🤖 The Ultimate Guide to Starting an AI Automation Agency
Are you ready to dive into the world of AI automation? As a business owner, you may have heard about the benefits of integrating AI into your operations, but you may not know where to start. That's where an AI automation agency comes in. In this guide, we'll break down the four basic components of an AI automation agency: AI services, getting clients, sales, and fulfillment. We'll also explore the different types of AI services you can offer, including automations, chatbots, and AI tool stacks. Plus, we'll share our top tips for finding clients and pricing your services.
Table of Contents
- 🤖 Introduction
- 📈 The Blue Ocean Opportunity of AI Automation
- 🤔 Unanswered Questions About AI Automation
- 🕵️♀️ Being an Innovator in AI Automation
- 🧩 The Four Components of an AI Automation Agency
- 💻 AI Services: What You Can Offer
- 🤖 Automations: Using Make.com to Automate Any System or Process
- 💬 Chatbots: Creating Conversational Bots for Customer Support and More
- 🛠️ AI Tool Stacks: Analyzing a Business and Recommending Specific AI Tools
- 🤝 Getting Clients: Three Ways to Find Potential Clients
- 🤝 Working with Other Agencies
- 📹 Exhibiting Your Expertise on Social Media
- 💬 Cold Commenting on Social Media
- 💰 Sales and Pricing: How to Price Your AI Automation Services
- 🚀 Thinking Bigger: Building Custom AI Software Tools for Clients
- 🤖 Conclusion
📈 The Blue Ocean Opportunity of AI Automation
If you're watching this, you're on the frontier of AI automation. A new business model has just been born, and with it, a blue ocean opportunity. But since it's a blue ocean, that means not much has been discovered. There are still so many unknowns: what service is best, how do I find clients, and how do I even price my services? These are all unanswered questions that you can be the first to uncover.
🤔 Unanswered Questions About AI Automation
In today's video, we'll show you exactly how to start an AI automation agency. But being early is a good thing and a bad thing. The pros are that it's a wide-open market with no competition. So if you find a system that works in a specific niche, you will make loads of money. The bad part is there are no courses on any of this yet, so there's no copy-paste blueprint that you can just follow to get started. This may be scary to some, but if you want to make millions in anything, you have to be an innovator.
🕵️♀️ Being an Innovator in AI Automation
As Naval Ravikant said, "If you want to get rich over your life in a deterministically predictable way, stay on the bleeding edge of trends and study technology, design, and art. Become really good at something." If you're watching this video, you probably understand broadly how AI can help businesses and can see how it could be valuable to them. But you are still unsure of exactly what services to offer, how to sell that offer, or even how to fulfill those services.
🧩 The Four Components of an AI Automation Agency
The goal of this video is to demystify AI automation so you fully understand the business model and how you should approach each step. So let's break down an AI automation agency into four parts: AI services, getting clients, sales, and fulfillment. These are the four basic components of any agency, and for those of you that might actually have previous experience with something like SMMA, well, understand that this is the exact same thing, except the only thing different is the service that you're selling. Instead of just running ads on Facebook, you're integrating AI into their business.
💻 AI Services: What You Can Offer
To become one of the best AI automation agencies, you have to fully understand the different types of AI services that you can offer. Then you simply handpick the best solution for each unique client. You can offer automations, chatbots, tool stacks, product recommendations, and much more.
🤖 Automations: Using Make.com to Automate Any System or Process
Let's start with the automations part of an AI automation agency. If you don't know, you can use a tool called Make.com to automate any system or process within a business. For example, my friend Matt Shields runs Facebook ads for real estate agents. His clients want to find people that are looking to sell their homes, and his system to get them clients goes as follows: he runs Facebook ads to homeowners, which then leads to a landing page. The homeowners enter their name and phone number so they can see how much their house is worth, and then the real estate agent calls them to schedule the visit.
If a homeowner clicks on Matt's ads and fills out the form, Matt then sends the lead's phone number to his real estate agent client and says, "Hey, call this lead. They want to know how much their home is worth." Seems simple, right? But Matt runs ads for over 20 clients, and each of them is getting over 10 leads per day. Is Matt just sitting at his computer and texting each real estate agent every time a new lead comes in? No, he created an automated system in Make.com. He connected his Go High Level landing page form to Twilio, and every time a new homeowner clicks an ad, their information gets sent as a text message directly to the real estate agent's phone.
The automated text message says something like this: "Hey, you have a new lead. Call their name, phone number." And this is what is called an automated system or automations. And now you can do the exact same thing but with AI, hence the term AI automations agency. Make.com is just a no-code API connector, and they just released their OpenAI GPT API. You can now connect chat GPT to any software tool and make your own custom automations. This is where creativity is endless, and this is really valuable for businesses because it saves a lot of time and makes things run effortlessly.
💬 Chatbots: Creating Conversational Bots for Customer Support and More
Another service you can offer is AI conversational chatbots. These can take a variety of different forms. One example would be a customer support conversational chatbot trained on all of the website's information. So if customers have questions on inventory, customer stock, or any other FAQ that's listed on the website, they can just ask a conversational chatbot.
Another example of a chatbot would be one for internal team documents and training. Most companies have SOPs, internal best practices, and just documents to help people understand how the business works. You can create a chatbot that helps large companies train their new employees and really just help anyone on their team stay on top of their own assignments. Think of this like a custom chat GPT but specifically for that one company.
Another few examples of chatbots would be one for a car dealership. You could check in on inventory and help people pre-qualify for loans. Or apartment complexes who want to foster a better tenant-landlord relationship. There are dozens of different easy-to-use AI tools to create chatbots, but what we prefer to use is Botpress with Stack AI or another one is Flow Wise.
🛠️ AI Tool Stacks: Analyzing a Business and Recommending Specific AI Tools
Moving on to another service that you can offer, that's just going to be an AI tool stack. You will essentially analyze the entire business and then recommend specific AI tools that will make the company more optimized and more efficient. For example, if it's an accounting firm, you could then recommend that they use Fireflies.ai to record all of their client meetings so that way you can easily take notes and talk back to the AI to see what you actually talked about.
Then they could use Tango.us for step-by-step how-to guides for people's taxes, let's say. Then they can use Chat PDF to actually talk to any of their customers' documents to get specific information. Then lastly, they could use Chat GPT to write all of their emails for their clients. This might sound obvious to us, but that's because we live in the AI world. A lot of these people are too busy and overwhelmed with running their business to look into all the latest and greatest AI tools, even though they will make their business better. So you just letting them know what tools exist and how they should use them will vastly improve their business and will be very valuable to them.
🤝 Getting Clients: Three Ways to Find Potential Clients
Now that you know what services you can offer, let's talk about how to find potential clients. There are dozens of ways to get clients, but we're going to focus on our three favorite ways.
🤝 Working with Other Agencies
The first one that we highly recommend is actually working with other agencies. Other agencies already have relationships with dozens of clients. So whether you want to work with a marketing agency, a design agency, or even another AI automation agency, a symbiotic relationship will be very mutually beneficial.
Agencies are just in the business of finding people who need a service and then finding someone who can provide that service. They then connect those clients with a capable team, and voila, they make money. They don't care if the team works for them directly or it's just another agency that they can hire out. As long as they can make more money, they're happy.
So if you approach, let's say, a marketing agency and tell them about the AI services that you offer, they will then start offering those same services to their existing clients under their brand. Then once those clients say yes, we would like those AI services, they will just hire your agency to fulfill it on the back end. You get dozens of clients, and then they get a finder's fee for bringing you the deal. It's a win-win, and this is how I scaled my first video agency way back in the day. Marketing agencies would close deals with big companies, and then they would hire me to actually make the video ads for those companies.
This is a cheat code and is by far the highest form of leverage when getting agency clients. Why reach out just to one company to get one deal when you can just reach out to one agency and potentially get dozens of deals? Pretty clever, right? Just make sure you have a well-designed professional landing page laying out the results that you get clients and the services that you offer.
📹 Exhibiting Your Expertise on Social Media
Moving on to the second best way to get clients, that's actually exhibiting your expertise on social media. AKA make YouTube content on AI automation, chatbots, and tools. Then people who are looking for ways to add AI into their business will stumble across your video and hire you.
Business owners that want to implement AI into their business will search on YouTube, "How to make an AI chatbot for my website." Then they will stumble across your tutorial video. After about 20 minutes of them trying to do it themselves, they'll probably get frustrated and then say, "Hey, this Brett guy on YouTube, he seems to know what he's talking about since he made the tutorial video. Let me just reach out to him and see if he can do it for me."
Many people think that if they make a video showing their process, that no one will hire them because why don't they just do it themselves? But that is false. Most business owners are extremely busy and overwhelmed running their business that they'd much rather just pay somebody to avoid the time and avoid the headache of learning. And since they stumbled across your video, they will assume you're the expert and reach out to you in the email that you leave in the description of your video.
And funny enough, this very video will probably get my agency a few clients. So if you want to add AI to your business, reach out to our agency. And guys, you don't need tens of thousands of subscribers for this to work. I know multiple people that have made just a few tutorials on YouTube with just a few hundred views, and they've closed ten thousand dollars plus in clients from those videos. Yes, you heard that right. 200 views got them three deals. It's not about the number of views, but it's about the quality of the people watching the videos. And odds are, if people find your content actually searching for it, they are much more likely to be buyers.
💬 Cold Commenting on Social Media
The third and final way to get clients is going to be what I call cold commenting. Choose any social media platform that your potential clients frequent, and then just change your name to something like the AI guy or AI automations king. Next, write a concise bio with a clear value proposition. For example, "Save money, time, and energy with AI automations in your business." Then just put the link to your landing page of your agency where people can book a call in the bio of your profile.
Next, simply go onto potential clients' accounts and start commenting genuine feedback on their posts. Do not, I repeat, do not try to sell your services on the comment section of people's Instagram accounts. They're just going to think it's spam, and they're never ever going to read it in the first place. Instead, just reply something relevant to their post, whether it's a piece of advice, a compliment, or a funny joke. It doesn't matter. But if you say something that they like, they will naturally then go look at your profile. They will then see that you're all about AI, and if they're interested, they will reach out.
Again, guys, it really is that simple. People who want AI in their business just don't know who to go to. And if you catch someone in the right moment, someone who's been thinking about it, then you're going to be the person that they default into.
💰 Sales and Pricing: How to Price Your AI Automation Services
Let's say someone reaches out to you. How do you move forward, and how do you price your services? It's not that simple. Price varies widely based on the complexity of the services that you offer and the nature of the business that you're servicing. If you are working with real estate agents, you can likely charge more since their deals are so large. If you are working with a local bakery, you're probably going to charge much less.
Understand that you are charging based on the value that you provide that specific business, not how much time it takes you to fulfill the service. Let's say a company has five customer support people that they pay two thousand dollars a month each. If you create an AI chatbot that eliminates all of the basic customer support tickets, this company now only needs three people. Now they only have to pay six thousand dollars a month. You just saved them four thousand dollars a month. Multiply that by 12 months, you just saved them forty-eight thousand dollars a year.
So if you save them that much money, you could then easily charge three thousand dollars for a setup fee and then five hundred dollars a month for maintenance and continued training of the bot. I like to use the rule of tin. If I make or save a company ten thousand dollars, then I'm going to charge them one thousand dollars. Again, this is all experimental, and you make it up on the fly. So you can test different prices with different clients. I always recommend starting low and then increasing the price with each new client. This way, you can get some work and experience on under your belt. And anytime you have future clients, you can then show them your previous work so they can trust you more.
And if you do good work, those early clients will then start referring you to their friends, which is how most agencies grow. Now I know a lot of you don't have any idea how to actually start with pricing, so here are some broad ranges. For AI consulting, I would charge anywhere from 100 to 300 dollars per hour based on your experience level. For AI chatbots, anywhere from 1K to 3K to just set up the chatbot. And then for actual advanced AI automations, anywhere from five thousand to fifteen thousand dollars depending on the nature of the business.
Another thing that you can do is just charge a monthly retainer for all of these different AI services. Say something like three thousand dollars a month for six months. And then in that time frame, you are constantly building out chatbots, private models, different AI tools, and giving them the full package.
🚀 Thinking Bigger: Building Custom AI Software Tools for Clients
In my next video, I'm going to show you guys how my agency thinks bigger and how we go above and beyond for our clients. We build them what is essentially their own AI software tool. And we do all of this with no code, thanks to Bubble.io and Make.com. This allows us to charge up to fifty thousand dollars for a single AI automation client. I will break this down in more detail in my next video, so subscribe to the channel if you're excited about AI automation.
🤖 Conclusion
In conclusion, starting an AI automation agency can be a lucrative business opportunity. By offering AI services like automations, chatbots, and AI tool stacks, you can help businesses save time and money. And by using our three favorite methods for finding clients, you can start building your client base today. Remember to price your services based on the value you provide, and always be experimenting with different pricing models. With the right approach, you can become a thought leader in the AI space and establish yourself as an expert in AI automation.
