Get Your First Agency Client as a Beginner (This Is Easier Than You Think)

This is the entire path to a six-figure agency. 20 clients, that's it. Not 200, not 2,000, 20. Which is less than the number of YouTube tutorials most people watch before even talking to their first client. If you're brand new and you close about one in every 10 conversations, you need 200 conversations total to get there. That's eight conversations per week. That's just over one conversation per day. And when I say conversation, I don't mean cold calling strangers out of the blue. I just mean a short casual chat with a local business owner. Someone who reached out directly, came through a referral, or responded to a message you sent. And almost nobody ever does this math because most people treat getting to six figures like something that just magically happens after enough time and enough effort. When in reality, it's just a math problem that you can solve. In a few minutes, I'm going to slow this down and help you run these numbers with your own targets, your own price, and your own close rate. So, stick around for that. But first, I want to talk about the thing that stops most people from ever hitting that number in the first place. Because once you see it, you'll never look at making money in the same way again. Here's what I see happening with most people who are working toward a six-figure agency but not getting there. They have the goal, they want the number, but they never actually figured out what activities they need to do each week in order to hit that number. So, they stay busy doing things that feel like they're moving toward the goal, but they don't actually get them any closer to it. These are things like watching endless tutorials or building a website or writing a sales pitch or researching niches for the hundredth time thinking you're finally going to be able to decide between roofers and chiropractors and dentists or plumbers. And that's not laziness. It's just that nobody ever showed you what the goal actually looks like when you break it down into weekly actions. So, you keep working hard without ever really knowing exactly what you need to do this week or this month to actually get there. That's the whole problem and the math fixes it. I did this too, by the way. I spent way more time building things that didn't matter than I really should have before I finally figured out what actually moves the needle. Fun fact, your logo doesn't get you clients. A brand new pitch deck doesn't get you clients. The perfectly worded website that you're worried about also doesn't get you clients. Conversations get you clients. Everything else is just entrepreneurial arts and crafts. And here's the other thing worth saying. You don't need to quit your job or completely clear your schedule to make this work. The math I showed you works in the margins of a normal life. One conversation a day is about 35 minutes. That's it. But let's get into that in a minute because first, I need to show you what actually makes these conversations feel hard because it's not a lack of knowledge and it's not a bad offer and not the wrong niche. It's the moment where you tell a business owner what you do and what it costs and then wait for their response. And that pause, that waiting for their response, is the longest three seconds of silence known to entrepreneurs if you're not ready for it. Now, at first that silence, that part, it is uncomfortable, especially the first time. I'm not going to pretend that it's not. Full disclosure here, my first few conversations were not good. I stumbled through what I was offering, one business owner asked me a question I couldn't answer. I'm pretty sure I responded with something like, "Great question. Let me circle back to that." Which is basically just entrepreneur talk for I have absolutely no idea. But it was fine because the conversation happened. I found out what I wasn't prepared for and then I was prepared for it the next time. That one uncomfortable conversation taught me more than another 10 hours of research ever would have. And here's who you're actually talking to when you have these conversations. A restaurant owner whose phone rings during the dinner rush and so the call just goes to voicemail, a plumber who misses three calls a day because he's on a job or stuck under a sink somewhere, and a dentist whose front desk doesn't follow up with patients who never rescheduled and so they're just bleeding money every single day. These are not people that you have to convince that they have a problem. They already know they have a problem. You're just the person who's showing up with a solution. Knowing that changes the whole energy of the conversation. You're not a sales person trying to extract money from someone who doesn't want to give it up. You're someone who noticed a problem and came to help. The nightmare scenario that you're probably afraid of, the business owner who's rude or dismissive or makes you feel stupid or keeps calling you Aaron when your name is Adam, does happen occasionally, but honestly, it's not that common. And you need to remember that if it happens, their frustration isn't personal. It's not that they don't like you. I mean, how could they not like you? They don't even know you. The only experience they have of you is a short message of you asking if they need help. But this is why the first conversation feels the hardest. It's the unknown. By conversation 15, you realize that most of the fear was in your head the whole time and people really aren't as scary as you thought they were. Now, I also want to address the time thing directly because I know it's real. Eight conversations a week with a full-time job, a family, other commitments, that can sound like a lot. So, let's look at what it actually requires. First off, most of these conversations are pretty short. You're not doing a full sales presentation here. You're just having a quick introductory conversation to find out if there's any interest. Call it 20 minutes per conversation including the time to find the contact and reach out. Eight conversations, 20 minutes each, two and a half hours a week, about 35 minutes a day. You can find 35 minutes a day. And here's the thing. You don't need to decide right now whether this business becomes your full-time business. All you need to decide is whether you're willing to have eight conversations a week to find out if it works for you. Run the experiment first, make the bigger decisions after you have real data. Worst case scenario here, you've done something hard that most people never do and you should feel proud of yourself. Best case scenario though, your life completely changes for the better and starts you down the path of complete time and location and financial freedom. This truly is one of those tiny little risk and pretty much unlimited reward situations. But in the end, it's up to you to decide just how much your goals mean to you. Now, earlier I showed you the math really quickly. Now, let's slow it down and run it properly but with your numbers, not mine. If you can, grab something to write with. This is worth filling in yourself. Row one, your monthly goal. Maybe it's 5,000 to start, maybe it's 10,000, maybe you're thinking bigger. Whatever the number is, write it down. Not the polite number, the number that would actually make you stop and think, "Okay, that would change things." Row two, this is your price per client. If you're offering something like an AI receptionist service where you set up a system that answers calls and follows up with leads automatically, or review automation where clients start getting a steady stream of new Google reviews without doing anything themselves, those services local businesses are happily going to pay you $300 to $500 a month for. So, write down what you charge. Now, divide row one by row two. That's how many clients you need to hit that number. Row three is your close rate. Now, if you're brand new, just use 10%. If you've already had a few conversations though, use 15 or 20%. Then, divide your client number by that and you've got the total number of conversations you need to have. Then, divide that by 26 weeks, which is 6 months, and that's going to tell you how many conversations you need to have each week and each day. What you just did is something that most people working toward this goal never actually do. You turned this vague goal into a specific weekly number and that changes everything because you can schedule eight conversations a week. You can put them in your calendar Monday morning. You can look back at the end of the week and know whether you hit them or not. You can measure it and you can adjust. You can't do any of that with just a general feeling. Naval Ravikant has this idea about getting rich without luck. The point is that luck is what you're relying on when you don't understand the actual mechanics of how something works. But when you do understand the mechanics, when you know exactly which inputs produce which outputs, success stops being something that you hope for and it starts being something that you can design and plan for. That's what this math does. You now know exactly how many conversations produce a client. You know exactly how many clients produce the income you want to hit. There's no luck in that equation, just execution, cause and effect. Let me also clear up something that's really important here, which are the things that you do not actually need to do or that are not actually required before you start doing this because there's a lot of things that people are going to tell you that you need and most of it just isn't true. First off, you don't need a portfolio. The first three clients build the portfolio. Next, you don't need a perfectly polished sales pitch. The first 10 conversations build that sales pitch. Third, you don't need a perfect business name. You don't need a perfect logo or any logo, a website, a business card, none of that. And you definitely don't need to spend three weeks asking chat GPT what your brand voice should be. None of that is what gets you 20 clients. The confidence people think that they need before they start is actually the last thing that shows up, not the first. Dan Sullivan calls these the four C's. First, you commit. The commitment gives you the courage to take the first step. Taking the first step builds capability and capability is what produces confidence. Most people are waiting for confidence to show up before they commit, but that's backwards. Confidence is the reward for doing the other three things first. You can't study your way to it or prepare your way to it. You get to it by doing badly a few times first till it starts to feel normal. Then, once the conversations start turning into clients, that's when you need a system that actually delivers what you've promised without turning every new client into hours of manual work. The software I use handles all of it. The AI receptionist, the review automation, everything runs automatically after the initial setup. New client, one afternoon to get them going, not because I'm super technical, but because the system is built to be simple. I'll link it below the video if you want to take a look at it, but the order is what really matters here. The system is step two as it only needs to exist once you have clients to run it for. Step one is still a conversation. Okay, there's two things that I want to be straight up with you about before you go do this. First, the math assumes that you're having real conversations with real business owners. Not planning to, not thinking about it, but actually having them. Do that consistently and the math plays out. Don't do it and it doesn't. It's that simple. The math works, but the math cannot have the conversations for you. Second, not every conversation goes well. You'll get no's, you'll get people who say, "Send me some info." and then completely ghost you. You'll have weeks where you've got eight conversations and nothing moves. That's just part of the 200 conversations and every conversation that doesn't close gets you closer to the that does. The people who build successful and wildly profitable agencies aren't the ones who never hear no. They're the ones who keep going after they do. Hearing no is not a judgment of you or your character or your abilities. It's simply a reflection that the person you're talking to doesn't feel like they need what you have at this exact moment of time. That's it. I just want you to remember that and keep going because six months from now, there's going to be two different versions of you. One version spent those six months treating six figures like a random far-off destination and hoping that it would show up eventually with enough work and enough time. They're still preparing. They're still busy, but they're also still not any closer to that goal. The other version of you is the one that did the math, figured out what that number actually required each week, and then went and had those conversations. Messy conversations, imperfect ones, ones where they got it wrong and adjusted. That version will have clients. The key here is to understand that nothing separates those two versions of you right now except one decision. Not knowledge, not experience, not the right timing, just a decision about whether six figures stays a dream that you're hoping one day comes true or becomes a number that you're simply solving for. The model exists, the math works, the businesses that need this are in your city and every city right now, today, while you're watching this. So, the real question is this, are you the kind of person who does the math and starts or are you the kind of person who keeps waiting until everything feels perfectly lined up first, which we both know never happens. And if you want the complete step-by-step system behind all of this, I'll link it up right here. It's a free master class called how to actually start and scale a simple AI agency, and it walks through everything. How to pick your niche, get your first clients, and scale past 10K a month. See you in there.