Should I offer CRM management as a freelancer, leveraging my existing experience, or pivot to automation consulting, and which is better long‑term?
The creator says you don't have to choose one or the other; you can combine CRM management with automation add‑ons. By keeping CRM as your core service you retain your social proof, while offering automation features (call logging, one‑click form fills, proposal drafting, automatic follow‑ups, invoice collection, onboarding) as enhancements. This lets you productize the CRM service and niche down. He notes that CRM (or project management) is the hub of a company's sales side, and the same ideas apply there. He personally does both and advises not to feel limited to a single offering.
It’s very difficult to know whether to stick with CRO or test AI automation without knowing your revenue or how long you’ve been at it. At the end of the day, those are the only two variables that matter for deciding whether to keep doing something or move on. If you’re asking this question, you’re likely not achieving the results you expected; that could be due to your expectations or your actual performance relative to reasonable expectations. AI automation is a solid niche, but CRO is directly defensible from a revenue perspective. Imagine a company making $100,000 a month with their CRO. If you offer to double their CRO, you’re offering an additional $100,000 per month because their funnel is their only revenue source. At $100,000 a month, you can charge 10‑15% as a service provider, yielding $10,000‑$15,000 per month from that client alone. All else equal, that’s a 7‑10x ROI—a strong offer right out of the gate. You can pair it with a fixed‑price guarantee (e.g., guarantee X improvement in conversion rate or you don’t pay, money‑back, free landing page) to get them in the door, improve CRO, and move to a longer‑term, performance‑based relationship. I don’t think CRO is a bad niche, nor is it at risk of being automated away; automation or AI would actually let you do more with it. The fact you’re asking this suggests you’re doing something wrong. Specific strategies: How many customer contacts are you making per day? Are you contacting and selling to at least 100 people daily for this service? If not, and you haven’t done that for 90 days straight (≈9,000 contacts), keep going until you hit that mark. After about 9,000 contacts you’ll have a reasonable sense of how it works. If you can’t do it, can’t hack it, or just suck at it, there’s no shame in moving on to something that works. I believe AI automation is probably the best service‑based business model to start, which is why I teach it in Maker School (my 90‑day accountability program), but I’m not dismissing your model because you’re not winning yet.
I understand the concern about friction, but GHL isn’t as cumbersome as it seems. The onboarding process is relatively straightforward, and once a client adopts the platform they’ll stay with it for a while, leading to recurring revenue. However, I believe there’s more opportunity in building a general‑purpose automation platform rather than white‑labeling an out‑of‑the‑box CRM. That’s why I suggested focusing on broader solutions.
Now that I'm sitting on the other side of this business model, the whole leverage of it is that no-code significantly shaves off the time needed to build technical solutions that are still reliable, robust, and maintainable. Instead of having to specialize in computer science and become a programmer, which would take years and split your attention, you can maintain skills on both sides — technical and sales. If you deprive yourself of the technical side and triple or quadruple down purely on sales without any technical experience, that's kind of silly and loses the whole point of the business model, which is being someone who knows enough automation to be dangerous while still spending most of your time selling. So no, I wouldn't recommend going pure middleman.
Small business clients can be anything from local service businesses—retail stores, flower shops, HVAC companies, digital marketing agencies—to other verticals. The best CRM depends on the specific niche, but the tools I see most often are ClickUp, Trello, Asana, and Basecamp for smaller organizations, while larger enterprises tend to use Salesforce or HubSpot. For specialized trades you can look for plumber‑specific or real‑estate‑specific CRMs. A good way to find options is to type the business vertical plus “CRM” into Google and review the top three results.