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#59 · 9 Concrete Problems Your AI Automation Agency Can Solve

youtube ↗Agency Operations

What's your framework for auditing a new client — you mentioned creating a roadmap for them and having weekly consultations. How do you gather the information you need to define that roadmap? Do you just run off experience, or is there a more structured process for figuring out which automations would solve their problems?

This nuance matters: I don't create a big roadmap for a new one-off project client — for those, I just ask questions, consult with them, offer a solution, and if they like it, send a proposal and start working. The full roadmap, where I define their problems and how I'd solve them, is something I do for recurring/retainer clients, and only after I've already done one, two, or three one-off projects for them. By the time I pitch the big roadmap, I already know what to put in it because I've spent time building for them, interfacing with their systems, and talking to them — I've effectively looked under the hood of their business already. I like this pipeline because the intro offer maximizes your conversion probability upfront (I aim for something like a 30-40% conversion rate), and if you do great work, that then maximizes retention — they're already comfortable with you and your delivery, so they're far more willing to say yes to something like $6,900/month than a cold pitch at that price would ever get. At that point you can position yourself less as someone building systems and more as a partner with real revenue goals for their business.

client roadmapretainer conversiononboarding process

Related answers

youtube ↗Offers

I struggle with shiny object syndrome, jumping between automation ideas and can't stick to one. I'm offering consultation calls to identify a business's workflow pain points in real time and provide tailored automation solutions. What do you think of this approach?

Basically, Autobuild guy is not offering a specific solution; instead, he asks what you need help with, offers to do an audit, and then provides a hyper‑fine‑tuned automation solution. In theory it's a great idea, but in practice it's not very good because a detailed workflow business audit isn't as sexy as promising 20 booked appointments in 60 days with a money‑back guarantee. Everybody sells the latter because it's easier: you guess the problem, present the problem and solution with a guarantee, and skip the audit. You don't need to ask what the client needs; just assume they have a common problem and sell a solution for it. Agencies often struggle with lead generation at the top of the funnel, project management, client notifications, and client comps. I solve those with systems, create many campaign variants, test them at scale, and pick the best performer. That's what I do, and I don't recommend the audit approach. I'm still experimenting with audits for larger deals (e.g., leftclick) to see how it works, but generally productizing your service is the way to go, and I'd recommend that. We probably won't be doing the audit approach for long.

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youtube ↗AI & Automation

Hey Nick, you make great content. It's almost exactly what I'm looking for—no BS, just actual use cases and useful things businesses need. Thank you. How do you decide which business processes are worth automating with AI? Do you perform an audit? I guess it's about targeting the most revenue potential and fastest development time, but what checklist or process do you follow when evaluating automation potential within a business? I'd love if you could walk us through your decision-making process. Also, what are your top three most requested or recurring automation solutions you build for other businesses? I can put this together ASAP—cold email, my proposal generator, and a one-click CRM based on CRM templates I've shown with 1‑second copy in my previous copywriting business.

In terms of the checklist, I use an automation agency sales skeleton. Instead of a full script, which is hard to deliver naturally, I give a skeleton—a big list of topics to talk about. I start by building rapport, then set the schedule, and ask the big question: 'Why me now in this?' Because asking 'why now' usually gives the person all the ammunition needed to sell them. For example, they might say they need X, Y, Z, and that they love that I talked about X, Y, Z and think I'm the best person to help solve those. Then I know everything I need to sell them. Next, I ask about the actual audit questions: always map the customer journey from start to end of fulfillment. That means identifying where the customer first sees you—whether it's a Facebook inbound lead ad, a referral email thread, a cold email inbox, or a cold call. Then I walk through every step: lead generation, sales process (how a lead becomes a sales call, sending a calendar link, booking or not), closing the deal (proposal, agreement, invoice), onboarding, fulfillment, post‑fulfillment retention, and getting them back into the business. If any step is missing, I note what to do. By running the customer through this series and having them map their pipeline from start to finish, you usually know everything needed to make a reasonable analysis of their main bottlenecks and problems. Another useful question is revenue per employee (or cost per employee/contractor). For example, when I made over $100,000 a month with just me, my revenue per employee was $100,000, while most other businesses have $15,000–$20,000. This helps map businesses from high to low revenue per employee; the lower the revenue per employee, the more you can systematize the business, and the higher it is, the trickier it becomes. Finally, I also ask some sales history questions.

ai automationprocess auditcustomer journeyrevenue per employee
youtube ↗Agency Operations

I'd love to hear more about how you went from having no clients to landing your first few, and then how you scaled to 100K months. Specifically, how did you structure long-term deals with automation clients after building their systems, and what makes clients willing to pay a retainer once the automation is set up?

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).

first clientsscalingretainersfractional coo
youtube ↗Offers

How can I create a specific, scalable offer or value proposition for my custom consulting and development shop that works across any industry?

We already work with any industry on anything they need—AI systems, business software, automations. The simplest way to start productizing is not to invent a new service, but to look at what you’ve already delivered that clients liked and double down on that. Make a list of every project you’ve done over the past year, pull the email threads, project files, and note the industries and types of work. Patterns will emerge: you’ll see which systems you built most often and, more importantly, which ones generated the most revenue. Use that data to decide which services to package. Then, reach out to the clients you built those high‑value systems for, remind them of the results, and ask for referrals and repeat business. Reactivating past clients is a low‑effort way to generate upsells—typically a 3‑4% uptake rate, and I’ve seen 15‑20% when I first started. Identify the most profitable, least time‑intensive product you’ve created—often an automated follow‑up agent or similar—and turn it into a repeatable checklist or product. Streamline the delivery: ask if you really need three discovery calls or if a single call or a form will suffice, reducing time investment and allowing you to raise prices, which is pure leverage. In short, catalog your past work, find the high‑margin, low‑effort services, market them to similar clients, reactivate old customers, and refine the process into a sellable product.

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