The Simplest AI Agency to Start in 2026 (Step-by-Step)

Do you ever feel like starting an agency is way more complicated than it needs to be? Websites, funnels, ads, copy, social media, branding, proposals. Feels like you need 12 different services just to make your first dollar. Which explains why most people quit before they ever sign a single client. That's why in this video, I'm going to show you the simplest agency model that exists. One offer, one setup, where you help local businesses like dentists, roofers, and plumbers stop missing phone calls, charge $297 per month, and stack recurring revenue without building websites, without running ads, and without having to do any cold calling at all. I'll break down the exact offer, the 7-day free trial that sells itself, the simple copy and paste DM script that makes signing up new clients almost automatic, and I'll show you what I would do to build this out to 10K per month. No fluff, no SMMA 2.0, just one simple service that solves a problem that businesses know they have and that's losing the money every single day from it. So, let's hop into my computer now and let me unpack this for you. All right, so as promised, this is the simple AI agency. I'm going to show you one offer, one pitch, one setup. This is, in my opinion, after over a decade of doing this, working with thousands of clients and agency owners and signing major clients like Google and Amazon and Meta, this is the simplest agency model that exists today. So, here's the invisible problem that you're going to be solving. Your clients, these local businesses, we'll talk about in just a minute, they're bleeding money from uh from phone calls, from essentially inbound requests that they never answer. [snorts] Now, the stats are around 30 to 60% of calls are missed by small businesses. Some statistics show this being even higher. Really depends on the industry. You'll find that a lot of people like roofers and plumbers and contractors, they're out on the jobs all day, so they've got their phone in their pocket. Uh they miss a ton of calls. Just go to voicemail. most people don't leave them, etc., etc. Now, 78% of customers hire whoever responds first. Meaning, when these businesses get a phone call and they don't answer it immediately, which they can't because they're running their business, they just go down the list and then they find someone else and they hire them. Also, this is invisible bleeding money. So, there's no dashboard or report that these businesses get at the end of the day that say, "Hey, you missed all of these calls and therefore you missed all of this money." This is just money that that goes away. Here's the other thing. Most of these businesses are already paying for some kind of marketing. So, ads, SEO, truck wraps. What you're doing here is you're not going out there and running Facebook ads for them or doing SEO or trying to get them any new leads. What you're doing is you're catching all of these leads that they're probably already paying for to get, but are just getting completely wasted when they don't answer the call. So, here is the offer. You help local businesses stop missing phone calls. You set out something called an AI receptionist. Sometimes we call this voice AI. It's an AI agent, whatever it is. But it answers their phones and it does this 24/7. It qualifies leads automatically and it books appointments. Sounds insane, right? A few years ago, this technology didn't exist. But now it does. And it is quickly becoming kind of the main way that these small businesses are going to stay competitive and are going to grow. Really, this AI can answer a phone. It sounds completely human. can have a conversation with someone, can collect all of their name and phone number and email, and can, yes, book them an appointment on a calendar, and you're going to charge the measly small fee of $297 per month, which is a very small, almost impulse buy cost for the business owner, but can add up to real money for you when you start stacking these, as we're going to talk about in just a minute. So, that's the whole business. Now, why does this work? Well, one offer, the one thing that you're selling here beats what I call the kitchen sink offer, where you've got an agency that does a million different things and it confuses and it overwhelms people. We're not doing any of that. No website building, so you don't need design skills. You don't need a portfolio to show them all of the previous work you've done. There's no funnel design, so you're not going to be designing landing pages. There's no copywriting, no split testing, none of that. There's no ad management, which is huge. So, this means you don't have to deal with Facebook ads and Google ads and YouTube ads and retargeting and pixels. No budgets, no campaigns, no reporting stuff. Also, no social media posting. No worrying about content calendars. No worrying about having to come up with new and creative angles, anything like that. All you're doing here, one pitch, one offer, one setup, and then you repeat. You do one thing, you do it well. Clients pay monthly, and you stack recurring revenue. All right. So, who are we going to go after here? Well, it's it's funny. After all of these years in marketing, anytime that I ask someone who their target market is and they say everyone or people with money, a small part of me just goes a little bit crazy because the fact is we do have to be selective about who we're going after so that our message is consistent so that we can actually get good results. Now, this is one of those things where we can't target everyone, but man, we can target a whole lot of people because we're going to be going after any local business that makes money when the phone rings. That's it. roofers, HVAC, landscapers, lawyers, auto repair, plumbers, electricians, dentists, chiropractors, contractors, med spas, pet groomers, funeral homes, um, pest control, power washing. I mean, anybody that's going to get a call needs this service essentially. Now, the qualifying question here that you're going to ask is, does this business make money when the phone rings? If yes, they're a prospect. Now, my suggestion, and we can talk more about this later, is that you do pick a single niche to focus on. So, you focus on either roofers or HVAC or landscapers because this is going to make sure that your message is directly targeted at them. So, you're not going to come across as a generic one-sizefits-all service. Your business essentially is going to be we help roofers stop missing calls, turn missed calls into clients, turn missed calls into booked jobs, and so on. So, here's the sales conversation, which you're going to be happy to hear as well. We don't even really need to have a conversation because we can do this mostly through DMs and through chat. But important point here, you're not selling marketing. You're not even selling AI. What you're selling is a receptionist for around $2 to $3 an hour. So the questions that we're going to have here is like, well, what happens when someone calls and you're on a job or you're busy or you're working with a client. They already know the answer. It goes to voicemail. You can let them say it there. So next, how many of these people actually leave a message? Well, they know this, too. And the answer is not many people leave a voicemail message. They simply go through the list until they find someone that picks up the phone. Next one. How much is an average job worth to you? If they say average job is between $200 to $5,000, well, this makes it the absolute most no-brainer offer ever because your service pays for itself with just one cot call. Even if they say something like $300 or $200 or whatever it is, then we can ask them what is the lifetime value of a customer. So when someone hires you for the first time, what are the odds that they stick around and they refer their friends and their family and they keep coming back month after month and year after year? You'll find that most businesses, especially that are doing business by accepting phone calls and booking appointments, they'll have a relatively high lifetime value. All right, then our offer, our pitch, well, how about you let me answer your phones for 7 days for free? It's going to take you about 5 minutes to set up. If they don't love it, they turn it off and you're done. There's almost no reason to say no to a free trial, especially because we're not going to ask them to lift a finger and we're going to be uncovering some incredibly valuable information for their business, not to mention recovering a uh a large percentage of those missed calls. So, this is your secret weapon. Now, you can run it for 7 days, you can run it for 5 days if they're incredibly busy. You could run it for two days, run it for a month if you really want to, but 7 days seems to be a sweet spot. What we're doing here is we're going to offer them this trial because it makes the invisible visible. Your client has probably never seen a log of their missed calls. They just don't know how many calls they're missing unless they're checking their phone at the end of the day and they see a few missed calls, but those don't add up because five or six missed calls at the end of the day, well, they don't show that 30 at the end of the week or the the hundred or the 200 missed calls at the end of the month. We're going to show them that after seven days, they're going to be staring at real call numbers with real dollar amounts attached. Also, service sells itself. You don't need to convince them of anything. That call log is the pitch. Once we install this service for them, they're going to be able to see these are all the missed calls. This is how things were responded. This is what ended up happening. Also, you end up getting a client in days and not weeks. And the confidence from that first win is what keeps you going. This is incredibly important when we're doing client acquisition. When we're trying to get new clients for an agency service, a lot of things take a lot longer than we would like to expect, especially when we have to build trust and build a relationship, possibly establish credibility. With a service like this, you become more of the simply the the delivery person of this service. So, no longer is it about you and your expertise and your long history or your short history or whatever it is. It's really just about this service. It's like, okay, forget about me. this software, this service, this thing that I have, this is what is really responsible. It's going to solve all of your problems for you. And of course, we can demo it and show them and so on. So, seven days, then the results conversation, then they're in for the forwarding or whatever it is. We can turn it on, we can turn it off. Easy. All right. So, the close after those seven days, the numbers do the talking for you. As an example, we could show them, all right, we answered or the AI answered 31 calls. Nine of them were outside business hours. There were four appointments booked. Estimated revenue recovered based on your average job size is 8,200 in this case. Could be more, could be less. The call logs, the pitch, the service sells itself. Essentially, the script, all you have to say or write or send is, "Hey, you got 31 calls this week. Nine came in we couldn't answer. We booked four into your calendar. That's 8,200 in potential jobs you would have missed. Want to keep it running? If so, $297 a month." All right. So, how do you deliver this service? Well, three steps. There is no step four. Step one, set up the AI receptionist. You're going to configure it inside of High Level, which is the software we use to run it for their business. And don't worry if all of this is new to you. I'm going to give you literally everything that you need to succeed. Just copy and paste it directly into your account and you're good to go. Uh, we're going to have the AI crawl their website and crawl their services and their pricing and the FAQ and the hours and the calendar. We do this one time per client. We essentially take the AI, we turn it on, we crawl their website, scrape it if uh another term for it, where the AI is going to go and just collect all the information from it. Then it's trained. Then we set up call forwarding. This is where the client keeps their existing phone number, which is incredibly valuable, especially when we're comparing it against other services we could offer that may require them to change their phone number. Not the case here. They keep their current phone number. We set up call forwarding. Very easy to do. I can't remember the exact codes on AT&T. It's like starst star 61 or Verizon star 71 then their number but they can do this all automatically without talking to a single person takes about 5 minutes to do any carrier works where we just forward the number if a call is missed and then it runs every call gets answered leads get qualified appointments get booked the client gets notified you get notified so you can track what's actually working and you're done now how to keep clients retention is built into the service which is beautiful so rather than having to go out there and justify your value and your worth every single month again in order to keep clients paying here. They're going to see the value of it every single time they log in. So, they'll get an app. Again, this is going to be free and included inside of High Level, so they're able to track it. Uh there's the app's called Lead Connector. They're going to be able to track missed calls and recordings, the transcripts. They can see booked appointments. Once they check it daily, they're not cancelling. Next, the price anchor. Well, 297 a month, about 10 bucks a day. one caught call that turns into a $500 job, thousand job, $2,000 job. Well, it pays for the service for the next six months. So, you want to remind them that when they question the cost. Also, you can show them the numbers. Every month, the client sees the calls that were answered, the afterhour catches, the booked appointments. So, the ROI, the return on investment that they're paying, it's always visible. Also, there's a downell opportunity if they do want to cancel. Well, we can give them after hours only for 197 a month. smaller scope, still recurring, still zero extra work for you. All right, let's do some of the math here. It's not magic, it's just multiplication. Five clients at 297 gives you 1485 per month. Get 10 clients, well, we're up to 2,900 a month. 20 clients and we're at 5,940 a month. And you can just keep building from there. Each client takes about an hour to set up. And once they're running, they require almost no ongoing work because the software really does handle this for us. Now, obviously results are going to vary based on your offer and your niche and your effort. This is by no means a guarantee of the income. Largely going to depend on how many people that you have these conversations with. But that is how it stacks up. Also, we've got pricing. One plan, one downell, no confusion. We don't need 18 different tiered offers with this and that service and that, which is going to confuse you and going to confuse your clients. We just charge this. We have a free trial. We can do it for again 1 day, 5 days, 7 days, whatever. $0 where they get full air receptionist, all the calls answered, complete call log, and the standard of 297 per month. Again, all of these things, but unlimited calls. And then, of course, we can do the downell after it was only nights and weekends. This is really just a retention play. If someone's like, "Look, I was thinking about it. Not really using it that much. We kind of answer our phone all day." Well, we can downell them to this. All right. So, let's talk about how to get your first client with this. Now, the good news is you don't need a website. You don't need a portfolio. You need a phone. In fact, even if you don't have a phone, we can get a phone number inside of High Level as well, but I'm assuming that you already have a phone. So, step one, pick one vertical, one niche, right? Again, we talked about some of the ones that you could offer. Um, some easy ones, roofers, plumbers, dentists, anyone who's going to get that phone call. Number two, search Google Maps for businesses in that vertical, in that niche, in your area. Again, this is going to be easier if you start with your local area simply because you're going to have kind of that no- like and trust factor by being a fellow person from that city. There is no geographical limitations on this offer. You can live on the other side of the world and offer it to someone over there or vice versa. It doesn't matter where you live. It's just a little bit easier because if you really want to uh to push this and push it fast, bit of a bonus tip for you. Uh if you're not uncomfortable, you can go in and meet these businesses in person and your conversion rates will will double or more. All right. Next, give them a call or send them a message. I'm going to show you the exact direct message to send them in just a second. You do not need to call them if you're not comfortable. Again, if you can see them in person, it will increase your close rates. If you can call them, it'll also help. But if you're not willing to do any of that, we can still send them a DM. Our offer here, we're going to offer to answer their phones for a week for free. Step four, set up the trial, forward their number. Step five, show them the results after 7 days. And step six, close at 297 per month. After two to three clients, you're going to have call logs, you're going to have results, and you're going to be able to show all of that to your next potential prospect. So, this service essentially builds its own proof. You're not going out there and having to do all of this work. You're simply signing people up, putting them through the software. It's getting the results, and then you're just going to show the next prospect that you want to sign what it's done for previous clients. So, how do we find these people? A couple different ways. Number one, we could look on Facebook and Instagram. Takes about 10 minutes. For Facebook, search for city and trade in Facebook. So, you could say plumbers in Dallas, roofers in Vancouver, uh chiropractors in San Antonio, whatever it is. Look for business pages with reviews but no website or weak online presence. Another good candidate to reach out to. You can check if they're posting regularly on social media. Active business means paying customers typically means they've got a budget for this kind of thing. Also, click their page, find the owner's personal profile or the message button, and you can reach out that way as well. For Instagram, very similar. We're going to probably use the hashtag here to do a better search, but again, dentist in here, plumber over there, pet spa here, etc., etc. uh look for accounts with around 200 to 5,000 followers. So, we want this account to have enough followers so that it's actually legitimate and real, but we don't want it to be so big that they likely have a marketing team in place. Next, we're going to check their bio for a phone number. If it's there, trust me, they rely on calls. If they're putting a phone number on there, they're getting calls. Then, we're going to follow them first, just because they'll get a notification. We'll like two to three posts over the next day or so. Then, we can DM them the next day. All right, here is the word forword scripts to say. And I'm going to move some of these around because I realize they got a little bit crowded and I want to make sure that you're able to copy and paste these directly. So DM, this is what you're going to send. You can send this on Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn. But if you don't want to visit them in person or you don't want to give them a call, you can send this. Hey name, I came across your page. Looks like you're staying busy. Quick question. Do you ever miss calls when you're out on a job? What we're doing here is we're just trying to break the ice to get a response to get some kind of engagement. Next DM. When they say yes, hey, super common. I set up a service that answers calls 24/7 for businesses like yours. Books appointments, qualifies leads, the whole thing. I'd love to let you try it free for a week so you can see how many calls you're actually missing. Interested? Again, what we're doing here is we're showing them that we understand their pain. We're offering the free trial. We're establishing this as zero risk. And then we're going to let the trial do the selling for you. And then of course DM number three to lock it all in. Awesome. Takes about five minutes to set up. I just need your business hours and what services you offer. Quick call or should I send you a few questions here? The beauty of this is that you're going to give them a couple different options. Both are going to lead to the same place with you setting up the trial, but it's often quicker to just hop on the phone real quick, get this information down, and you can get it set up for them. Now, the math here is pretty simple. You send 10 of these a day. Even a 20% reply rate gets you two conversations. One trial a week equals four clients a month. and you can just stack and build from there. So, what this becomes, well, the sky's is the limit. We start with one offer, we stack from there. Month one to two, I don't want you doing too much. Your goal is to land your first, maybe your second, possibly your third client, free trials, close at 297 a month, master the setup, and then build your first call logs as proof that all of this system works, which you're going then going to be able to turn into more clients down the road. Months 3 to six, well, now we want to stack to 10 to 15 clients. Recurring revenue, we're expecting around 5 to 7. This is what we're looking for. Almost no ongoing work per client. And the service builds its own referrals. And month six plus, this is when you can start to layer on upsells. We've got a ton of other features and services that we can offer built right into High Level Reputation Management where we help them get more five-star reviews on Google. Lead follow-up, which means that anytime they get a call or a text or an email, we can automatically follow up with them, qualify them, put them through the same automations. We can do full funnel builds if we want. Again, we only want to sell these to clients who already trust you. One of the biggest mistakes people make when they're going out there and trying to get clients, especially their first clients, is saying, "Hey, random stranger who's never met me. How would you like to give me $5,000 to do this random marketing stuff?" I mean, it's a it's a tough sell. This, on the other hand, with a free offer and a low price to get them going. Fantastic. You get your foot in the door, you establish that relationship, then they're going to trust you, so you can offer entire services. Uh so entire business runs on high level. One tool, one login, one system. Again, I'll make sure I've got the links down below with everything you need. Parting words, don't uh don't over complicate this. One offer, one pitch, one setup process, and then just do it again and again. Help local businesses stop missing calls, charge 297, stack clients, build to 10K a month. From there, like I mentioned, link is in the descriptions below. You're going to get a free trial. You're going to get agency OS, which is the exact scripts and templates and frameworks and everything that I've used to build not just one, but three separate 7igure agencies on High Lee. All yours free when you sign up for a free trial, which is uh which is what you're going to need to run this offer. So, do that now. I'll see you on the inside.