Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] I haven't logged into Asana in three weeks. And honestly, every time I used to log into Asana, my brain would just freeze and I'd start daydreaming about doing absolutely anything else. The AI loves it, so the AI can fucking have it.
[00:00:13] Well, holy moly. The previous video and episode of the podcast that we launched talking about the headless agency model kind of went nuts. My DMs have blown up over the last couple of weeks. Everyone's asking the same question. This is great, Troy. You're living in the future, but actually give us the nuts and bolts, tell us exactly how you're doing this. So in this video, in this episode of the podcast, I should say I'm going to pull back the curtain and reveal the entire AI system that I've got running here. That is. That is running my entire agency for me. Okay? This is a super tactical exercise and a super tactical episode, so please make some notes. Again, share this with anyone you think might be interested in growing their revenue without growing their headcount. Without further ado, let's dive in. So, a quick recap if you're new here or if you missed it. 28 clients at three grand a month each. That's a million dollars a year in recurring revenue, less than 10 hours a week of my time. No team, no staff, no virtual assistants. Just me and the AI. And I told you, I was at zero clients about four or five weeks ago. As I'm recording this video. I'm now at 10 clients, still onboarding one new client a week by choice, because I want to grow slowly, because I value my time and I have a young family. So the trajectory is set for 28 clients at three grand a month. Now, the DMs have just been completely nuts over the last couple of weeks, and you're all asking the same question. Yeah, but how does the AI actually do the work? So today, I'm going to show you. This isn't the marketing version. This is the real version. First thing I need to clear up, the AI I'm using is not ChatGPT. It's not Claude, it's not Gemini, it's not a chatbot. It's not a team in the Philippines pretending to be a robot. I love ChatGPT and Claude. I use Claude every day. It's open all the time, but it's a tool. And what we've got here is a system of agents. And here's the difference. A tool is something you pick up, use for a task, and put down, whereas a System is something you build once and it keeps running. So imagine you build a team of staff where each person had exactly one job and they did that job incredibly well. The social media person does social media. The account manager manages the accounts and the clients. The reporting person just does the reporting. What a wonderful world that would be that we lived in if grownups just acted like grownups and did their job consistently all the time. But of course, we know that's just not the way it is. Now imagine those team members never quit. They never sleep, they never call in sick, they never ask for a raise, they never take their training with them when they leave. And every time you tell them how to do something better, they remember it forever and apply it to every client from that point on. Well, that's what we've got here with the AI. One AI agent orchestrating a team of co workers doing the job. A system of specialized AI agents, what I call skills. Each doing one job plugged together to deliver agency services end to end. Each skill is documented and each skill is tested. And each skill gets better over time and they snap together like Lego blocks to form complete services for clients. So let me actually walk you through some of the skills running in my agency right now. This isn't theory. This isn't something that Claude told me I should make a video about. This is the actual setup. Skill number one is the brand voice extraction. When a new client onboards, the AI runs a discovery process. It interviews the client, reads their existing content, analyzes their tone, builds a brand voice document that captures exactly how they sound. Punchy or polished, conversational or formal, Aussie or American. Whatever they are, the system learns it even in Dutch, which I'll talk about in a moment. Skill number two is the ideal client profile and the content strategy. So from the brand guide document, the AI builds out an ideal customer profile and a content strategy for the client. 3 months of content mapped out in advance with the themes identified, the pillar topics chosen, the search terms researched. This used to be a $5,000 engagement at least, and the AI does it in less than a few hours. Skill number three in my agency is long form blog writing. Every week for every client, the AI produces a 1500-2000 word thought leadership blog post. It's not an SEO play, but it is optimized for keywords because why wouldn't you? Bound to the brand voice on strategy, the image is generated. The featured image for each blog post is generated and bound to the client's image style guide. The blog posts are written in A way that they're optimized also for LLMs and AI search. By Tuesday it's drafted. By Thursday it's QC'd and approved by the client. By Friday it's published. Skill number four is the social media production. 40 plus social posts per client per month, each one with a generated image, again bound to their brand image guidelines, scheduled and ready to ship. Skill number five is the email newsletter that they send to their clients. List again on brand and tied into their content strategy. Skill number six is project management. This one's massively underrated and I've never seen anyone do this yet. The AI updates Asana automatically. It moves tasks, it assigns assigns things to people, it marks things done. I haven't logged into Asana in three weeks and honestly, every time I used to log into Asana, my brain would just freeze and I'd start daydreaming about doing absolutely anything else. The AI loves it, so the AI can have it. Skill number seven, client communication. Every client has a dedicated Slack channel. The AI sends them updates. Hey Paul, this week's blog post is ready for review. Here's the link. Let us know if you want any changes. And if they ask for revisions, the AI handles it. If something needs my attention, it tags me. I don't get pinged for routine stuff anymore. I just get pinged for the things that actually need my brain. There are more skills that we'll dial in. Paid media management is an example. Now that Meta has released their MCP approval workflows, onboarding sequences, renewal automations, you get the picture now. This is real work going to real clients right now. This isn't something I'm building in the future. I've built this already. It's already live, it's already happening. So let's say tomorrow I sign a new client, I've signed the agreement, they've paid the first invoice. What happens? So week one is a discovery process. I have a 60 minute kickoff call with a client to get to know them. We talk about their business, their goals, their ideal client, their voice, what they want to be known for. The AI is in that call and also doing its own work in the background, researching their website and their social media profiles. The AI is in the call, listening, taking notes, building the foundational documents. By the end of week one, the AI has produced three documents. The Brand Voice Guide, the ideal client profile and the Content Strategy. I review them, give the AI any tweaks, it updates it, we send it to the client for approval. Week two is the strategy. Build from those three documents, we build out the full three months of content. Pillar topics, blog post titles, social themes. We lock in their image guide, their library of images. We build out email sequences, keyword research baked in. I review it with the client on a 30 minute call. We adjust where needed, give the AI feedback and then it's approved. And once that's approved, week three, we're into production. The first batch of content gets produced. Blog posts, social media, newsletters, images, IQ see the first batch heavily because the AI is still learning the client's voice. I make corrections, I feed corrections back into the system. The system learns and updates itself. Week four through eight is calibration. So each batch of content gets a little less of my attention because the system's getting better at the client's voice. I'm watching the quality control pass rate go up, errors go down, revisions go down. Weeks 9 through 12 is autonomous operation operation. And by this point, the system is producing content for the client. Without my hands on it, I'm just doing strategic check ins twice a month. The AI is handling everything else. Production, project management, client communications. That's the model. That's how it actually works. All right? Not theory, not someday. Right now it's working. Now, I know what you're thinking because I've been getting these questions in the DMs every day for the last couple of weeks. Yeah, this all sounds great, Uncle Troy, but is the output actually any good or is it just AI slope with a bow tie on it? And it's a fair question. And it's the question that six months ago I would have had a very different answer. There's two reasons it doesn't read like AI slot. One is the voice capture that we do up front. Most AI sounds generic because it comes from people who've used ChatGPT with a one line prompt and seen the default output full of em dashes and those classic AI sentence structures. And then they might take that and run it through a humanizer. And guess what? We're back to copying and pasting between platforms.
[00:08:24] The default AI output is generic, but when you front load brand voice extraction during onboarding, the output isn't generic anymore. It's finely tuned to that client. It sounds like that client. Quick tip here. The fastest way to do this is to interview your client and get your client talking a lot about what they know. Take the transcript and feed it to the AI so the AI can analyze how your client actually talks, not types. Okay? The second reason it doesn't sound like AI is because of our editorial quality control, every piece of content that we produce goes through a final pass before it ships. The AI handles 95% of it. I do the 5% that requires human judgment. We're not editing AI to disguise it. We're finishing it. The same way any agency finishes content before it ships. And here's the proof. My clients are agency owners. They make content for a living. So if anyone could spot AI slop, it's them. They're paying me and they're recommending me to other agencies. Sam at Heartbeat Digital here in Melbourne absolutely raving about the work that we're doing for them. Rene at Spiker and Co in the Netherlands, where we're producing blog posts in English and his social media posts in Dutch. In fact, I just want to read what Renee sent to me in Slack the other day. The system agency Mavericks built is remarkably simple. You answer a handful of questions, and content just flows. Blog posts and social posts get approved through AI. Edits appear instantly, and everything publishes automatically. It even works perfectly in Dutch. Every week, there's new content on our socials and website, and I no longer have to chase it. That alone has been worth it. Real agencies paying real money and getting real results. And if the output was bad, I wouldn't be having this conversation. I'd be refunding people. But instead, I'm capping growth at one new client a week because I want to maintain the quality. And as I've said, I value my calendar and I value the time I get to spend with my kids. So if the AI is doing all of this, what do you do all day as the agency owner? And this is the question that actually matters, because the answer is the whole point of this conversation that we're having. You should be doing three things. One, you sign clients. You do sales, relationships, and networking. The AI doesn't do this for you. And frankly, it shouldn't. Humans buy from humans. You are the face. You are the person they trust. You're the one shaking hands and making a promise and putting your reputation on the line.
[00:10:37] Number two is you have strategic conversations twice a month with each client. 20, 30 minutes maximum. How's it going? What's working? What do you want more of? Anything we should change. This is where you keep the relationship strong and you earn the lifetime value of the client. Number three is you supervise the system. You watch the quality control pass rate, you spot trends. You train the new skills. When something new comes up, you iterate. The AI gets smarter over time because you make it smarter. And that's it. That's your day. No more team management, no SOPs, no hiring, no firing, no payroll, no where's that document? No Asana. Well, the AI is in Asana. You're not. No. That offshore contract that ghosted us. Again, just sales, strategy and supervision. The three things you actually got into business for. Now, I'm not saying you need to fire your existing team. I'm saying if you're a solopreneur, you don't want to hire a team. This is perfect. If you've got an existing team and you want to scale revenue and profit without extra headcount, this is perfect. So, now that you've seen the system, I know a different set of questions is starting to come up and I want to just tackle them here, head on, because you've already been asking me in the DMs anyway, what software do I need? Well, you need a handful of things. You need a project management tool. I use Asana, but anything works. A lot of our agencies use ClickUp. It's fine. A CRM, we use high level. Yeah, it's clunky as shit, but it does the job. A communication tool. Slack is where I live and. And it's what I would recommend, because our AI is built for Slack. Plus the platforms your clients already use. WordPress, Google Workspace, Meta. Just the standard digital marketing stack. Total monthly cost is in the hundreds, not the thousands. It's way less than one employee. The other question I get is how customized is this to my niche? Well, very. Because the skill files are the infrastructure. Think of a skill file as a modern version of a standard operating procedure. Here's what I want you to understand. Instead of writing an SOP and delegating that to a human being to follow, you're writing a skills file and giving that to the AI. The configuration, the brand voice docs, the strategy templates, the content libraries. Those get tuned to the clients you serve and the services you provide. So if you're serving plumbers, the system gets tuned for plumbers. If you're serving SaaS, it gets tuned for SaaS. Same skills, different configuration and context. If you've hired a copywriter to write blog posts for plumbers and a copywriter to hire blog posts for SaaS. Same skill, different context, different configuration. That's what we install during the 90 days. What about my existing clients? Is another question that I've been getting a lot of. Do I have to start from scratch? Not at all. Your existing clients can be migrated into the system over a few weeks. You Keep them. You just stop doing the work yourself or delegating it to your team. Another question I get is how long until I see roi? Well, it depends on your client base. If you're already running an agency with a few clients paying retainer, you'll see time savings within the first 30 days. You'll be making more profit within 30 days, guaranteed real margin improvement by day 60 and full operational independence by day 90. If you're starting from zero clients, that's a different conversation. The system runs whether you have one client or 28, but you still need to go and get the clients. The AI doesn't do that for you. We're not promising leads here and we're not closing deals for you. So just a quick honesty moment. This isn't a magic button. Setting up a system like this takes work. The 90 days of setup is real. You're going to be in the AI workspace, training skills, reviewing output, calibrating and learning the work front loads. It's heavy at the start, so that in 90 days you can sit back and watch this thing do its magic. By month four, you're working ten hours a week. But months one to three are real work. Also, I just want to manage expectations. This isn't for everyone. If you don't have a network, if you've never sold anything to a business client, if you can't have a strategic conversation with a CEO or a founder without sweating, this isn't going to fix that. We're not teaching you how to start from absolute zero. We're showing you how to build a fulfillment infrastructure that lets you serve clients without a team. It's a different problem if you're already running an agency and you're stuck in fulfillment hell. This is the easy button. If you've tried to start an agency before and you got tripped up by the delivery side of it, not the sales side of it, then you're this is your second ticket. So from here there are two paths. Path one is just be patient, stay here, wait for the next video, stay on the email list. Video 3 is coming out in a couple of days, and by the end of that, you'll have everything you need to make a decision. Path two, like a bunch of people have already done. If you just want to get moving, a few of you watching this video right now have already made the call. You don't need video 3. You don't need pricing. You just want me to install this inside your agency for you. There are still a small number of done for you spots open Half of them have already gone. I've got three left. So book a call with myself or Alan on the team. We'll just have a conversation and work out if it's a fit. If it isn't, we'll part ways as friends and if it is, we'll get to work.
[00:15:35] All right, thanks for listening to the Agents how podcast and this very special three part series that we're putting together for the headless agency model in the next episode. As I mentioned, I'm just going to pull back to Kurt and show you exactly how this works. What does it look like for you to work with me, either one on one or in a small group setting to set this up in your agency so that you can scale your revenue without scaling your headcount and actually reduce the number of hours you work a week? I know it sounds like a pie in the sky theory, and I know a lot of people don't believe me and that's okay. This is only right for a select few people who actually want to step into the future and experience what a headless agency looks like. This is the future of work. I'm all in. Mark my words. It is May 2026 now. We will look back on this moment in time two, three, four, five years from now and say, well, Uncle Troy might have been onto something. The guys at OpenAI are talking about a screenless future. The future of work and the future of digital agencies is headless. So get amongst it.
[00:16:37] Make sure you get the next episode of this podcast and then reach out to us and have a conversation about coming on board and working with us to get this set up in your agency. I look forward to speaking with you on the next episode. Until then, I'm Troy Dean. Let's get to work.
