Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: A traditional agency at the Same revenue is eight to 10 employees, half a million dollars or more in payroll, the owner's working 50 plus hours a week. Your margins are under 30%. If you're really good, after you pay the team, the rent, the software stack, constant hiring, firing, training, client churn, staff churn, you've got one really good team member and if they leave, you know, the whole thing falls down like a house of cards. This is the same revenue half the time, zero people, management, way better margins.
[00:00:30] Speaker B: Welcome to the Agency Hour podc. This is a special edition of this podcast because frankly, I feel like I
[00:00:37] Speaker A: have fallen out of an episode of
[00:00:39] Speaker B: the Jetsons and landed in the Matrix.
Listen, we've all been looking for the easy button for a long time, ever since Tim Ferriss wrote the Four Hour Workweek back in 2008, I think it was. I remember reading that on a beach
[00:00:52] Speaker A: in Gili Trawangan, which is a little
[00:00:54] Speaker B: island off the coast of Bali in Indonesia. Reading that book and thinking, this is it. This is what we've been looking for. And since then we've tried a bunch
[00:01:03] Speaker A: of things to free up our time
[00:01:05] Speaker B: and maximize our income, right? Most of us just want to provide a good lifestyle for our family without too much stress. And so what we've been doing since then is writing up SOPs and hiring labor in emerging economies to try and follow those SOPs. And that's kind of worked and it kind of hasn't. Then we've been writing custom GPTs and trying to get AI to do the thing, and that kind of worked and it kind of hasn't. Well, I'm here to tell you I've
[00:01:33] Speaker A: found the easy button, and my mission
[00:01:36] Speaker B: now is to help you build an agency that runs with no staff or no additional staff and reduce your workload. I'm on a trajectory to do a million dollars a year in recurring revenue with no staff, working about 10 hours a week.
[00:01:51] Speaker A: Now, it's taken me close to 90
[00:01:53] Speaker B: days to get this dialed in, but
[00:01:56] Speaker A: I just want to walk you through
[00:01:57] Speaker B: the math and in the next few episodes peel back the curtain and show you the system that I'm running here. I'm not overwhelming myself with 150 agents running on OpenClor on a computer. I'm talking to one AI agent in Slack that's doing everything for me.
[00:02:11] Speaker A: So this episode of the podcast, I'm
[00:02:14] Speaker B: going to walk you through the math and I really hope you take some notes and get something out of this.
[00:02:18] Speaker A: Because this, ladies and gentlemen, I call
[00:02:20] Speaker B: it the headless agency model. It's going to allow you to scale your revenue with no additional headcount.
[00:02:25] Speaker A: Let's dive in. By the way, if you're excited about
[00:02:28] Speaker B: what we're talking about here on the Agency Hour podcast, but you just don't have any time to breathe because you've got too much client work on your desk. Just ship it off to the guys at E2M Solutions. Go and have a conversation with Brent. E2M Solutions.com they've just rebranded. They are the black label now. The black label standard in developing services for your clients. White label services, whether it's development or SEO or content or ad management, whatever it is, whatever you need to get done for your clients, including building AI solutions.
[00:02:57] Speaker A: If you need to do work for
[00:02:59] Speaker B: your clients but you don't have the time or the desire to actually fulfill on the work, just go and talk to Brent at E2M Solutions. Free up your time so then you've got time to think about what you want to do with your business long term. All right, let's get back to the program.
[00:03:11] Speaker A: So a couple of weeks ago I posted this on Facebook. $1 million agency, no staff, 10 hours a week. It kind of went off a bit harder than I expected. I frankly didn't expect much, but it's kind of gone bananas. Over 250 comments and over 150 of you have opted in at the wait list to learn more. My DMs have been non stop ever since. And the same question keeps coming up over and over again. How is this actually possible? But I want to start first with why I'm doing this and how we got here and why this even exists. Because here's the thing, I didn't build this so that I could teach other agencies to do it. I built it for myself. I've started my own digital agency that serves other digital agencies where we do not do white label service for agencies. We do the content, the marketing, the operations, the backend work that keeps their agencies running. We're kind of like the mechanic that fixes the broken down car in the mechanic's front yard. And about two months in, three of my clients independently asked me the same question. Troy, how do we set this up inside my agency? Because I want to do this for my clients and at first, full transparency. I said no, I'm not interested in doing that. I'm running my own thing. I'm growing slowly. I'm not in the business this time of teaching people how to copy what I'm doing. And then Another client asked and another client asked. And so I'm now doing one on one, done for you implementation for my agencies, teaching them how to do it. This exists because my own paying customers
[00:04:39] Speaker B: asked me to package it.
[00:04:40] Speaker A: Not because I had a brain fart of an idea for a new course. Not because I need a new stream of revenue transparently, but because the people who are already paying me to do it said, hey, we want to do this for our clients. And they were asking for it. So a quick bit of context, if we haven't met. My name's Troy and I run Agency Mavericks, and I've spent the last 15 years or so coaching digital agency owners through every part of growth strategy you can think of. Paid discovery, recurring revenue, productized services, all of it. I've also run my own agencies. I've hired teams, I've fired teams, I've burned out trying to scale through headcount, and I've watched friends do the same. And six months ago, I started building something different. I wanted to know if I could run a digital agency without a team. Not a small team, not a lean team, no team. Just me and AI. Today I have 10 paying clients. Four weeks ago I had none. And I'm capping growth at one new client per week by choice. I have a young family. I don't want to work 60 hours a week. And so the math I'm about to show you here gets to a million dollars a year at 28 clients paying three grand a month, with me working less than 10 hours a week. I'm going to show you exactly how we do it. I'm a third of the way there. The trajectory is set, the system is real. I'm building it in public so you can watch it happen and hopefully come along for the journey. Okay, so let's talk about the math. This is the spine of the entire thing, and you're going to understand how it works. I'm going to walk you through it very slowly. 28 clients at $3,000 a month each, that's $84,000 a month in recurring revenue, $1,000,008,000 a year. Now, 28 clients might sound like a lot, but it isn't. I'm onboarding one a week. So that's 28 weeks, six and a half months from zero.
[00:06:21] Speaker B: As I said, I'm already a third the way there.
[00:06:23] Speaker A: So now let's look at how much time it takes to serve those clients. Each client takes about 90 minutes a month from me. Now, that includes two quick calls with them a month with some strategic conversations, checking in, how things going, what's working, what's not. And the rest of that time is me making sure the AI is delivering what it should. So 28 clients times an hour and a half each per month is 42 hours a month. Divide that by 4.3 weeks in a month and that's 9.7 hours a week. Let's call it 10 hours a week. 28 clients, a million dollars a year in recurring. No team, me watching the AI do its thing and talking to the clients. It's less than 90 minutes a month of actual time on each client account.
Now, I've spent about 90 days setting this up, so you're not going to hit this out of the gate. All right, now I want to talk about the output, what we're actually doing for the clients. Because it's not just writing AI slop copy and handing it over. So the output side, because 3,000amonth means clients are getting real work done. So for each client, every month, the AI produces a weekly long form thought leading blog post. And we get that information from the client. When we onboard them, we understand what each client wants to be known for, who their ICP is. We build a brand guide for each client. We build a content strategy for each client. When I say we, I mean me and the AI. And then from that content strategy, we
[00:07:53] Speaker B: map out the first three months worth
[00:07:54] Speaker A: of content and we produce a weekly long form blog post, 1500, 2000 words every week for the client. It is keyword optimized. It's not an SEO play, it's thought leadership content. But we may as well optimize it for search and LLMs while we're there. So we do the keyword research and we make sure that it's built in a way that it's going to get found in search and LLMs. So that's one blog post per week. We produce an email newsletter for our client each week that they send to their list. We also produce about 40 social media posts per month for each client. Each blog post includes a featured image, a unique generated featured image for each blog post, and a unique image for each social media post. And those images are bound to the client's style guide. So that's the deliverables that we're delivering for the client. There's a backend system here that our clients adopt. They're using thought leadership content to get more calls booked and to get people to show up and to get people to convert. So by the time people are on a call, they Already see their agency as the trusted source. Right? So this works. Not running ads for E commerce. Right. I'm not building custom hand crafted websites for, you know, big API integration companies. Okay. We're doing, we're doing a productized service delivery here. The other thing that the AI is doing is the project management and the account management. So I don't log into Asana anymore. Thank God, because every time I log into Asana, my brain freezes and I fall asleep at the desk. The AI is managing all of the tasks in Asana. It's managing approvals from clients. Whenever a client asks for a revision on anything, the AI just automatically does it. Once the thing is approved, it updates Asana and it sends the messages to the client in their dedicated Slack channel. So it's handling project management, it's also handling account management updates. So anything that can be done with an API, and these days that includes paid media platforms like Meta, it gets done by the AI consistently, on time, every week, every month, without me touching the keyboard or the mouse. So compare that to running this same business the old way. A traditional agency at the Same revenue is eight to 10 employees, half a million dollars or more in payroll. The owner's working 50 plus hours a week. Your margins are under 30%. If you're really good, after you pay the team, the rent, the software stack, constant hiring, firing, training, client churn, staff churn. You've got one really good team member, and if they leave, you know, the whole thing falls down like a house of cards. This is the same revenue half the time, zero people management, way better margins. That' the math. Here's where it gets interesting. The agency model isn't dead, the staffing model is. And for the last 20 years, scaling a digital agency meant scaling a team. Hire copywriters, designers, account managers, ops people, virtual assistants, write, SOPs, delegate, manage, hope that your hires don't quit, train the new ones, rinse and repeat. And that entire playbook was built on one assumption, that you needed humans to do the work.
Twelve months ago, that was kind of still true. Today it isn't. The big shift in this industry that most people still haven't actually internalized and got their head around is one. How reliable AI is now, how fast it is, and how consistent it is to actually deliver agency services.
Not help with agency services, but actually deliver them. Not just deliver the digital assets that your clients want, whether it's emails, blog posts, social media, ad campaigns, creative copy reports, dashboards, whatever, but also the account management and the project management and the Biggest software companies on the planet are betting on this happening Salesforce Meta anthropic OpenAI stripe notion. Every major platform is racing to release what's called an MCP model context protocol. And that translates to guardrails and a system that let AI agents interact with their software directly.
No clicking, no logging in, no human moving a mouse. So why are they doing this? Why Has Salesforce gone headless360? Why has Meta just last week announced their MCP? Well, there's three reasons, and all three are important for agency owners. One, they can see that the interface is shifting. If the future is headless and people working through AI agents instead of browser tabs and dashboards, then any platform that isn't reachable from those agents becomes invisible.
They're hedging against a world where the UI isn't the primary way that work gets done.
Number two is per seat. SaaS pricing is dying. If one AI agent does the work of five employees, you don't need five seats, you need one agent. Salesforce's whole agent force pivot is them quietly admitting this. The future pricing model is per action, per, per outcome, per result. And MCPs are the rails that make that work. And the third reason is that most platforms have way more capability through their API than through their ui. Building screens is fucking expensive. How many developers do you think Salesforce and Meta have to make their UI work in? All the different browsers barely work. So through mcps, AI agents can use the full capability of these platforms. Features that were never worth shipping a button for. Which means a headless agency running on AI can actually do more than a traditional agency running on humans clicking buttons. So when I say the staffing model is dead and the headless model is next, I'm not making this shit up. I'm watching Salesforce and Meta and every major platform on earth. Fund the infrastructure right now, today, with billions of dollars and we get to use those railway tracks for free for our clients. Most agency owners are still trying to scale the 2019 way because at some point they read the four hour workweek and they're developing SOPs and trying to hire labor in an emerging economy. Hire train, delegate, hope. It's like a fucking slot machine. Sometimes you get lucky, but most of the time you lose money. And they're losing because they're playing the wrong game. The new game is to build the system once, plug in the clients and let it run. Now, I just want to address some obvious questions that I know you have, and this is what my DMs have been slammed with over the last week or so. So I know what you're thinking because I've been answering these in the DMs for the last 10 days. Yeah, but the AI output must be mediocre. Well, dude, my clients are digital agency owners. They make content for a living. If anyone on the planet could spot AI slop, it's them. And they're paying me, they're recommending me, they're giving me testimonials. The output is good enough that people who do this for a living can't tell because we capture each client's voice during onboarding and run every piece through editorial QC before it ships. Yeah, but you need 90 days to set it up. That's hidden labor. Yep, and during those 90 days, the AI is producing real work from week one. So the labor curve drops as the system gets trained. How long is it going to take you to onboard a new team member until they're actually making an impact on profit? By the end of 90 days, you have a fully operational fulfillment infrastructure that runs without you. Compare that to hiring a content marketer in Australia or the US or the UK. 65 to 80 grand a year, plus super plus benefits. 90 days to ramp them up, 30% chance that they're gone in 18 months and you start the whole process over. The AI doesn't quit, it doesn't get sick, it doesn't take its training with you and it doesn't complain. Yeah, but you must have staff. Yep, I do. I have some full time team members helping me run the coaching business. They work on the coaching business. The videos you're watching, the content I publish. This has got nothing to do with the agency. The agency is me and the AI end of list. Yeah, but you're a 10 clients, not 28. Correct. And I'm about four weeks in. I had zero clients four weeks ago. I'm onboarding one a week by choice. The math projects to 28. I might not even get to 28. It just depends on how much mental bandwidth I've got. I've got a successful coaching business already. I don't even fucking need to do this. I'm doing this to prove the point. I also have a young family, so I want to spend time with them. I'm building this in public so you can watch it happen. If I'm wrong, you'll know. If I'm right, you'll have seen the whole thing. Yeah, but if this is so good, why teach it instead of scaling to 280 clients? Well, because 28 is my number. As I said, I have a young family. I want my weekends. I'm capping it at 28 by choice. And once I'm there, my agency's built teaching. This is how I keep building something without breaking my own rules about how
[00:16:30] Speaker B: I actually want to live my life.
[00:16:31] Speaker A: Now, this is the part of the video that most people in the agency space won't say out loud. I don't want to grow a big team. I don't want to manage humans. I don't want to be on calls
[00:16:39] Speaker B: 50 hours a week.
[00:16:39] Speaker A: I don't want to chase scale for the sake of scale. I want to make great money. And a million dollars a year recurring at that kind of margin is great money without paying the lifestyle cost that usually comes with it. I want to be available for school pickups. I want my weekends. I want to be in the studio playing guitar on a Tuesday afternoon if
[00:16:56] Speaker B: I feel like it.
[00:16:56] Speaker A: I'm 52 years old. I'm running out of life. The headless agency model isn't about working less for the sake of working less. It's about doing work that actually matters. Strategy, relationships, the things that humans are still better at and will always be better at than AI and letting the robots handle everything else. So if you've ever felt like the agency game is broken because the only path forward is to hire more people, manage more people, work more hours, then this is the alternative. If you run an agency right now and you want me to install this inside your business directly for you, there's a small number of done for you spots open, and I'm talking a very small number. Some of them are already gone. You can book a call with myself or Alan on the team using the link near this video. We'll figure out if it's a good fit, no pressure. If it's not, we'll part ways. If it is, we'll show you how it works.
[00:17:47] Speaker B: Hey, thanks for listening to the Agency Help podcast.
[00:17:50] Speaker A: I really appreciate you being here. Feel free to like, like, subscribe. Share this with anyone you think might be interested. And remember, in the next episode of this podcast, I'm going to peel back
[00:17:57] Speaker B: the curtain and explain exactly how this AI system works.
[00:18:00] Speaker A: I look forward to sharing that with you then. Until then, I'm Troy Dean.
[00:18:03] Speaker B: Let's get to work.
