are doing. Some people are doing like, okay, like they're doing good enough. Right? And then you're gonna have 20% here that are just absolutely crushing it. They love you to death. They stick with you long term, and they would be a client for life. Okay? So this is kind of the way that it distributes. What you want to do is you're gonna start to realize there's certain commonalities among this group of people. Like these are the ones that are giving you your case studies. So you're gonna start to realize like, okay, all of these people, like, let's say you're serving. Alex Hormozi served gyms. So in his example, he was like, okay, all of my best clients, they have a signed lease, they're a gym owner, and they have more than 30 members. So then what you do is you cut off the bottom 20%. So you raise your prices and you raise your qualifications. So we're no longer serving these people that were terrible and always complained and charged back and refund, request, whatever. Now we're only serving the people that get decent results and the people that get great results. And so then again, the great results are the people that are going to get us the proof, the case studies, the testimonials, et cetera. And we're going to do is we're going to leverage that and we're going to learn about these people to then go out and acquire more of them. So we're going to adjust our messaging and our advertising, our funnel, our qualification process in terms of how we're getting the clients. And we're going to start to go after more of those people. Then the clients that were originally in the 60%, these are going to start to become your lowest quality clients. So these are going to be the bottom 20% because we've now leveled up in terms of who we're going after. This is going to be our 60% and then we're going to identify a new 20% of our best clients. All right? So we're essentially, I call this laddering up the market. So you might start serving, I'll use the gym example. You might start serving personal trainers and you have a couple gym owners. And then you realize, okay, all of my best clients are gym owners. The personal trainers suck. So then you exclude the personal trainers. You, you double down on the gym owners and other gym owners become, you know, 80% of your market. But then you realize this 20%, oh, they all came in already having members, maybe they all have 100 members. And that becomes the 20%. And then we double down again and we go more into optimizing towards getting the top 20% of your clientele. Okay? And then you get to a point like this. Now, what was originally our top 20% of clients now becomes our bottom 20% of clients. We have 60% of these people, and then we identify a new top 20%. Okay? What's so important about the agency model is again, when we run an agency of any kind, we're always going to be downstream. We're always going to be earning a percentage of the profit that the business we're serving makes. And so by doing this, like, you're continuing to get better and better clients. And that's the thing that's so critical and pivotal about running an agency, is it all comes down to the clients. So as you scale, as you improve, you have to get better and better clients. In the very beginning, the best clients would not work with you because you probably suck at what you're doing. But so you kind of practice all, you practice out on like the lowest tier clients. And as you get better, you level up, level up, level up, level up, level up. And you get to a point where eventually, you know, you can have certain clients that are paying you 30, 40, 50 grand a month. I know one mentor of mine, his average deal that he works with, they go for clients that pay them 100 grand a month on one deal. So it's entirely possible. But it comes with time as you improve your skill. But you just gotta, you gotta nix the bottom 20 and then ladder up, okay? And so as you're going along this process, what starts to happen is your prices increase, right? So you're raising your price.

Your price is increasing, say P. Your quality of customer is increasing and so is your profit. Okay? All of these things increase simultaneously and they all correlate. So, ladies and gentlemen, that is step by step, how to build and monetize an AI agency and how you can scale it to $100,000 a month and beyond. If you guys have questions, drop them in the comments below. I respond to every single comment that is given. And if you guys want more videos like this, leave a like and subscribe and I'll be sure to put them out for you. Take care. See.