Some honest notes on starting out. (No, I'm not selling a course).

And no, this isn't another AI-generated post. Yes, unfortunately I actually spent an hour typing this all out in the hope it provides you all with some real value.

I wanted to get on here and pass on some lessons I’ve learned in the last year starting up in this space. I'm doing it because I keep seeing people making the same mistakes I did, overwhelmed by all the tools and struggling to find clients.

By trade, I'm a mechanical engineer currently completing my master's degree. When I started out, I got the same general advice from many people but didn’t receive these kinds of thoughts on the concrete work of learning and selling. Fast forward to now, I'm the founding engineer for my AI consulting and automation agency, and we've worked with New York City law firms, Long Island-based Private Equity firms, and a number of small businesses.

I've been answering a lot of similar questions from people in this Skool, so I wanted to pass on what I can and hopefully save you all some time and money.

If you find this valuable, give it a like so it can help other people feel less lost when they start out. I don't mind answering questions, so if you have any, feel free to shoot me a DM and I'd be happy to help you out.

Don't Start with Building!!!

I recommend you don't start with building something when you currently don't know what businesses will actually pay for.

I understand you need to know and be able to work around the basics of building these systems. To get to that point, I’d recommend the community videos and then Make academy for make.com and then some n8n tutorials. This should give you the actual foundational knowledge you need for your first few projects.

Honestly, we learned how to actually finish some of our first projects on the job. Once we had our technical foundation, then we just spent a day or two learning the knowledge we needed to get the project done. Remember, you can always just run deep research prompts on LLMs to figure out the actual specifics of how to build something. As long as you confirm it’s possible when you take the contract, it’s not the worst option to build in a few extra days to get up to speed on what you need.

The most important thing in these contracts is to underpromise and overdeliver, both in capability and timeline. That’s how you get positive testimonials and good referrals.

Understanding your Target Market (It isn’t fellow Agency Owners on Skool…)

Too often I see people asking in Skool about what they should build or to rate their latest make.com email organizer/CRM integration they built as a case study.

Don’t ask us. The people here aren’t your clients 99% of the time; the actual business owners are. They aren’t hanging out in AI Automation Skools, which is why they are willing to pay for you to implement these solutions for them.

The only exception to this is skool partnerships between sales minded bussines people looking for fullfilment specialists to complete their sales offers or vice verse. These are vaulable but more on that later.

About The Cold Calling...

I won't lie to you, cold calling kind of f-ing sucks, especially if you aren't a natural to sales. I'm a technical guy and engineer by trade and I hate making them too. I felt like I wanted to puke the very first time I made one; I've spent the last 6 years of my life working with other socially awkward engineers after all, what do you expect.

However, it's where we have had our best success and over time you can track success and continually improve your rough scripts that you follow.

Even when you don't get sales over 30, 50, and 100 calls, you will really start to learn exactly what their issues actually are. Then you will actually be building useful things for them, not just what you think they'd like or complex workflows to impress people on Skool/social media.

At the end of the day, every successful entrepreneur/business owner will have to learn sales at some point in their journey. It might as well be now when you're starting out and can afford to fail.

Focus on Outreach, Not Perfecting Your Skills

I'd recommend some sales podcasts and YouTube videos from legit tech sales reps who have had real success in the industry. That's where I learned from. A specific one that was foundational to my learning when I first started was this podcast from a veteran tech sales rep for Oracle who was the most successful salesperson in the company and eventually trained all new SDRs (Sales Development Representatives). At the end of the day, tech sales basically follows the same process we do and sells very similar solutions. https://open.spotify.com/episode/3llaEGo9LTehD0kKfpzmKn?si=PC9VKsTFQq6-81W-gstKXw

It may seem counterintuitive, but I think you should mainly focus on the outreach portion of the business.

Too many people here learn how to do everything and still have no sales, and typically posting on here about your skills won't get you real clients. There's a reason small and medium-sized businesses, especially home service ones and similar niches, don't already automate and integrate AI into their businesses. They aren't on these or similar spaces, so you need to go to them and prove that you can actually improve their business in some way.

Most of them will actually, to a certain extent, respect you for calling them, even if you are interrupting their day. However, this doesn’t mean you won’t still have some very cold rejections and painful calls.

Don't Get Discouraged

Most of all, don't get discouraged. If you get told to f-off and delete my number, just move on to the next one. No harm done.

Let me know below if you'd like me to share more tips for starting out and I'll make some more posts this week for those of you still getting your feet underneath you.

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