The 3 AI Agency Mistakes Keeping You From $20K/Month Retainers

0:00 Let me start with a little story. So, I'm I'm 23 years old at this point. I just quit my full-time job. I just closed this deal with a client and I deliver something and and he messages me

0:11 on Slack and he's like, "Hey, can we get on a call?" And this is what he says to me as soon as I hop on the Zoom. He goes, "We are not getting the value that we paid for." But I made three big

0:19 mistakes here. And that's pretty much what I want to talk about today are these three big mistakes. So the first one is that what I built for him, the personal assistant, was not the

0:28 constraint in his business. The second one, I guess you guys saw the third one. The second one is that I didn't choose a KPI. And the third one is that I guessed on

0:37 the price. So like I said, that's what I want to talk about today. So right now, I'm at this event in Montenegro called Workless AI, and there are a bunch of AI content creators, AI

0:48 experts, and a bunch of community members. And on the main day, I closed off the day with this presentation which I'm about to share with you guys. So, hope you guys enjoy. Hope you find it

0:57 insightful. I'll see you guys in there. This is called Still Relevant Next Year. And it's actually kind of funny because last night I kind of switched up what I was going to talk about a little bit

1:06 because yesterday in the VIP sections and I talked to so many of you guys and I just kind of had a feeling that this would resonate a bit more because whether you are I mean I think a lot of

1:13 you guys are building kind of like an AI consultancy, an AI agency or working with clients. Um, but even if you're not, I think that this is the way that you should be thinking about using AI

1:21 within your own business. And um, yeah. So, let me just although also, um, I hope this picture that's Montenegro, right? Okay. That'd be awkward if it wasn't. I I wasn't sure. It was codeex

1:32 threw it in there. So, good to know that that's Montenegro. Okay, cool. So, start with a little story. So, I'm I'm 23 years old at this point. I just quit my full-time job. I just closed this deal

1:44 with a client and I deliver something and and he messages me on Slack and he's like, "Hey, can we get on a call?" And this is what he says to me as soon as I hop on the Zoom. He goes, "We are not

1:53 getting the value that we paid for." And this really made me think because, you know, I started to question like, did I just make a huge mistake? Am I not actually able to build these solutions?

2:02 Am I not going to turn this into a business? And so I realized that the reason that this happened was because, well, first of all, I made this video which went viral. It was like a personal

2:11 assistant. And so he saw that. Lots of people saw that and they wanted this. But I made three big mistakes here. And that's pretty much what I want to talk about today are these three big

2:20 mistakes. So the first one is that what I built for him, the personal assistant, was not the constraint in his business. The second one, I guess you guys saw the third one. The second one

2:31 is that I didn't choose a KPI. And the third one is that I guessed on the price. So like I said, that's what I want to talk about today. I had a big realization here before I started to

2:41 scale my business and I was doing everything in the agency myself all the way from the lead genen all the way to the you know invoicing all of that kind of stuff. I realized that our job is to

2:51 be the ones to diagnose and prove you know it's one thing to just be kind of like you take the ticket you develop whatever they're asking for. You kind of evolve from that and then you start to

3:00 be the doctor and you start to diagnose the pain that they're feeling. But then you're still not done yet because you have to prove the value because if you don't prove the value then how are you

3:09 going to win more business? And I've got another quick story to tell you guys about in just a sec. But first I wanted to start off with if you guys don't know me a little bit about my background. My

3:16 name is Nate. Graduated from the University of Iowa in 2024 and I was studying business analytics and marketing. So don't come from a technical background although I did work

3:25 with data quite a bit. So I've got a good understanding of data which was very helpful in automation. So can't lie about that. Um, from there I graduated and I was working at Goldman Sachs as an

3:34 analyst and I was automating a lot of stuff. And what that helped me realize was that automation is not new at all. It feels new because the word AI has been put in front of it. And that's what

3:43 a lot of business owners are kind of waking up to. And it's funny because when I first started running my agency, I used to joke with my friends and you know some of my my partners when I

3:51 started when I brought on some partners that we're not even an AI agency. We are a data infrastructure agency and then after that we're just a boring automation agency. And I think that's a

3:59 really good realization to have because that the whole reframe of diagnosing the problem is that people might come to you and they want an AI agent because they

4:07 saw a YouTube video that went viral or because they saw something on LinkedIn, but your job is to figure out what do they actually need. Um, and remember how I said the thing about

4:16 you have to prove the value. I was building a lot of automations at Goldman and actually you know that's on the next slide I'll talk about that in a sec. um sold my agency for sold my agency once

4:27 we scaled it past $100,000 a month. It was purely because I was way more passionate about education. Um but the reason we were able to get to $100,000 a month is because the minimum to work

4:35 with us was a $20,000 a month retainer. And the only reason we were able to do those retainers is because of this exact kind of like three-step framework of working with clients. Um I've got a

4:44 YouTube channel. It's pretty much the top of funnel. That's where I am doing a lot of the education. And then my free community called a automation society is where we try to get people into and try

4:52 to build community. So real quick, I wanted to start off with like why did I bring up the Goldman thing? What did that teach me? Number one, like I said, boring is beautiful. Deterministic

5:01 automations, they're easier to build. They are easier to evaluate and they are less risky ultimately because they're deterministic. You know the inputs and you know the outputs. Two is that big

5:12 companies I was, you know, hosting is doing a lot of stuff with AI which is which is awesome but typically when I've worked with companies and when I was at Goldman just kind of move slower they

5:20 have a lot of change management issues and obviously in a or an institution like Goldman in that type of vertical there's a lot of regulation and then the third thing is that you need to

5:31 spotlight your value. So quick story here I remember I was building a lot of automations like I said I built a few like weekly report things. I built a few dashboards and I was on a call with my

5:42 entire team. So probably 20 25 people and I was showing them this automation, you know, on a Zoom call. So your name is right there under your face, right? And I get off the call. It was also my

5:50 job to send out the meeting minutes, which obviously we know AI can do now. But I sent out the meeting minutes and I got a response from one of the managers that said, "Good job, Arthur." I'm like,

5:58 "Who is Arthur? My name is right there and I sent you the meeting minutes." And that just made me realize that if you're not explaining to the business owner, to the stakeholder what your automation

6:08 actually did, then it's hard to get credit for it. So you could potentially be in a situation where you're making the business tens of thousands of dollars, but they don't actually know

6:16 that or acknowledge that because you didn't prove it. And it's not bragging, it's just proving what your systems actually did. So those are three big lessons that I had that I tried to carry

6:24 with me through my AI automation agency journey. Now, think about it like this. So truly the only way for a business to scale is to remove constraints. And it's very

6:37 simple at a high level. Obviously there's a lot of things that you know a lot of nuance once you get into the weeds of that but that's at the end of the day if you want a business to scale

6:44 you have to remove constraints. You might get a lot of people coming to you like I did that says, "Hey, we need an AI agent that does X, Y, and Z because they saw a viral video because

6:55 their board is putting pressure on them to have an AI strategy because their competitors are posting on LinkedIn saying, "Look at this AI agent that we built that's doing all this for us." And

7:04 so that makes me feel like what they're doing is they're actually just buying relief. They're buying the ability to say, "Yeah, we work with an AI agency. Yeah, we have an AI strategy. We have

7:11 this agent going to production. We have blah blah blah." But that's not really what you're trying to provide. You're not trying to provide relief. if you're trying to provide real business value.

7:19 So, the whole idea is to reframe. I've done probably 300 or more discovery calls and what I've realized is that they come to you and they say something, but that's

7:30 almost never what they want. And so, your job is to figure out why did they book in the call? Because they booked in for some reason, right? They had they're feeling pain or they're feeling

7:38 pressure. And so, you have you have to figure out what is that actual pain. You kind of have to take a step back there. There's pain somewhere and that is your job. You are paid to solve the pain and

7:47 the more pain you can solve, the more money that your business will make. I think this might have might have died on me. Okay, so the reason I put this up there is because think about if you were

7:58 to work with an agency that was going to help you run ads. It's super super clear. Like you know what is your budget for ads? $10,000 and you in a direct correlation because of you ran those

8:10 ads, you made $50,000 in sales. That like the agency doesn't even have to prove that to you. It's very clear but it's not super clear when it comes to automation. So you have to make it

8:19 clear. So those are the three things I want to talk about right constraints KPIs stands for key performance indicator and then how do you actually price this stuff so

8:29 that you can clearly show this is how much you paid and this is how much you're going to make your business back. Okay. So starting off with a constraint. The only way for a business to scale is

8:40 to remove constraints to directly attack them. And at a very high level, your business is either going to be supply constrained or demand constrained. Meaning supply

8:49 constrained, too many customers coming in and you cannot service them. Demand constrained, you need business. You have no people coming in. So I really like to think of this as a pipe.

9:00 The water coming into your pipe is revenue. It's cash flow. And you obviously want that pipe to be clean, no leaks, and you want lots of water to go through. So the top image we see is a

9:12 pipe that has a clog in the middle. And this is probably a supply constrained business because they're having a lot of water come through, but the water isn't making it all the way to the end. Maybe

9:20 it's leaking out. It's not coming out the other end of the pipe. The bottom one is one where there's no water in the pipe. And right now there's no clogs. There probably are. There there always

9:29 more clogs. But right now this this business on the bottom is demand constrained and they need more water inside their pipe. So let me tell you another quick story.

9:37 I had a med spa owner that came to me and she wanted a lead generation AI agent. She wanted to make more money and I saw the stat the other day. Um, couldn't be outdated by now given how

9:48 fast the space moves. But the stat was basically that over 50% of all AI automations are like lead genen or sales or marketing automations. And I think that makes sense because what is the

9:58 pain a lot of us are feeling is that we want to scale our monthly recurring revenue. And usually the first thing you think is like oh more leads, more clients. But in this case, the med spa

10:06 owner wanted more leads. And when I really tried to dig into the pain there and figure out where the constraint was, the constraint was, she ended up telling me that they had lots of leads coming in

10:18 consistently, but what happened was they weren't showing up to their appointments. And then all of the people that had showed up to an appointment, there was no follow-up. So the LTV was

10:27 extremely low, meaning there was a decent amount of water coming in the pipe, but it was just leaking out before it ever made it to the end. And so we realized together on this call that it

10:35 would be much more valuable to the business to build reactivation systems, to build follow-up reminders on their appointments so that people actually started to show up more. And that's just

10:44 a perfect example of the reframe that you have to do in order to really diagnose what the true pain is. And something interesting here is I think about a slide that says this later too.

10:53 There's just a lot of power in silence. So when I asked her the question of like why did you book in this call? Like what is truly the pain that you're feeling here?

11:01 I stopped talking. She thought for a couple seconds, responded, and then I didn't respond yet because I I had a feeling that that wasn't true. And when you have that silent pause, they think

11:11 and they feel like they need to talk more. And I'm not big into like the sales tactics, right? Like I I don't have the sales background, but that was super powerful. I would pause and they

11:19 would just keep talking. And your job on the discovery calls is to talk as much as least as possible. Your job is to sit there and listen. And that's how you're able to diagnose. So that's one quick

11:28 example, right? But that happened all the time. Now, if you guys were here yesterday on the VIP VIP sessions and I came around to the table, some of us dug into this, some of us didn't, but there

11:37 are two questions that I love to ask business owners or even your own business, right? Like if you're trying to help automate your own business and remove constraints, that works super

11:44 super well, especially when you pair it with silence. So, the first one is if a business is supply constraint, if you had 10x the business tomorrow, what would break

11:56 first? You ask them that and then you just be quiet because they'll think about the flow in chronological order from start to finish. And the key word there that I put in all caps is first

12:05 because whatever breaks first is the first clog. Now, whenever you diagnose and you fix that first clog, there's going to be another one. There always is. And that's the beauty of it and

12:14 that's how you get on a retainer because you just keep solving constraints and you keep scaling the business. So that's really good. If there's supply constraint, if they're demand

12:22 constraint, you basically just flip it. You say, "What would you do to 10x the business coming in tomorrow? How do you get 10x the amount of water into your pipe tomorrow?" So, whatever they're

12:29 already doing to get leads or maybe they're not doing anything to get leads, building systems to support that initiative. And that doesn't sometimes what you'll

12:38 realize is as an AI consultant is what like a lot of us are calling it right now. Your job is just as much to tell them, hey, this is the problem that I'm seeing and we can solve this with no AI.

12:49 So, sometimes the problem could be it's a very service-based business. they're supply constrained and so the key is to just hire more people. Now, yeah, maybe you could come in here and say, you know

12:58 what, let's build you some recruiting agents and some screening agents. That helps the hiring process. That removes that constraint. But that's a really great way to think about it as well is

13:06 that an AI consultant or someone that's AI native, it doesn't mean that you use AI for everything. It means that you know just as well when not to use AI because that perspective is even more

13:14 valuable in a world where AI is being shoved down everyone's throats and then you just be silent. Okay. So, moving on to the second one here, we've got the KPI.

13:25 So, the whole idea here is that you before you accept any payment, you want to choose one number that you're trying to move and you're not choosing this number, you're choosing it with the

13:36 stakeholder. If you think back to that example earlier where the business owner said to me, "Hey, we're not getting the value we paid for. It's because we didn't do well

13:44 all of these things but this one very specifically because I had no way to prove that a personal assistant was helping his business. He came to me his pain was I feel busy. What is the

13:53 solution in my mind? A personal assistant. When we really dug into it, the reason he was so busy is because he was handwriting all his proposals. So the better automation there would have

14:00 been for me to help him build an AI agent that would automate the proposals or at least get them 90% of the way there. He checks it, he approves it. If we would have aligned on a number

14:08 beforehand, then I know what I'm working towards. I know the result that I'm trying to drive for the business because productivity is really interesting.

14:18 Productivity is actually moving the needle. And you can't move the needle if you don't know what you're trying to move it towards. Because a lot of us feel like you might have had a day where

14:28 you sat down on your at your desk all day, eight hours straight, let's say. But maybe you watch a lot of YouTube tutorials. Maybe you played around with image generation for an hour and you

14:37 felt productive because you know you you clock off and you you sat there for eight hours. But how many of those hours were you actually doing? What you need to do to move that number forward? And

14:46 for us, you know, a lot of us, you know, it's a business, so there's a lot of different north stars. But knowing what you're building towards that quarter or that day or whatever it is helps you

14:54 actually be a lot more productive. And if your agents know your goals, then they can help you plan your days better to be more productive. So something that I would like to ask is, okay, let's say

15:03 we've scoped it down. We've we understand the constraint and I forget the example I use. Um, anyways, let's say we we've scoped it down to a certain automation, then I

15:14 could ask, "In a perfect world, what does this look like for your business? If we push this into production and it's working perfectly, what do you want to see?" And from there, you try to drill

15:25 into one certain metric. So maybe it is an AI agent that sets appointments. Maybe they say, "Okay, yeah, I mean, right now we're getting like five appointments a week from our manual

15:35 setters." In a perfect world, our manual setters have those 10 hours a week back to do other things and we're booking in like 10 appointments a week. And so now I know exactly what is a success to

15:46 them. So there's that's completely objective. I can go work towards that and I can prove that. So if someone says to me, "Hey, we're not getting the value we paid for. Look at the scope. This is

15:54 what we agreed on. This you said that you wanted 10 appointments a week from this automation and I objectively delivered that to you." I probably would say a little bit nicer though. Okay. So

16:03 that's a trackable and objective metric because a lot of this stuff is very subjective. I want a personal AI assistant so I can feel more productive, so I feel less busy. There's no way that

16:12 I can actually prove that. There's no way I can prove to the business owner that he is now less busy because of what I built. So, they can't be subjective. So, like I said, you have a baseline

16:20 like five weekly appointments. You've got a target like 12 weekly appointments. And now you know what you're working towards. Of course, you're going to have to leverage some of

16:27 their expertise because if you know not much about the process and you try to set a baseline target of like, you know, 35 appointments a week, that's very tough and now you're not going to be

16:34 able to prove that. But the idea is that each automation is having something to work towards. And like I said, if this is not you working with a client, before you go out and

16:44 decide to dedicate some some of your own internal resources or budget to a project, you should probably figure out what is that one metric you want to move. A lot of times there are, you

16:52 know, it it drips into other metrics too, but if you can choose one, it makes the decision a lot easier. And then you can figure out how is that actually impacting the bottom line of the

16:59 business. And that's how you prove, like I said, that your automation helped. Okay. Okay, the third piece now is on the pricing side. Now, this is really

17:09 interesting. I really don't think there's like a standard universal right way to price. Everyone's doing it a bit differently. Even the big firms are changing up their

17:19 pricing. I've tried almost everything that you could think of. I've tried performance-based. I've t hourly. I've tried retainers on hourly. I've tried value based. I've tried just lots of

17:27 stuff. Um the way I feel is that you should not be charging hourly. I think that a lot of people when they're getting started, I hear, you know, I keep getting nos to

17:39 my price. I hear that there's imposter syndrome. And so, I think hourly to start is a really good way to get your foot in the door and win some trust or even start free. I think it's a really

17:49 good way to start, but I don't think you should be building a business around your hourly pricing. And it's it's really simple and especially if you start to think about the way that AI is

17:57 supposed to make us do more in less time. So, it's all about the incentives. All right, real quick, guys. I mentioned this at the end of the presentation, but I attached this completely free PDF,

18:08 which is like a 30-page resource on pricing your AI solutions, which you can access for completely free inside of my free school community. The link for that is down in the description. You just hop

18:16 in there, you'll click on all YouTube resources, and you'll find that pricing masterclass guide in there. So, if you want it, it's there. Let's get back to the video. Let's say you've got two

18:26 developers on your team and you're providing services to businesses. You've got one developer named Sarah and she's a killer. She gets something done in 1 hour and you've got another developer

18:35 named Dan. He's good but he's a little slower, three hours. And let's say for the sake of the example, they produce the exact same quality of solution. You would then bill for Sarah's work, your

18:45 better developer, you would bill $150 to the client or I don't know, however you want to you get the point, right? $150. And now Dan, because he took three hours, you get more money. And those

18:57 incentives are completely backwards. Why would you make more money for moving slower and on a worse developer? Right? It's all about incentives. It's all about value based pricing. That this is

19:09 where we got to and this is what I believe at the moment is the best way to be doing this. And what that means is yes, the same automation could be different

19:19 amounts of valuable to different businesses. So you have to kind of take that into account at least when you're going very custom and you're consulting.

19:28 This is the way we did it, right? Oops. A client should understand how they will receive 10x their investment. That's kind of the golden rule that I like to to give, right? Because if you can walk

19:38 the stakeholder through the math, whether that is a business you're trying to help or whether that's you internally trying to win a budget because you're trying to, you know, build AI projects

19:49 in house, you need to prove that this investment of their money will get them a 10x on it because that makes it a really hard offer to say no to. So the way that we

19:59 would do this is basically take 10% of the projected annualized value of the price of the the automation and that's a gear price. So an example here, let's say you're building a customer support

20:12 agent and the manual rep, the human rep spends about 10 hours a week responding to these tickets and this person is paid 40 bucks an hour. So the cost of the business 40 bucks an hour for customer

20:23 support. 40 bucks an hour and the rep is does this about 10 hours a week. That's 400 bucks a week. And if you annualize that, that's about $2,100 over the course of the year, the first year

20:34 projected annualized revenue. And you take 10% of that. Now, 10% 20%, I play with it a little bit, but let's just say 10% for the sake of example. That's $2,80

20:46 here. Because what you have to assume, they don't always, but you have to assume that they're going to ask you, can you please tell me how you got to

20:56 that number? Because a lot of people will come in and they're kind of like maybe they're shopping around, they're trying to get a quote, they don't even know how much to allocate a budget

21:02 towards. So if you assume that they're going to ask you how did you get to that number and you can confidently walk them through the math and then you just be silent and you don't devalue your work.

21:11 I'm kind of jumping ahead. I know I got some slides here that cover this, but anyways, you have to figure out what does the manual process cost the business. And so in this example, right,

21:19 I I was able to understand, okay, this rep cost the business 40 bucks an hour. They're not always going to tell you salary. They're not always going to tell you the hourly weight rate, but there's

21:29 other ways to figure out what does the manual process cost the business. It could be opportunity cost. Maybe they've been having a different funnel or tripwire that they've wanted to push out

21:38 for two quarters, but they haven't because they are too busy, right? There's there's other types of cost besides just like the hourly cost. Maybe you're building a voice appointment, uh,

21:46 a voice agent because the business misses calls all the time. And every missed call could potentially be, um, a driveway, right? A driveway. And that driveway could win the business $10,000.

21:58 So, there's other ways to figure out what is the cost of the manual process. You just have to ask good questions and then be silent and listen, like I said.

22:10 So, the key thing to remember here is that cost doesn't justify price. value justifies price. And this was kind of tough for me to wrap my head around at first because the first

22:20 thing I thought of as a very new business owner was I need to protect my margins here. I need to make sure that I'm making this much money or this percent of the deal and I'm keeping that

22:29 much to account for taxes to account for, you know, what I have to pay my employees to account for our API cost or our service, whatever it is. I was thinking about the margins. But I think

22:37 that obviously you still have to think about the margins so you're not running your business in the ground, but the cost doesn't justify the price. And a really good example that I heard from

22:45 Jonathan Stark who spoke at our event a couple weeks ago, he was saying like let's say you're paying someone to do your lawn and you pay them a hundred bucks for the lawn and he's been come,

22:54 you know, he's been coming to you for for years. All of a sudden he buys a new pickup truck and that's an expense to his business. So he has higher costs on his end and then he comes to you and

23:02 wants to charge you 200 for the exact same job for the exact same lawn. That's not something that people will typically agree to because the cost doesn't justify the price. The value justifies

23:10 the price. So, like I said, you have to pretend and you have to assume that as soon as you say the price, they're going to come back to you and ask, "How did you get

23:18 that number?" And then you just have to walk them through the math. Now, what's really important there is you don't want to devalue your work. So, let's say someone comes to you, you scope out the

23:25 right constraint, you figure out the cost of the business, and you give them a 10% number. Let's say it just comes out to 15,000. And they were basically planning$7,000

23:34 to be the maximum they were going to spend on AI this quarter. You don't want to get into this negotiation of devaluing your work and saying, "Ah, you know, this would be

23:42 15K, but for you, we'll do it for 7K." You know, if you're really trying to get your first client and you can get that, then I would say do it reps over cash upfront when you're getting started. But

23:52 you don't want to devalue your work. What I would do in this situation is I would say, "Okay, this build, this solution is $15,000 worth of value to the business and you

24:01 have a $7,000 budget. Let's just drill down the functionality a little bit and treat this as a V1. we'll give you the $7,000 worth of this automation and then you know next quarter when you've got

24:10 the budget or once this automation's in production and we're actively earning you back time and money, then we'll look at the next one. Because I think if you if you set the impression right away

24:19 that you're willing to bump down your price as soon as they push back, then they're just going to keep doing that and you don't want to devalue your work. So that's pretty much what I wanted to

24:30 run through today. Um, obviously those kind of three main things, there's a lot more nuance to get into, which if you guys want to chat more, I'd love to to chat more. But think about this with

24:39 your own business. Um, actually, let's just take let's just take one volunteer real quick. Someone that Yeah. Um, is it Allejo? >> There we go. Tell us

24:52 in your business, you know what you're driving towards, right? >> Yeah. >> At the highest level, are you supply constrained or demand constrained?

24:59 >> Demand constraint. We need more clients. >> You need more clients. And how are you currently getting those clients? >> Uh content on YouTube. Uh it's not quite converting. I'm doing webinars and out

25:10 of 20 people that have assisted webinars over two months, >> uh we've gotten zero appointment set. >> Okay. So, if you wanted to have 10x the amount of

25:21 business tomorrow, what would you have to do? >> Uh probably 10x the content. >> Mhm. 10x the content. uh seems crazy but the methods that I see today very

25:35 helpful. >> Yeah, volume negates luck, right? But you want to 10x the content without decreasing the the quality of course. So in this case,

25:46 obviously there's a lot more to dive into here, but you know the way that you're kind of you know your top of funnel. What does it seem like you should be focusing on automating when

25:55 you get home in a couple days or next week? Um the problems that I have heard on the sales calls uh turning those into a video.

26:06 >> Okay. >> Uh that one is huge is I like forget what we talked about >> and maybe focus on something in the sales call but I miss something else

26:14 that they said that is an actual problem with their business. >> Totally. And do you know how you could automate that? >> Now I do.

26:22 >> There we go. Um now something I saw I remember talking to you about was the grill me skill, right? Yeah, >> if you guys don't know the grill me skill, I mean, it's a very simple

26:30 prompt. Essentially, just at the end of of questions, ask the AI to interview you relentlessly about this topic because what that does is it gets all of the subject matter expertise in your

26:41 head into the AIOS that you're building. Because once you give it all of that nuance, it's able to build an automation out of that so much better because the way that you would kind of create these

26:49 AI agents to to uh, you know, operationalize that process is different than someone else might. So, Obviously, that was a really quick example. Thank you, Aljo. I appreciate

26:59 the the participation there. But just constantly be asking yourself like what is the actual constraint? You know, how do we 10x the business? How do we actually look through the flow of the

27:07 pipe and the water and figure out where the clog is or where the leak is and then just directly attack that? And so, like I said earlier, when we were working with businesses, we

27:17 would always start with our foot in the door with one project on a value based uh project fee. And from there, we started to explain to them, we are seeing all of these other clogs

27:29 because once we've removed this constraint, there's another one. And that's a good thing because still you're getting more water through. And that's how you're able to get on the retainer

27:36 because not only did you find the right constraint, you also chose a number beforehand so you can objectively prove to them the automation helped their business. And then you

27:45 price it in a way where it was a no-brainer for them to say yes. And then guess what? after you push it into production, you come back one month, two months, 3 months later and you show them

27:54 that number and now you're able to justify asking for that retainer and to just say, "Hey, you know, we can move a lot quicker if we're not always doing the scoping and we're not always

28:02 figuring out pricing, if we can just work more and just keep attacking those constraints." And that's the only way that the business is truly going to grow. So, that's pretty much what I want

28:10 to talk to you guys about today. I have a full pricing guide. This is like a 29 30 page doc um kind of just like about what I talked about today on the valuebased pricing and some stuff like

28:19 that. Um so go ahead and scan that and grab that doc. I'm sure we can include it in the the resources later as well if you miss it. But yeah, thank you guys so much. It's been an awesome day and yeah,

28:30 let's let's have some dinner.