I tried running an AI agency for 365 days and Earned $_____

I scaled my AI marketing agency to $3.4 million in one single year, with our highest month being nearly $500,000 in cash collected. And the best part is I do little to no fulfillment work myself, thanks to AI. So in today's video, I'm going to reveal the 4-pillar framework that allowed us to scale to $3.4 million in one single year so that you can copy my success into your own agency. So what is the 4-pillar structure? Number 1 is figuring out exactly what to sell. Number 2 is figuring out who you're going to sell it to. This is one of the biggest mistakes that I see people make. Number 3 is figuring out how to actually attract clients and close them consistently and at scale. And number 4 is automating most of your business so that AI can do the heavy lifting for you. And after I cover the 4-pillar structure in depth, I'm also going to share with you the 3 brutal mistakes that we made along the way, because honestly, we could have gotten there even faster had I known about these expensive mistakes sooner. And while I can't go back in time and teach myself these lessons, I can pass them along to you so that you can scale your agency faster than I did. By the way, later on in this video, I'm going to show you the exact AI tools that we use to scale our agency. And if you want to literally copy the exact AI system that we deliver to our clients, I'll be giving it away inside of my free school community link down below in the description. I post all of the resources from these videos and share game that I can't share on YouTube directly inside of that community. So if you want to literally copy the exact fulfillment that I do for my clients and get tons of other free resources, click the link down below to join. All right, let's get into the video. So the first pillar is figuring out what to actually sell. You see, with the AI tools that are out there, you can basically create nearly anything from a simple prompt. The key is knowing how to determine what is a good output from the AI from what is a bad output from the AI. Now there's a million different services out there that you could sell. For example, one of the most common ones that people do is they'll go out and they'll build N8N automations for people. So they call this the AI automation agency. And I think it's a great business model if you're extremely tech savvy and you love being in the weeds of building out automations and doing those kind of things. Those are the pros. The cons, I would say, are it's not a very productizable and scalable business. Right? I am not going to get into any business unless I view that it can scale to millions of dollars a year and ideally millions of dollars a month. And I don't really see that business doing that. At least I haven't seen it in the past. The other thing that you could do is you could use AI to create web apps and then you could resell those web apps or AI softwares that you build. Again, good if you're tech savvy, if that's something you're super interested in. But I haven't seen too many people build those services and then scale them to hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars a month, usually a smaller thing that people do. Now, I'll tell you what I do and what we do within our own agency, which in my opinion is the best thing to do, is you essentially find a service that people are already buying and then you use AI to help you with the service delivery. So let me explain. People are always going to need lead generation, appointments, and new clients. So what we basically do is we help financial professionals generate leads and appointments. You could do this for just about any niche that's out there, which I'll talk more in depth on when we get to pillar number 2, which is figuring out who to sell to. But first and foremost, you want to find a service that people are already buying and will continue to buy, whether it's AI doing this fulfillment, whether it's you doing the fulfillment or whatever. You're looking for a service that is always in demand. Businesses will always need new clients and new customers. So my opinion, I think that that is the best service to sell. So there's multiple ways that you could do this. You could run ads for clients on Meta, on Google, on LinkedIn, on TikTok. Doesn't really matter. And then you You can send those clients to an AI chatbot that can qualify the leads, speak with them, and book them directly on your calendar. Then you could build a chatbot inside of a software called GoHighLevel. I give you the exact chatbot inside of the Free School community if you want access, but you can build all of that inside of a software called GoHighLevel, and then the chatbot will book appointments directly on your client's calendar and also qualify the appointments. And then you can also build out other automations, email sequences, etc. inside of GoHighLevel to help your clients make more money. And we basically package that whole service together. So the ads, the AI, the automations, the appointment booking, and we call that an AI client acquisition system. And so essentially I have found that that is the best service to sell. And it's the exact service that we sold inside of our own agency to do $3.4 million in one year. Now, because we can use AI to create a lot of the ads that we then run for our clients, what our job really becomes is to be the ultimate curators of high-quality ads, of high-quality funnels, of training and designing that chatbot to book appointments for the clients. All right. So pillar number 2 is to decide who you're actually going to sell to. This is, in my opinion, one of the most important pieces. And it's actually one of the biggest mistakes that we made when we were first getting started. In other words, you could say this is finding your niche. Now, a niche is literally just a specific pocket of the market that you focus on. So a niche could be restaurants, a niche could be home remodelers, a niche could be lawyers, a niche could be doctors' offices. And I'm not saying all All of those are good niches. I'll tell you some of the ones that I recommend, but a niche is basically just a pocket of the market. So the biggest thing that you want to look for when you are identifying a niche is 3 different things. Number 1, do they sell a high-ticket product or service? Now, if you're selling to restaurants, they're probably only selling something between like $20 and $50 on the high end. So for you to bring them in a customer is not that valuable to them, especially because their margins are extremely low. So they're not going to be able to pay you that much money. Now, let's say you were dealing with a construction company, for example, one client that you bring bring them could be worth tens of millions, in some cases even hundreds of millions of dollars. So you can see the difference if you bring one client to a restaurant versus one client to a massive construction company. One client for the construction company could literally pay for years and years of your service. So one of the biggest things you want to look for is leverage in your business, and one of the best points of leverage you could get is the clients that you choose to serve. The second thing you want to look for is boring businesses. So if I'm going to go start a client acquisition company, I'm probably not going to do it for an industry that is already really good at client acquisition, right? Like one of the most competitive industries for marketing and client acquisition is e-commerce. And e-commerce, to make any money, you have to be really good at running ads, really good at getting clients, and really good at branding. So I wouldn't want to go compete in that market with the best marketers and brand builders on earth because I'm dealing with a super competitive market. But if I went to a business like home remodelers who are really good at delivering the service that they provide, but not so good at marketing, I can offer them a lot of value. So you want to look for boring businesses that are in business for a long time, right? If you can find an industry where businesses exist that are 100 years old, you have found a goldmine industry. You want to look for businesses that are boring, old, owned by boomers, and just don't go out of business because they just print money. The next thing you want to look for is businesses that already spend a lot of money on marketing. So a really good way that you can identify this is next time you're driving on the road, you want to look at industries that are advertising on billboards, industries that are advertising on TV, industries that send out direct mail, right? Because if they're able to spend a lot of money on these traditional forms of advertising, it means that they're probably making a lot of money. Because how are you going to track the ROI of a billboard? It's literally just a brand awareness campaign. And so the thing you want to look for is if they're spending a lot of money on marketing, if you can give them a better way to invest that money, money, they will give it to you. If someone's spending a bunch of money on billboards and TV ads and you say, hey, look, I have this new AI client acquisition system. If you spend $20,000 a month with me, for example, 100% possible, there's clients with us that do that. If you spend $20,000 a month with me, I'm going to get you a better return. Well, instead of them having to find new money to spend, they're just shifting money that they already have to you. Some good examples of niches, and I'm just reading off of a list here that I have: law firms, accounting and tax firms, wealth management, plastic surgeons, dentists, orthodontists, specialty clinics like fertility, telemedicine, all those kind of things, roofing companies, custom home builders, insurance agencies, things like that are all going to be great niches to target. Now, my business serves financial advisors and insurance agents. If I were to start over, the two niches I would be looking at would be telemedicine and law firms. Those I think are some of the best niches to look at today. All right, cool. So now that we've figured out what niche we're going to sell to, now we've got to figure out how do we actually sell to them? How do we get clients so that we can get our clients clients? So there are a million ways you can get clients. You can make content, you can run ads, you can spin a sign on the street. Lots of things you can do, right? The one thing that I would focus on personally is Facebook ads. I have found that Facebook ads is by far one of the most consistent, reliable, scalable ways to get clients. We spend around $60,000 to $100,000 a month depending on the month on Facebook ads to acquire clients for our agency. So basically what you want to do is you want to put together a no-brainer offer, right? If you haven't already read it, read $100 Million Offers by Alex Hormozi. That will give you all the context that you need. But basically, you want to have an offer that is so good they'd feel stupid saying no and eliminates a lot of the risk for them, especially when you're first getting started. You want to have a guarantee attached to your offer because it's going to reduce a lot of the friction on the sales process and get you clients over the line that are starting to pay you. Once you have a strong track record, you could look at potentially removing your guarantee if you find that it's attracting you the wrong type of people. But basically, you get your guarantee. You want your offer to sound really, really good in one sentence. So for example, roofers, we will get you blank number of appointments or you don't pay, right? Very clear, very direct, understandable offer where you explain it in one sentence and they're like, yes, I want that. You don't want something where it's super complex. It takes 3 hours to explain and they don't get it in one sentence. No, you want a one-sentence explanation offer, right? So Domino's, get your pizza in 30 minutes or your money back. I don't even know if they still run that, but I'm pretty pretty sure that was a campaign they ran. Very simple. Pizza delivered in 30 minutes or it's free. Simple. So what you do once you have your simple one-sentence offer is you're going to put it on an ad, right? So we'll make literal just like basic photo ads. Throw some examples up here on the screen. Literal just basic photo ads just saying, hey, if you're part of this demographic, hey, if you're a roofer, get this, click here. That's it. Like, that's the extent of the ad. It's very simple and direct. Most of the time works the best. Then you can also make video ads where you basically are explaining your offer, in different ways. So for example, you could say, here's why smart roofers only work with marketing companies that guarantee appointments. Here's 5 reasons why smart roofers only do X, Y, Z, right? If you're a roofer and you're tired of chasing leads, we guarantee appointments, right? So it's just like you're saying the same thing in different ways. Then you're going to run those ads on Facebook, Meta, Instagram. Meta owns Facebook and Instagram. So Meta, drive them to a landing page where you have a video explaining what the offer is. Below that, you're going to create an an application that they fill out and then they book directly on your calendar. Now, the fun part comes when the people actually book on the calendar and now you have to sell them on your offer. We put together a whole video that breaks down how to actually sell your service. It's like a 1-hour-long masterclass. If you guys want that, we'll link it in the comments down below. So check that out. But basically we jump on the phone, we go through, we explain the offer, we explain the pitch, and then we ask them to buy. So once they buy, now that brings us to pillar number 4. We actually use AI to deliver the service. So this is one of the biggest levers you can pull, which is having AI do a lot of your fulfillment work. This is exactly how you scale without having to hire a huge team. So we use a few key AI tools. We use a bot inside of GoHighLevel that conversates back with the leads and then books them appointments directly on our client's calendar. Now, again, if you want access to literally the exact bot that I use inside of GoHighLevel, just click the link down below. Join the free school community. It'll be posted inside of there. You can just copy it. It's completely free. I just get an affiliate because you signed up through my GoHighLevel. So that's it. So that saves us and it also saves our client a lot of time because we don't have to to go hire appointment setters for them and they're able to get appointments without managing an appointment center. Then next, to actually create the ads that we run on the client's behalf to get them the leads and the appointments, we use a tool called Manus AI to help us write ad copy. So we put together a master doc. It's a big PDF that explains the best practices for advertising in that industry. So for example, let's say I was advertising to roofers. I would go and I would have AI do a a full deep research report on all of the top angles and advertising methods for getting clients for roofers. I would upload that into a project inside of Manus, and then I would tell Manus to go and write me the ads. I would then take those scripts, put them into VO3, generate video ads, have them edited, and then those are going to be the ads that I run for my clients to get them leads. So now that we've gone over the 4-pillar structure, let me explain the 3 biggest mistakes that we made along the way that prevented us from scaling faster. And if you learn these and implement them apply them can get you to your goals in half the time it would take you otherwise. Mistake number 1 is selling to the wrong customer. When I talked about picking the right niche in the beginning, I cannot stress how important that is. When we first started at the beginning of the year, we were selling to beginner insurance agents that were basically completely broke. And no matter how good our service delivery was, no matter what kind of features we added and how much support we gave them, our churn was just considerably high. And it's because 92% of beginner insurance agents fail within the first 5 years. So no matter how good your service is, most of your customers are leaving the industry, let alone your company. So what we did instead is we changed our marketing and messaging to speak to higher income agents and advisors that were already successful and simply wanted to scale. And when we did that, our churn dropped down and our lifetime value of a customer skyrocketed. Now, a quick caveat to that. When you're first getting started, it's okay to sell to anybody because you need to get a track record and just learn what good looks like. But once you start to get some momentum, you really want to analyze, look at your customers and figure out who's causing you the most headache and bringing you the least amount of money versus who's causing you the least amount of headache and bringing you the most amount of money. And then you want to optimize towards the latter. Mistake number 2, which was kind of an extension from mistake number 1, is we were not charging enough money. When you first get into business, or even if you just have a smaller agency, a lot of times you have these limiting beliefs around how much money you could charge. I remember when we charged $1,000 $1,000 a month, I thought it was impossible to sell something for $2,000 or $3,000 a month. When I was selling something for $3,000 a month, I thought there's no way that people will pay $5,000 a month. Sure enough, we bumped the price to $5,000 a month, $15K for 3 months, and our sales and profits just exploded. And yeah, we sold to a different person. The people we were currently selling to wouldn't pay that price, but there was a new, better avatar that was willing to pay that higher price for better service. So don't be afraid to charge high prices. Keep testing the boundaries of what you can charge and say the highest price you can think of without cracking a smile. Over time, you'll start to learn at what point your price caps out and your close rate starts going down. But it's always good to push the needle as opposed to being scared to charge more. And mistake number 3 is there were a lot of little AI services that we tried to add on along the way and just sell them because they were AI. This is one of the biggest mistakes I see people make, is they focus more on the fact that they're selling an AI service than the service itself. AI is simply a way to solve solve a problem. You don't sell AI just because it's AI. You need to find a problem that people are already willing to pay for, and then you just use AI to make it better or easier. AI doesn't create or solve new problems that didn't exist. It simply takes the same problems that people had and makes it easier for you to solve those problems for them. People have the same problems. You just use AI in a new way to solve them. So don't just try to sell some AI system because it's AI. Make sure it actually solves a core pain point of your ideal avatar. So if you skip all of those mistakes and get to your goals faster, be sure to click the link down below to join my completely free school community where I'll post all of the resources from these videos and you can get access to my GoHighLevel chatbot that I use to fulfill for my clients. See you guys in the next video.