Should an automation offer focus on eliminating admin work or directly on generating revenue for clients?
The core determinant of whether someone buys from you is the return on investment (ROI) you generate, how confident they are in your delivery, and how easy you make it to accept the transformation. This can be expressed as a formula: Value = (ROI * Social Proof) / Friction.
Positioning automation as eliminating manual admin to free up time to eventually make money is indirect and circuitous. Instead of taking indirect steps, focus directly on generating revenue right away. This increases the clear ROI and makes social proof easier to establish. Revenue generation (marketing and sales) is standardized and needed across virtually all industries, whereas backend admin automation is often client-specific and difficult to replicate or scale. When you solve marketing and sales problems, your offer becomes much easier to sell.
There's a ton of opportunity here — you could build a fully successful business just optimizing internal processes; that was most of what Left Click did in its first year working with my old business partner. I later shifted primarily to growth systems because they make more money, but that doesn't mean internal-process optimization isn't also lucrative — think of it as top-line versus bottom-line. If a company makes some amount of revenue at the top, they only keep a subset of that as profit. Growth work adds to the top line; internal-process optimization mostly improves margin on what's already coming in (though it's not purely margin — faster internal processes also improve throughput, meaning you can push more customers through the same system, which does affect the top line too).
internal process automationmargin vs growthpositioning
Automations don't let you do anything you couldn't already do manually — they just improve the speed and efficiency of the process. Speed matters for revenue (faster speed-to-lead, more orders fulfilled per unit time, more personalization squeezed in); efficiency mainly saves money. Given that, build and sell 'revenue-proximate' automations — ones close to the revenue line: sales automations, marketing automations, lead-gen automations. Focus on things that help clients make money, not just things that help them save money.
He says yes, it's smart to start an automation agency now to capture the lag, but you should focus on delivering strategic outcomes and consulting rather than just selling tools. You can still make money with tools, but the real value is in helping clients achieve business results. He also notes that if you're not making $10k/month yet, focus on reaching that income first, and that many traditional businesses (web design, clay pottery) still thrive, so it's not all black‑and‑white.
It's really interesting that you're noticing this without intending to. Customers have pain points, and when you press those pain points, they reward you disproportionately compared to other topics. In your case, the pain point is lead generation. Paid ads are just a mechanism; the real value is in lead gen. Every time you discuss lead gen, people respond and want more, so you keep pressing that pain point. Automation is not the product; it's a means to an end. It's not something you should sell outright. Think of automation as a way to make something work better. For instance, if a company has a lead gen pipeline that isn't performing well, adding automation can improve it significantly. Or if a fulfillment process works manually but you want to scale, automation can reduce headcount and increase output without hiring more people. So focusing on lead gen isn't bad; it's where the value lies. Regarding your sales calls, if you're getting low conversion rates (like 7-8%), that's not unusual for a first AI automation customer or any new customer. The issue is likely that you're not following a standardized process. Once you adopt a consistent sales skeleton—building rapport, transitioning, framing the call, learning why they're talking to you, understanding their problem, gathering background, proposing a solution, and following up—you can refine it over time. The key is repetition: following the same process repeatedly makes you good at it. Your big issue is probably the lack of a standardized process, not the automation itself.