Hey neck, you often mentioned starting with a one-off project and moving into retainer. But once that initial project's been delivered and value has been provided, what kind of retainer makes sense from there? How do you continue to deliver meaningful value that justifies an ongoing engagement and maximizes customer LTV?
Start with a fixed‑price project to deliver quick ROI, minimize friction, and test the client relationship. Once the project is done and value is shown, transition to a recurring service (retainer) to capitalize on the proven ROI and maximize lifetime value. This lets you learn the client’s business, build stronger relationships, and improve conversion from the initial project to the retainer. Most of an agency’s income comes from this recurring step. For an automation agency, the recurring work often evolves beyond pure automation delivery. Begin with custom automations to learn the market, then identify repeatable tasks, productize them, and eventually become a specialized agency (e.g., a cold‑email or CRM agency) that focuses on a narrow set of high‑value services. Because selling pure automation‑as‑a‑service is hard to scale due to variable scopes and staffing challenges, you add value to the retainer with extras like unlimited maintenance on past builds, weekly strategy calls, daily availability for questions, team training, discount aggregators, affiliate/partner perks, and brand association. These tangential line items boost the perceived value of the retainer and help you lock in long‑term clients.
Yes, there is ongoing maintenance, but instead of offering a binary choice (retainer vs. no retainer), give clients three options: 1. Self-Service: Deliver the system along with a video walkthrough and Google Doc guide so they can maintain and adjust it themselves. 2. Maintenance Retainer (e.g., $985/month): Provide a service level agreement (SLA) to fix any broken integrations or microservice failures within 48 hours, plus an emergency support thread. 3. Growth/Peace-of-Mind Retainer (Higher Ticket): Include full maintenance under a faster SLA, plus build two new systems per month, conduct team training, host weekly calls, and act as a fractional CTO. By offering three options, you shift the decision from 'pay vs. don't pay' to choosing a service tier, reducing the drop-off rate. For standard maintenance retainers, cap your actual time at 3 to 4 hours per month. Minor maintenance issues (like retrying failed executions on Make due to temporary third-party API downtime) take only a few minutes, making a $985/month retainer very profitable. If maintenance requires extensive hours, it's usually an architectural flaw in how you designed the input validation or workflow.
All agencies share the same fundamental shape: lead generation at the top (via ads, cold emails, cold calls, etc.), which funnels into a sales event (typically a discovery or closing call). From there you onboard the client, fulfill the promised service, and manage the client—checking in on progress—before delivering the project, possibly with a revision cycle that leads to another transformation event where you resell them. I’ve documented this shape in the three automation agency sales flows and a roadmap to $25k/month automation that you can download for free. The real key to success isn’t becoming a top AI or automation specialist; it’s becoming a good business person who understands the container (the agency model) and what you put inside it. This mindset can be learned in a couple of weeks, and you don’t need to be expert at the specific service you’re 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.
Thanks for the question. Shipping an automation isn't really needed—you don't need to ship it at all because the shipping happens during the building process. You start by talking with somebody who likes what you have to offer, get them on a call, discuss the problems and solutions, do quick math to see how much the problem is costing them, and pitch your solution at a fraction of that cost—usually around 30%. Once they agree, you send a proposal, they sign it and pay you a little money. I like doing a 50/50 upfront and then upon delivery structure for a small intro offer, then transitioning to a retainer fully paid up front at the beginning of each month. After they sign, you need to get them on a kickoff call to walk through expectations, scope, timelines, and confirm the scope again before starting work—this is your point of highest leverage. If there are project problems, deal with them now while you have some of their money and haven't done work yet, rather than at the end when they're holding money out on you. On the kickoff call, you also have them sign up to the necessary platforms (like Make.com or N8N) so they have everything they need upfront and you never have to bug them again for access; the only messages you'll get are positive happy updates. As a Make.com partner and NN verified creator, I get preferential treatment like a thousand free operations via affiliate promo codes, which adds 3‑5% to your margin because they use your affiliate links and trust you as an authority. You have no liability for recurring payments—they take that on. Before the end of the call, you have all the credentials so you never have to bug them again. That's how you actually go about doing the shipping. To find clients in the really early stages of your automation agency, join Maker School.