Why didn't you just build systems to scale your automation agency itself to $170k/month, instead of pivoting to teaching? It feels like you couldn't scale the agency as a one-man band unless you switched to teaching.
It's much, much more scalable to run an info/teaching business than an agency. Agencies are actually a lot more fragile — but when you're at the start line with no business experience and no revenue, agencies are the straightest line path to materializing revenue: zero to one, nothing is faster. You're trading that speed for the downside that agencies are fragile and much less scalable, since you need a lot more people to make them grow, and margins tend to get worse as you scale. Even if you sell an agency later, a lot of the time and energy spent building its equity often only nets you something like a 3x multiple — pretty low compared to other vehicles. So the equation that worked for me: front-load services first, make a ton of money fast (a few hundred thousand dollars, more than most people make), then take that money and put it into a more scalable vehicle. In my case that was building a better business model — teaching. All roads really do lead to info eventually; it's just a more optimized model. Instead of giving a man a fish, you teach him to fish and charge a monthly subscription for the knowledge — the revenue ends up a lot more predictable.
My AI and automation agency makes significantly less money than my coaching. Coaching is extraordinarily scalable—when you run a YouTube channel with distribution like I do, the optimal next choice is to sell something hyperscalable with zero delivery or logistics, which is what my coaching stuff is. If you're a total beginner, your optimal choice changes depending on whether you have distribution: with distribution, you'd go for e‑commerce or info‑product with a templated service; without distribution, you'd run an agency because agencies let you get your first 10, 20, $50k in revenue super quickly. Agencies allow you to make a lot of money very quickly, but you tend to plateau relatively fast, with further gains being incremental. Contrast that with an information product business (like a community or SaaS), which has zero marginal cost after a fixed development cost, so you make little money at first but way more later. Does this make sense? From my perspective, when I started my agency I was up here, made money quickly, hit resistance, wanted to scale with as little headcount as possible, moved over here, and now I'm significantly higher. Would I recommend doing what I'm doing now to total beginners? No—many people throw away their businesses after starting coaching because they stop doing the main service, become disconnected from implementation, lose skill, and start teaching the wrong way. That's why this YouTube channel is valuable: I'm showing you how I actually generate leads for my agency. I want to change the fraction of my total revenue that comes from this channel; I don't think it's the most effective use of my time per dollar, but I believe it will indirectly lead to more money through authenticity, so I'm getting back to selling outbound for the agency, setting up more inbound funnels, adding calls‑to‑action at the end of videos, and going to hire a team eventually.
The biggest one-time contract I sold was mid $220,000 for a project I called 'Uber for lumpers'—a system connecting companies needing lumpers (people who load/unload ships) with lumper workers. My business partner and I built it, but it was a total pain and not worth the time; it was one of the first projects we sold, so I took on custom work, but I don't recommend doing custom projects more than a couple times early on because there's little ROI on your time—my hourly rate is about $50. After that, I did a proposal generator system project that paid $1,500 and took only about 5–10 minutes to fulfill (plus ~30 minutes selling and a 30‑minute kickoff call). That gave a huge return on investment and unlocked the leverage idea: I could either make $225,000 in month‑one revenue from a big custom project, or I could create templates and sell the need, then spend five minutes copying a template I already built. Regarding agency requests, I get about 10 genuine agency inquiries per month; most want to invest $15K–$20K and work with me on a three‑month subscription at $5,900/month ($17,700 up front). I haven’t finalized my agency dynamics yet. The businesses that reach out most are high‑earning industries: fintech, software, financing/investing (e.g., underwriting firms that need automated financial data and email replies), and companies installing power grids that take a cut of hundred‑million‑dollar projects. My agency currently makes about $25,000 a month; from the $128,000 profit I mentioned, that’s roughly 20% of my income. Monthly profit isn’t the only metric—enterprise value matters. Info products are hard to sell because they’re tied to me; agencies have low multiples, whereas a SaaS product can achieve much higher multiples. I’m therefore building templates and done‑for‑you services, continuing to scale the agency for enterprise value and to stay connected to what I teach, because in coaching, when a system works, people often abandon it to teach it, which makes it outdated. I want to avoid that.
biggest contractuber for lumpersproposal generatoragency
Cool man, I know you already have a full-time job, which is fantastic. You're probably working 6 to 8 hours on that job and then spending time on lead generation, client calls, and fulfillment. You're doing a lot, and it's natural to wonder if it's time to bring on help. Here's what I'd do: first, set a near‑term realistic income goal—for example, $25,000 a month. Add up your salary, income from custom projects, and any other income. See how far you are from that goal. Then calculate your current internal hourly rate (maybe around $100/hour). If you need an extra $10,000 to reach $25k, that's about 100 additional hours. Ask yourself if you have 100 hours in your schedule. If not, you don't necessarily need to hire; you could raise your prices or pursue higher‑paying clients. Doubling your rates would double your income for the same time, getting you a large share of the way there. You could also increase lead volume—more leads give you more opportunities to pick the best‑performing projects instead of settling for low‑rate work out of scarcity. My decision‑making mindset is based on expected value: I evaluate the expected value of taking on a client or making a decision and choose the option with the highest expected value at that moment. Regarding hiring, my experience shows it's not easy to post a job, review candidates, interview, and hire quickly; you add a daily management time sync. The equation for effective hiring is whether the daily management time plus the cost of paying someone is less than the value they create by doing the work. Early in a hire, you're often not profitable until they're onboarded, trained, and up to speed. So, unless you have a much higher goal—say $50k, $100k, or $200k a month—you probably don't need to hire right now. As for scaling an agency model, I do think it gets harder to scale beyond a certain point. It was harder for me at $72k/month than at $25k/month. After a certain point you're no longer just an automation agency; you become a niche‑specific service or system‑providing agency. For example, one community member scaled to $80k/month by pivoting from automation services to selling cold‑email systems—a lead‑generation focus. If you start as an automation agency but find a super‑high‑ROI CRM project, you'll quickly shift toward being a recruitment‑agency‑style CRM provider. If you stick with the pure AI‑automation‑agency idea, you'll likely plateau around a $1M annual run‑rate, because that's when you need to hire managers to manage people, which is tricky.
Are we talking no clients in general, in any of my businesses, or specifically automation? You might be talking about automation. The way I did automation was I just started out on Upwork — applied to like 10 to 20 Upwork jobs per day along with my business partner at the time, and the vast majority of them said no to us. We used a custom Loom-video-based approach: I'd record a Loom of me talking through the problem and send out a ton of those. I got really good at explaining automation problems consistently, and we scaled that automation agency pretty quickly to $15-20K a month. We languished around $20-40K a month for a while because my partner wanted to operate it as a software consultancy taking on custom projects with a big hired team, but that didn't really work — the engineers we hired could drag-and-drop in tools like Make.com but didn't understand the business side, so the automations they built were brittle. That's when I learned how difficult hiring is for something as complicated as a software/automation project. My partner and I eventually split up amicably — he wanted to focus on the consultancy side and building resellable equity, I didn't. I kept the business, focused on high-leverage applications of systems I'd already built, scaled up Upwork applications and cold email (reinvesting most of my income into cold email), and simplified the offer down to mostly cold email systems and one-click CRM templates. Around $35-45K/month I couldn't keep scaling that way, so I started pitching a fractional-COO model: I took a few smaller clients paying $3-4K/month and gave them massive 20-30 page proposals saying, 'I want $10K/month plus 7% of your business, and here's how I'll justify it by delivering $100K/month in value.' That worked for a couple of clients, my revenue shot up, and combined with old clients coming back that same month I hit $72K in revenue (not all of it was recurring).