How would you make the switch from full-time employment to running an AI automation agency?
I wouldn't do it all at once, as sexy as it sounds and as incredible as the big gurus on YouTube make working for yourself seem. There are a lot of problems with it too. The main one is you're going from an environment where everybody essentially has their day structured for them to an environment where you actually structure every waking moment of your day completely yourself. One of two things happens: it's really overwhelming and you end up not utilizing that time effectively, which leads to you making less money. That's basically the only thing that happens. You're starting this off as an infant — if this is the first time you've ever done self-employment, you have to learn that skill. It doesn't matter how long you've been in IT or how much time or energy you've invested in a specific niche; you're learning an entirely new skill from scratch. So rather than going from 100% corporate to 0% corporate overnight, I'd recommend tranching it or breaking it up. What we'll have people in Maker School do is try to get to 80% of their time in a full-time job. If they can get to 80%, most of their work's already done for them, because the jump from 100 to 80 means you can now introduce 20% of fully self-structured time where you work on your own business. Maybe instead of working 9 to 5, you work 9 to 3:30 — even an additional hour and a half. The second you learn to utilize that hour and a half effectively, it'll carry over to the rest of the time, and usually you don't even have to work a full 8 hours a day head-down after you've learned to be extraordinarily effective with that hour and a half. That's what I would do. I wouldn't go 100 to zero, because I did that for myself and I was completely lost for a very long time — on the brink of eviction multiple times, living in a converted garage, eating rice and beans all day. You don't need to make it that hard for yourself, especially if you're not going to be saving 6 to 12 months of expenses, because it's very difficult and not really worth it. The exhaustion you feel at your current job is probably going to be multiplied tenfold if you do the exact same thing and then switch. Alternatively, you'll make far less money, which leads to a different type of existential threat or exhaustion.
No problem at all. I don't think your situation is necessarily the hardest question I've gotten. You have four hours a day, which is more time than many people have—not to minimize your conditions. My father has scoliosis, which really affects his back; your girlfriend has asthma, and I've heard of adrenal insufficiency before, which can interfere with motivation, stimulation, sleep, etc. Obviously, that's a massive pain. Anyway, you've got four hours a day—a synthetic constraint. Artificial constraints, believe it or not, are actually good over the long term because they force you to be as effective and efficient as possible with every available minute. Whereas someone else might have a full day to do whatever they want, you don't; you have a rule set in place, an evolutionary pressure that will make you better and more effective with your time. So it's harder, but the flip side is you'll be significantly more effective five or ten years out. Where would you start? I'd recommend typing in 'nix arrive 80% of automation basics in 29 minutes'—a solid video that covers what you need to know to get up and running with AI automation. From there, you could take my AI automation NAD course, which is six hours and runs you through everything needed to build automations with NAD, because you'll have hit the 80/20 moment right before this, understanding some business fundamentals. Then, if you just go on my YouTube channel over here, you'll find the daily updates channel—a compilation of daily updates and other stuff—and my video 'Watch Me Start and Sell.' This one's a while ago, but okay; check it out as well—it's one of the most viewed videos on my channel. It runs you through AI automation basics, how to build a system out in an automation platform like NIN, and some AI fundamentals. How do we actually go about putting this in front of people? That's more or less it. Okay, so start there; as long as you're consistent and motivated, you've got this buddy. Okay, guys, I think I'm going to leave it there. One big thing I'm doing right now with the retrospective I'm writing—the big lifestyle audit and the big blog post—is just auditing where I'm spending my time. I've realized the daily update videos are unfortunately growing into more of a behemoth than I initially planned. The average post time over the last ~20 videos is about 47 minutes—too long. So it's hard for me to stay on top of all this stuff. I'm instituting a 20 to 25 minute maximum. I don't exactly know how fast I'll do these, but this will necessitate a change in the structure of the daily updates. Fortunately for me, unfortunately for a lot of people I was doing unstructured Q&A sessions for—which is all good—I'm still going to do Q&A and show up every day, but for my own time I'll have to change the structure and how I do it. I'm going to obviously try to implement, as I was just talking about EMOD, some sort of structure that lets me use this constraint positively: deliver more value per unit time, not less. That will buy me back about a half hour of my day, which is very much needed right now. A couple other things I'm going to do: I'm going to change how I'm doing my administration by hiring a virtual assistant again, and having the VA take care of a lot of my mundane email admin stuff. I've been dealing with all of my refund requests entirely on my own, which I understand is not optimal, but I've always just been like, 'well, screw it.' I've been dealing with one-off questions about the program entirely on my own. Somebody reached out to me asking, 'Hey, Nick, you know, how do I access my subscription portal for Maker School?' I'll actually go through and answer that question. I have like five or ten variants of those questions every day. If everyone takes a minute, you could see how these sorts of things add up—right? I answer one-off questions about, 'Hey, does Maker School include this?' or 'Does make money with Make.com include that?' It just ends up being a boatload of time. I'm going to be changing a little bit about how the agency is operating as well. I有
You know one of the major issues here is you're at $3K a month and want to hit $10K a month, so the gap is $7K a month. But because you're at a middling income level, I'd imagine it's $3K a month, and you probably don't have anything else; you really want to hold onto that and save every dollar. If you wanted to grow from $3K to $10K a month, you'd have to spend a lot of your money and risk some of it. What I mean by this is you're not sure about starting from scratch on Upwork for $10–15 an hour. You know, if you did that, you'd probably spend somewhere between $200 and $400 a month just on connect costs, if you really wanted to take it seriously. That's like 12% of maybe 15% of all your money. That's the thing I personally think is probably stopping you from saying yes. But the reality is, you've got to spend money to make money. My recommendation would be to take everything you're doing here—whatever $3,000 USD minus your living expenses, whatever you have left over—and spend it on marketing, on sales and marketing. Upwork is a great example. We just had a guy in Maker School, Sai Satoru, who's absolutely one of the coolest guys in this group. He has a relatively similar situation as you do. From $849 a month teaching kids to $40,000 on Upwork in 12 months. A year and a half ago, he was teaching English to 9-year-olds in Chiang Rai for $849 a month. It was stable, predictable, and the wrong life. But he dove in on freelancing and AI automation, and now he's made $40,000 on Upwork in 12 months. Granted, it's in 12 months, so it's not the same thing, but keep in mind that the majority of that money is pushed into the future. I imagine the way Sai probably started was he started with a $500 month, then a $1,000 month, then a $1,500 month, then a $2,000 month. And also, this is just Upwork; there are a million different ways you can make money online with AI and automation. I'm not telling you you have to do this necessarily, but it is a very simple and straight-line path for somebody in your situation. So what you could do is the first couple months, go on Upwork, make a grand, two grand, three grand, and then take that money and graduate to more efficient marketing approaches as well—things like cold email and so on. So that's what I would do. And $10K per month might seem really scary, but think about it: that's just three positions like this at maybe half the time spent on each. You could absolutely do that. Thank you very much, MZ Maestro. Your brains are half algorithms at this point. Basically, yeah, that's how I feel.
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.
Many people think lack of skill stops them from hitting their goals, but the harsh reality is you probably already know more than you need to win. After a certain point, learning more actually becomes counterproductive—just look at 17‑ or 18‑year‑olds in accelerators who blaze through the roadmap and start making $5k–$10k a month despite having almost no skills. What they do is develop a minimum viable skill set, then try everything under the sun until something works. In your case, as a student you’re actually at your least busy point in life, and you already have plenty of skill from what I know about you (you were in Maker School). So the issue isn’t time or skill—it’s application. You need to consistently apply yourself. If you had been doing that, you’d be tracking metrics like how many cold emails you sent, how many responses you got, and noting that they flaked. Since you didn’t, you likely haven’t taken any action at all. It’s not complicated; it’s simple but not easy. Pick a few high‑revenue‑generating actions—like reaching out to people—and do them every single day for a long period of time.