**The Full Rundown of Retainer Offers for AI Automation Agencies**

If you're looking to offer retainer services as an AI automation agency, I'd love to share some valuable insights with you. However, I would not recommend it for beginners. This is a very difficult thing to do if you don't have the experience. As I always say, "you need to focus, get it as simple as possible, get your foot in the door with a specific niche and a specific delivery."

To succeed, you need to expand that eventually. I'd love to see some of you guys do this in the future. That's why I'm sharing my expertise with you today.

**Key Takeaways**

That being said, here are some key takeaways for those who are serious about offering retainer services:

* You don't need retainers especially early on. It's not your focus to be running up retainers early on.

* Your goal is to learn, get case studies, and get testimonials. Use that to start charging more for your main product or lead product.

* Be very cautious about the timing and terms of your retainers. If you're getting started with a client that you don't necessarily want to work with for a long time, be cautious.

* There are many variables in retainer offers. Be very cautious when doing your first ones before you have any kind of data points to base your numbers off.

**A Full Retainer or Retainer-Only Model**

There is always the option of a full retainer or retainer-only model, which we're running at Warning Side Automation. However, this is not for beginners.

If you want me to do more of a deep dive on what we're doing on the automation side at Morning Side, I'd love to do that in a future video.

**Next Steps**

So, what are the next steps for anyone looking to make money with their own AI automation agency?

1. **Subscribe to the Channel**: If you haven't already, please subscribe to my channel.

2. **Leave a Like**: While you're down there, please leave a like if you've enjoyed this video. It would mean the world to me as the creator of this model.

3. **Check Out My Recent Uploads**: I've already done a bunch of other videos on this topic, so check out my recent uploads for more content like this.

4. **Join My AAA Community**: We have the biggest community of AAA owners in the world. If you want any kind of help from myself, we do weekly workshops and Q\&A sessions.

**Extracting Value**

Lastly, if you want to extract some value from my resources, I have a free resource Hub where all of my old Discord workshop records are going up every week.

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enin this video I'm going to be explaining how you can structure your AI automation agency offers in order to generate juicy monthly recurring Revenue in the form of retainers there are a number of ways that you can achieve this but if not done carefully and in the correct way the golden prize of monthly recurring Revenue can quickly become a dead weight in your young business and really cause you more headaches than it's worth so I thought I'd come on here and share with you some of my honest learnings and pitfalls of running retainers of my own AI automation agency so that hopefully you can avoid some of the mistakes that I've made along the way now to properly explain retainer offers for AI automation agencies I've broken this video up into a few different parts so if you want to skip around them as you need feel free to do that firstly I'll be very quickly going over what retainers actually are and whether you even need them in your AI automation agency then I'll be taking you through a few different types of AAA retainer offers that I've seen work best then we'll be following that up with four common retainer mistakes that you need to avoid then I'll be giving you guys a look into my own company and the retainer only variation of the AI automation agency model that we've been running recently now before we any further if you're watching this and going what in the hell is an AI automation agency be sure to check out my beginners guide here this is a 2hour long video that I created we've had some insane feedback from it the likes and comments on it as you can see on screen here have been ridiculous so that's really my marker of whether or not this video is valuable that video will be linked up here if you want to go and watch that now and then you come back to this and you'll be ready for this information and I do want to briefly show some of the results coming out of my community just a week after I released that video these people are using the exact method that I covered and gave away for free in that 2hour video and they're seeing the kind of results on screen within their first week of starting an AI automation agency model so if you want to get started go watch that video and then be sure to join my community to get the resources that they've had access to in order to get these results so firstly what are retainers and do you really need them in your AI automation agency well if we ask Dr Google we get an official definition here of retainers are structured agreements in which the client agrees to pay a specific amount of money to a business usually monthly and in return receives a set of services during that same time period so what is that actually look like in a business well firstly it's going to be a a month-to-month agreement maybe you're signed on for just a month at a time but it might be sort of an ongoing for six months so six-month contract month-to Monon retainer where you're getting paid a fixed amount of money every month for doing a fixed set of services essentially you are going to be providing a set of services in exchange for a fixed monthly fee for example you might get $11,000 per month from your client for doing XYZ Services now the key thing here is that if you have clients on retainer within your business you are generating monthly recurring revenue or M you'll be seeing Mr pop up a lot throughout this video so here's a very basic diagram of how retainers works so say you signed the client in May on a $1,000 per month retainer you're going to collect that payment at the start of the month and then every month from then on until they cancel you're going to be paid $1,000 per month so in this case this business is generating $1,000 in Mr now what is the relationship between retainers and the AI automation agency model that I've created by default the AAA model does not include retainers the way that I've created and structured this model means that you don't have to have retainers at the start it is actually works better at the start as you're going to see later to not include retainers so by default it doesn't have retainers this isn't something like smma where everything is basically built on retainers this is more of a contract based initially and then retainers are sort of extra icing on the cake as you're going to see later in this video now for example if your AI automation agency deliverable as a prospecting chatbot for restaurants you might be charging upfront a oneoff setup fee of $997 now it is completely fine to set things up in a way that the client no longer needs you and then you can walk away and get straight onto your next client but if you are absolutely set on getting some kind of Mr for your business there are options that do exist for squeezing more money out of each client now before we get into explaining the different types of retainer offers for automation agencies we need to answer the question of do you actually need retainers to succeed as an automation agency owner in order to properly answer the question of whether or not you need retainers to succeed as a AAA owner we first need to look at why you'd even want retainers in the first place firstly m is the lifeblood of small businesses like AI automation agency it's what keeps them afloat when times are tough as I've put on screen Mr creates a cushion of safety that keeps the machine going keeps your business moving forward even when times get tough if your business only relies on those setup fees then you're going to potentially have huge months followed by absolutely nothing so by having some kind of recurring income that you build up over time you can increase the Baseline and ensure that even if you have a complete flop over one month and you aren't able to get any new clients cuz you're on this hamster wheel or something happens you need to travel or something pops up at least if you stop trying to sell you're still going to have some kind of income coming in each month so your Baseline has increased when you have some sort of Mr also by having retainers you can actually increase the lifetime value of your client so instead of just getting a $1,000 upfront setup fee that client could now be worth up to $2,000 because they've got a couple months of retainers after that it can be a little bit complex for beginners but essentially by increasing their lifetime value you can afford to spend more in order to acquire that Customer because you've got this total amount of money that they're going to be worth eventually another reason why you might want to do retainers is because it can be very profitable if if you've done it right if you have the right team setup if you know what you're doing and you structure the contract and the fees in the right way so can be very profitable if done right and the final Point here which kind of circles back to that cushion of safety is that having some sort of Mr in your business or retainers clients that are on retainers is going to give you peace of mind as a business owner that uh your bills can be paid the next month if you have any people who are on payroll you know that you you can at least cover those with the retainers that are going to be coming in each month and this idea of Peace of Mind for entrepreneurs really goes back to to why we're doing this in the first place right it might sound a little bit backwards but as entrepreneurs we are trying to get to easy we want things to be easy we're just choosing to go through the hard in order to get this we are trying to build these businesses so that we can have peace of mind we can have all of the the fun things enjoy the life that we want to but we're willing to do the hard work now and by getting a bunch of retainers stacked up you're actually setting yourself up for that easy bit eventually because everything else is going to be taken care of by those fees there's a bunch of different ways you can do it but essentially that's why M can really be such a a price position within small businesses because as a business owner having that that baseline or that cushion of safety can be really really the game changer between having a business that you enjoy running and you have lower stress levels or having a really nightmarish business whe you're on a hamster wheel constantly I thought I'd throw in a couple little diagrams here for you guys to just be able to visualize how Mr can affect the business and how having retainers in your agency can actually affect your bottom line here's a AAA with no monthly recurring Revenue as you can see April to May to June is bouncing up and down no sort of consistent level of of income and the black line here is a trend line and here you can see what the AI automation agency that uses a couple retainers can look like in the difference it Mak so the orange line here is the retainers which is sort of slowly increasing over time but sort of staying fairly stable then you have the sales bouncing around in the same erratic way but the purple line here of the total revenue is the key thing here so you can see that rather than going all the way down to zero in June you've still got some baseline here of around 20 so in that case you can still pay your employees you can still pay yourself out of the company even and you don't have to worry about running into the red for that month and as you can see the trend line this is obviously on a much higher gradient so over time you're going to be making more money and stacking up those dollars as you need them in the business account now we've identified why you would want retainers we can now look at why you don't need them or why you wouldn't want them at least initially so to be clear I think retainers can be a great thing for people who have enough experience and who have had enough time to really build out the systems required to manage them but initially for beginners who are servicing their first second third client I do not recommend trying to build some kind of retainer offer and for the reasons on screen here firstly as a beginner your focus needs to be on perfecting the delivery of your main product your job as a beginner is already hard enough to be delivering this thing and doing this entirely new business that you've never done before you do not need to add things in like oh I got to calculate how often set up systems for when I'm going to be checking the client's thing and oh I've got all these obligations I have over the next month just cut all of that out focus on getting your one product your main product delivering it and moving on to the next and getting really familiar with that delivery process I get so many questions on how to structure retainer offers from complete beginners in my community and it's really sad for me to to honestly see them struggling with these sort of more complex things that they should not be worrying about your job is to find one Niche and pick one deliverable and sell that thing over and over again and build up some kind of results before you even think about going out and adding these things in so please do not get distracted and do not let your lack of understanding on how to put together a retainer offer because it's far more difficult than just delivering one product do not let that from getting in the way of you signing your first client or first couple of clients secondly here for why you don't need them initially is that to handle multiple retainers without employees is actually going to be fairly difficult for you if you're a so business owner most of you initially are probably going to be delivering these Services yourself you're going to be setting up the zapia Integrations or you're going to be creating the chat Bots and duplicating them over you're going to be doing a lot of that stuff yourself and now if you add in running the business getting clients Service delivery for the clients that you've got coming in and then also doing regular maintenance for these different clients that you've sold previously that's a lot of stuff on your plate and ideally you can start offering these retainers as soon as you have your first employee so you can set up some systems and say okay I need you to once a week check on this this this or message the client it's just going to be too much on your plate as I say you always need to focus 80% of your time on sales and bringing in new business adding this big retainer thing and retainer obligation really is going to just screw up your time organization and mean that you're spending time doing things that are really not what the business needs at the current time and furthermore the amount you can charge for your attainers as a complete beginner without any kind of credibility or results to show clients is going to be too small for you to even bother with and it goes back to what I just said about time management unless you're getting paid thousands of dollar a month for the stuff initially there's no way it's going to be worth more than you going out and getting new clients and getting new case studies and testimonials and results also when it comes to pricing retainers this going to be a lot more complex than copy and pasting over chat bot and passing it off to a new client being able to properly estimate how many hours you're going to have to spend or your team members are going to have to spend or the usage that's going to be put on accounts and all of these kind of calculations can be really difficult for a beginner to do and until you have some kind of experience and track record of being able to estimate these cost is going to be very difficult and you're likely going to either get lost in the details and and put together a really bad offer or you're going to get it completely wrong and you're going to end up wasting or losing a lot of money on that retainer offer so it's difficult to price so this is another reason I recommend beginners just do not focus on it and stick to selling your main product over and over and over again at start and finally I wanted to put this on here because I think this is why a lot of people I see in my community and all over the place really getting hung up on this retainer thing is that they're so used and they think AI automation agencies are smma just on AI it's not they are different and one of the main ways that they are different is that you don't need to have a retainer with an AI automation agency you have the luxury as an AI automation agency business owner you're able to come into a business and set something up basically copy and paste it over from a prior client and then still get paid a handsome amount for that which is something that SM don't really get to do you can't go in there and copy and paste and add strategy over because you need to constantly maintain it and edit the campaigns and things like that don't think of it as a negative think of it as a positive you get to go in there with a product you've already created and already sold charge it a decent amount for it and then just go to the next one you don't have to be worried too much about trying to get these big retainers just focus on selling your product to your Niche and and getting the money in that way so what are the different retainer offers for AI automation agencies so firstly I'm going to be giving away an AI automation agency retainer cheat sheet it's going to be on my free resource Hub and not only is it going to be this cheat sheet for retainer offers but there's going to be all my other workshops that I do within my Discord so weekly workshops on lead generation on website creation on anything I've done a workshop on it by now there's also going to be a lot of my chatbot templates so if you want to steal my ABNB chatbot template my onboarding chatbot there's going to be all sorts of free resources uh and people in the community already getting a ton of value out of my resource subub so if you want to get this and then all of my other resources it's for free available in the first link in the description if you want to get through to that so be sure to check that out at the end of the video on screen are the four main types of retainer offers for AI automation agencies firstly we have a maintenance fee secondly we have maintenance and Improvement fee thirdly we have automation as a service service and finally we have a product tise automation package which is a lot more advanced but something I'm going to cover at the end of the video now an important aspect of your retainers is going to be where the automation actually set up now you have two options for this either to set them up on your client's accounts or to set them up on your own so obviously two very different ways of doing it and the retainers that you can do off these two different types are very different this includes the accounts for things like bot press for your chatbot stack AI for any AI functionality you need and also on zapier as well or make.com whichever you're preferring to use so first off you have a basic main package now this is something that a lot of the businesses you work with are going to want this is more so just a bit of Peace of Mind for them that if anything breaks or anything goes wrong you'll there to help them out and ensure that everything is working as it's supposed to for a basic maintenance package I would recommend setting up the automations on their accounts of course they're going to cover all the cost for the different platforms and then you're going to be charging a fixed monthly fee to fix any little bugs that pop up with deployment or any issues that they notice and finally a good thing about having people at least on some kind of small maintenance package is that if something comes along and they want to add a new feature to it your already there and they're ready to ask you for it so you can just quote them and say hey this is going to cost you $500 or $600 to set up and then B me take the payment set it up and then continue the maintenance package as normal secondly and one of my personal favorites that I like to recommend to people is to have a maintenance plus Improvement package now this is sort of the same as your maintenance obviously you're going to set them up on their account they're going to cover all the costs but then you're going to have a fixed fee for the regular bug fixes and support but you're also going to say I'm going to give you additional features um when they come available so if you you want to offer them something that you create say for another client say it's within the same industry for example the Airbnb thing if you create a prototype and you sell it to one client and then when you're working with another client they ask for a specific feature which is I wanted to be able to have instant reports if any damages is done within the property I want to feature within the chat bot that they can report that once you've made that for that client you can then go and offer it to all of the clients that you have on your maintenance and Improvement package and say hey I've just got this new feature we've been working on it's been working really well with other clients would you like me to set it up for you for free so by this you can add a lot of value to the retainer because they're like well I can get one new feature a month and I would recommend to set it at a a specific limit so they're not expecting infinite improvements it's saying I can add a new feature in once per month for you based on what I'm working on I'm really on The Cutting Edge of this within our Niche and I'm seeing new things all the time so if either you want something so they can bring an idea to you and say hey would it be possible for us to get this you can say I can do one of those per month or you can say I'm also going to be coming with you with ideas and I present them to you and if you want to implement them then I can do that under the contract and there's also a little bit of extra source I wanted to give away for chatbots in particular so if you're doing a Improvement in maintenance service for a chatbot a lot of the time if you're doing some kind of knowledge bot where people are asking questions to a knowledge base and it's giving them back in the form of a an assistant answer that knows this information you can actually set something up so that every time the bot replies with I don't know and so they ask a question that's outside of the scope of the information that the client has provided you with and you've put into the chat bot every time it says I don't know you can trigger that using zapia to save it to a Google sheet and then you can say look if you go on to my maintenance and Improvement package I'm going to be improving your Bot maybe four times a month like at the end of every week is a good way to do it on a on a Sunday or something going you're going to go into that Google sheet and you'll say I'm going to take all of these questions I'm going to go back and forth with you or your team going to get the answers to that and then I'm going to add them back into the knowledge base you're maintaining and improving the knowledge base so that the chat boot can answer questions better and the way that you set these chat Bots up typically they're not going to have all of the answers right off the bat so this is a really good way to continually improve it and a lot more than a typical maintenance package setting up something like this is actually very basic and I've actually covered it in another video I'll link it up here for you guys to watch that now but yeah this is a really really powerful way and a really big value add for different clients depending on what their Niche is and what the uses of the chatbot are another way of charging retainers to your automation agency clients is to package your automation as a service so a AAS is not very nice to say but automation as a service is when you're going to be putting the automations on your own accounts and you're going to be covering all of the cost yourself so in set up they don't have it set up on their accounts they're going to be relying on you solely as a provider and essentially in order to benefit from the automations they're going to need to stay working with you the whole time this is obviously a far more sticky business model and that once you've set them up for the client and they're getting benefit from them it's highly unlikely that they're going to want to chop them off unless you start charging ridiculous retainers so it's going to be a bit harder to sell clients on this where you're going to have all of the access to it and as I say you're going to be asked fairly regularly do I even own this am I going to get access to this bot or this this this so will be harder to sell but if you want to take this angle and charge it as an automation as a service then this is an option when it comes to charging your automation as a service clients you can charge them either monthly just a flat sort of $2,000 $3,000 monthly or you can charge them on a monthly flat fee plus usage so you add a little markup on top of whatever they're using on your account or you can just do it purely by usage as well on these platforms zapia bot press stack AI you get charged by usage so if you want to charge them by usage you're going to have to track that based on whatever they're using so it's going to include some sort of support as well if you want to do this kind of package they're going to be paying you monthly you're going to have to provide some kind of uh maintenance and tweaking for the client in that situation but when it comes to Major improvements and new features that they want added you can charge them and say hey I'm going to quote you $800 for this upgrade this is what it's going to cost you and these are the terms of the contract so you can include support basic support of of maintaining it but if it comes to actually getting new things built into it then you should charge them a fixed price and then finally we have the Holy Grail of AI automation agencies which is a productized AI automation package which I'm going to be touching on later in the video which is something that we do with morning side at the moment this is really the final form of a retainer-based AI automation agency so if you're interested in hearing more about that and how we're running it and we can potentially take your agency in future then be sure to stick around cuz I'm going over that the entire process at the end of the video an important point of course as I mentioned earlier in the video is the correct pricing of retainers if you get this wrong you can be stuck into something that's not going to be very beneficial for you in the long term pricing your retainers can actually be quite risky and if you're not careful you could easily start running into the red or just attach to something that you really don't want to be so the way that you can start to price them and estimate is by by estimating the number of hours your developer will spend per month on maintaining the software so if it's a maintenance package only you could say okay you might be spending 3 hours a week maximum okay times that by 4.3 okay that's roughly how many hours we're going to be spending on this or you can limit them and tell your developer you are to spend no more than 2 hours per week on this particular client when it comes to maintaining so there's two different ways you can do it once you have that estimate or that hard limit that you're going to provide to your developer you want to mark it up at least 2 to three times ideally more if you can get it depending on your prior results but you do need a significant margin because depending on the client as you'll see later you could have that suddenly double or triple in size so make sure you have a nice healthy margin that's worth your time and when it comes to billing by usage you can do the same process marking up the usage cost that you're paying on zap and things like this markting that up two or three or four times very very easy way to be making a nice margin on those kind of services that are ongoing so if it's by usage it's a lot easier to manage the cost and to be tracking how much you're paying and how much you need to build them so that takes a lot of variable cost out of it when you Belling them by usage rather than by the hours that your developer spending on it just to give you an idea of the kind of prices you can charge these can go anywhere from $300 per month for a very very basic maintenance package to $1,000 or more depending on what value you're packing into that package when it comes to Improvement and things like I've discussed with the chat Bots it's really up to you how much you can charge because you can really direct that value back into this thing's going to get better over time sell it as best as you can and see how much you can start charging those retainers for to illustrate these different pricing formats I thought I'd give you a couple examples so here on screen we have a say you set up a chat bot for $1,000 and then you're going to have a $30 per month maintenance you're of course collecting $1,000 and then the $300 in the month of May and then from then on you're making your $300 per month to maintain it and then if they cancel mid August then you're not going to get paid in September so pretty basic and then same sort of deal with this if you're doing a $2,500 chatbot plus zapia automation package you'll get that collected up front you're going to get the $2500 and then also $1,000 for the maintenance in that month and then so on from there now looking at this you can actually play around with it a little bit and this comes back to the offer creation that I covered in my beginner's guide if you have these two different price points so say we have the setup fee and then we also have the monthly retainer when you have those and you're trying to sign the client you can play around with them and say hey look I'll wave this $2,500 up front if you buy today or if you buy this week so you can really use those or you can say I'll give you your first month of Maintenance cuz if you're a client and you're looking at this I'm already paying 2,500 to set it up I don't really want to pay another $1,000 in that same month for maintenance so you can play around with those variables and really adjust them to create a really irresistible offer for your clients and finally here's an example of a basic $500 system setup depending on whatever you you're providing the client with but then billing them by usage so here we have your $500 setup fee and then we have a usage based billing so this is a random number 567 849 so it's variable depending on how much they're using the systems now this isn't great if you're looking to get some sort of consistent income in the business on the client side depending how much money you're really going to make but if you think they're going to be a high value client that's going to be running a lot of volume to these different automations you're creating then this can actually give you a really really healthy upside and huge upside potential really for making a lot of money per month so if you can get the right client on the on a usage based billing then you could be uh up for making a lot of money as well now I couldn't make a video on retainer offers for AI automation agencies without at least covering some of the mistakes that I commonly see and the mistakes that I've even made myself so that you guys can do this without making the same mistake so mistake one is accepting the wrong kind of clients onto your retainer offers now there's probably isn't the most obvious thing for you beginners out there but accepting the Ry kind of clients onto your retainer office can be a absolute nightmare that you do not want to be a part of as I say on screen here some clients can be problematic and trust me you do not want to sign on to a three or six Monon retainer with a client who you just can't stand to deal with so for your own peace of mind and also for the reputation of your business you need to be very very cautious about who you want to work with do not just open the doors to everyone and anyone to hop on a retainer offer with you if you're going to be getting paid and you're going to be working with this ongoing basis you need to be 100% sure 110% sure that these are the kind of people that you're going to want to work with on ongoing basis and more so you don't think they have the potential to potentially go sour on you cuz it might be all good at the start when you're first hopping on the calls but uh by the end of the first month and the second month things could really get ugly if it's not a good relationship so be very very cautious about who you start offering these to it shouldn't be to everyone don't just accept retainers willy-nilly CU you want the money need to be aware that you're going to be working with these people for potentially a long time and do the proper due diligence before accepting that deal and chatbot specifically if you combine a hard to work with client with a chatbot deliverable where the outputs are really subjective that could be can be a very very bad mix because this person's grumpy and they're able to nitpick about the kind of quality the responses if you can avoid getting in that situation I would seriously recommend it because chat bots on their own without having a grumpy client can be very very hard to agree on the outputs and say yes we've achieved what we wanted to achieve with this particular deliverable and the second retainer mistake that you want to avoid is is of course charging too little you need to be making sure that these retainer offers are going to be worth your time and I know when you're first starting out you might think well $300 $500 that is worth my time but if you're going to do all of that work you better make sure you're making some reasonable amount of money and there can be a lot of admin a lot of just messaging and mental clutter for you as the entrepreneur if you have two or three different uh clients who are on $300 or $500 a month at the end of the day if you've hired someone on and they're putting in a couple hours a week on those kind of projects you might be making one $100 profit per client and you have to ask yourself is that worth my time is it worth the stress is it worth exposing my business to potential risk of clients going sour and having bad experiences and then wanting their money back it's just there's a huge opportunity cost as I've got on screen here an opportunity cost for you as a business owner to be dealing with these ongoing commitments that are really not bringing in that much money to the business as a business owner your job is to sell your main product and that is all you should be focusing on really if you're dealing with these kind of retainer offers and ongoing Communications with clients who are paying you 300 to $500 a month it's just there's so much more upside and you get such a higher return on your time if you're going out and selling new clients and trying to get those $1,000 $1,500 $2,000 uh upfront fees rather than trying to play around for $500 $200 in profit you know it's just not worth your time unless you charge enough that it is so my point with this is that if you're going to charge a retainer make sure you're leaving plenty of room and that plenty of margin so that it's worth your time thirdly another mistake that I want you guys to avoid is getting into contracts that are too sticky particularly on your end you do not want to get locked into these maintenance contracts for many many months if you are going to be doing retainers you need to negotiate as a ideally a month to Monon not something like a six-month locked in so the month to month is going to be far superior because if you want to get out of it you should be able to get out of it within a month because if it's a six-month locking contract and you're making $300 $500 $100 profit a month whatever it ends up being locking into that for 6 month commitment is going to be a dead weight in your business as you scale and as you start to make more money you get more results you can Char more for your main product and you begin to upsell suddenly you're making $3 to $5,000 with your main product and then you still have to play around with with servicing and maintaining these things that are making you $100 or $200 a month so always make sure you have some sort of back door in your in your contract so that if you want to get out of it and if you think this is not a good use of my time or my team's time you can say hey look sorry I'm going to give you all the resources you need to manage it yourself but I got to get out of here I I can't do this contract for you anymore long story short do not get locked into uh long contract with client unless they're paying you a ton of money if they offer you $3,000 $5,000 a month to manage it then sure maybe that's worthwhile but if it's something small back yourself that in the in the next 2 3 4 months that amount of money that they're offering you is going to be very very small so it's a bit of a a mindset thing and a belief in yourself and your future ability to generate money but just know that if you do the right steps and you're willing to put in the work those little $300 $500 monthly retainers are going to be Pebbles compared to what you're dealing with within a couple months and that brings us on to our final mistake here which is going for retainer offers and trying to secure retainers too early in your in your business and too early in your in your time as a AAA owner as I always say in my videos and you guys are probably getting sick of me saying it by now but your first few clients are meant to get case studies you're not trying to bag a ton of money on these first couple of clients because you're probably going to be absolutely terrible at delivering a service you're going to have a product that's Half Baked and it's not really of massive value to a business you need to be using these first few clients to learn to further improve your product and to create case study so get some result results from your clients and use those to then go later on to other clients and start to charge them a ton more so you need to get those first few and as I said the focus of the first few clients is to get those case studies the goal in those initial clients where most of you guys are probably looking to to get now is not to build monthly recurring Revenue the goal in this stage is to learn and for you to get locked onto itty bitty little retainer contracts because as as I say on screen here once you have results you can actually charge a reasonable amount but if you don't have any results you're not going to be able to charge them 500,000 ,500 $2,000 a month for retainer because you don't have the results to back it up so doing it too early is going to mean you're taking these little tiny retainers that are going to distract you from the business what you really should be doing what you're selling so just wait a bit longer when you're working solo as I say here you should be focusing on sales not maintaining these clients for a couple hundred a month just trust the process and know that in time you're going to be able to charge those higher retainers which are worth your time so don't get stuck into it too early uh you need to be patient in order to get the real money once you have some results to back up those retainers now I couldn't make video about retainer offers for AI automation agencies without at least sharing a little bit about what we're doing at Morningside AI my automation agency and development company we have created a pure retainer variation of the AI automation agency model and I'm going to give you a bit of a look into how we're doing this now so that you can sort of look ahead and see potentially where you want to get your business in future after you've done the hard work of learning more about the model and delivering at least a ton of different clients so that you're familiar and you have enough knowledge to be able to start making this offer because it is quite difficult to do this is a pure retaining AAA version and this is really the final form of the AAA model at the moment at least on the retainer side of things this is a first of its kind AI automation offer at morning side automation I do have to give credit where credit is due as I always do in my videos You'll see a lot of similarities between what we do with our retainer model here and what the teamw that design Joy are doing if you're not familiar design Joy is a design agency where you pay an upfront monthly fee I want to say thank you to the design Joy team and the guys over there credit with credits du thank you to the design Joy team for putting this thing out there for people to share with this pure retain of variation you'll be charging a monthly fee at the moment Al is here at $88,000 per month but I think we've cut it down for our beta test at the moment which are running to about 6,400 this is more of an automation partnership an ongoing partnership between your business and their business where you are a automation partner and you're not doing this sort of scoping Contracting proposing this like little cycle because when you're dealing with automations that can be fairly small and easy to deliver that only take a couple of days it's not worth spending days and days and days going back and forth over email it's better just say look you've got a lot of stuff we can do a lot of stuff we can help let's just jump into a contract like this where you're getting a ton of value from us you have people working around the clock on your on your projects in exchange you're just going to pay us a monthly fee and we can work as us as partners from our experience of running this offer we have noticed not only a benefit for the customer and that they get a sort of conage service where they've always got attention from our team constantly getting things built and they can sort of let us know and guide the development process without all the admin but but on our side as well by removing all of that admin and email communication and Contracting and things like that our team gets to focus on what they're actually good at the developers get to just work constantly and us as the admin team and the guys leading the business can actually just focus on driving more sales rather than spending a ton of time on emails and stuff like that so how does this pure retainer version of the model actually work well step one is that clients need to come onto our website and purchase a subscription here you can see is our morning side automation website and down below is a subscription section so they can click monthly they can actually buy quarterly or yearly which aren't available right now cuz we're in our beta test but they can click here and apply for the beta in the final version they're just going to be able to click there and purchase it out right so from there we go to step two which is a workshop call so after the client has purchased the subscription they've sent a link to book in a workshop call with us and their team these calls typically last an hour or more and it's really just getting to know their business inside out and picking out all the different automation opportunities they have so we actually get the client to walk us through their business using a a framework or a set of questions that we have so that really takes us from top to bottom and we can start to jot down the whole team's Jing away identifying different things that we can help them out with and then they may also have some ideas themselves we often have businesses that come to us and they say hey man I've been seeing these different things and I want to get this this this involved and we go great we can put those down on the list and then we go through that framework and that questionnaire with them we also identify a ton more that they never even thought of that we know from our own experience of working with businesses like them and at the end of the call we have 10 to 20 different automation ideas uh that we can then go and boil down into a actionable list for them once we have that list of ideas boiled down to some actionable tasks then we create a trailer board for them and populate the trailer board with all of these different automation tasks so our developers will scope each one of the little tasks and say for this thing it's going to take 3 days for this thing it's going to take 10 days cuz it's a bit more complex and once they're all put onto the Traer board then the client can come on and have a look around and say h yeah that one's going to take 3 days okay sure let's get started on that and once they drag it across and put it in the current request column then on our back end our developers are going to see what requests are being asked for and which clients are in need of work so that takes us to the next step of Service delivery we're using air table here to just track all of those different Traer boards and so whenever there's someone who who's waiting for a review or they've asked for a new task to start our developers can just come onto the air table and see everything and and determine which projects are currently on pause or or waiting for review and which things they actually need to do work on so very easy all centralized sort of project management Hy here works very very well at the moment and we're we're really happy with the system that we've got set up a few more notes that I'll mentioned just to clarify the service delivery a little bit all communication is done on trow via comments this is to eliminate as much slack back and forth as possible which is a bit of a a black hole you can get stuck into as agency owner but by keeping all the communication on Trello includes a lot more friction right so as soon as it's on slack and and other communication channels there can be a lot more chatter back and forth with comments it's a bit more blocky and a little bit more friction right so only messaging us when you really really need to Once to happy with it we can move it across to complete we can start on the next task so this basically results in more work and a ton less admin for us and a ton less back and forth for the client and I will mention that this kind of thing does require a lot of experience but the results are worth it and I wanted to include it in this video so that you guys can see where you can get to with this model once you have enough experience obviously to to have a business come to you and you do a full audit of their operations and figure out a ton of different automation opportunities for them that takes quite a lot of experience and TI a lot of skill and and a good team of developers behind you to back it up and and really build those things out I seriously would not recommend it for beginners this is a very very difficult thing to do if you don't have the experience as I always say you need to focus get it as simple as possible get your foot in the door with a specific Niche and a specific delivery and if you keep at it and you continue to to expand that eventually you can get to something like this and I'd love to see some of you guys do this in the future so that is your full rundown of retainer offers for AI automation agencies key takeaways here that I just want to reiterate is that you don't need retainers especially early on it's not your focus to be running up retainers early on your goal is to learn your goal is to get case studies and get testimonials and use that to start charging more for your main product more for your lead product so that you can make money on that setup fee right so don't worry about it too early on it's too complicated there's too many variables it is something that you should really really avoid early on secondly you need to be cautious about the timing and the terms of your retainers as I said if you're getting with a client that you don't necessarily want to work with for a long time or you're not charging enough as I said there's a lot of variables in there be very very cautious at least when you're doing your first ones before you have any kind of data points to base your your numbers off so you could get locked into something you really don't want to be in for way too long you could really lose money every single month if you do the math wrong so be very cautious about it but uh there's always plenty of help in my community if you want to have a chat to our guys in there and finally a full retainer or retainer only model does exist and we're running it at warning side automation but it is not for beginners now if you guys want me to do more of a deep dive on what we're doing on the automation side at morning side I'd love to do a deeper dive into how we're running our processes so let me know in the comments below if any of that would be interesting for you guys the next steps for any of you who are looking to make money with your own AI automation agency is to firstly subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and while you're down there please leave a like if you've enjoyed this video it would mean the world to me as the creator of this model I've already done a bunch of other videos on it so check out my recent upload if you want to check out more content like this of course join my AAA Community we have the biggest community of AAA owners in the world we're very very proud to say that we' got about 17,000 people at time of filming this and we're growing rapidly so if you want any kind of help from myself we do weekly workshops in their weekly q&as that I just had a couple hours ago so if you want to talk to me if you want to talk to uh people who are making money with the model if you want to see the results people are getting be sure to join there and extract some of the value that people are giving away for free in there including myself if you want to sign up to my free resource Hub where all of my old Discord Workshop record in so each week my recordings are going up on there I have chatbot templates I have contract templates I have all sorts of value that's free on my resource Hub so you can sign up to the resource Hub including the document that I gave away within this video it's going to be available in the description the pin comment as well and finally I also have a AAA newsletter specifically for AAA owners AI automation agency owners I give away my personal notebook my my secrets and my little jotting Downs during the week on how I'm running my automation agency and how you can benefit from my learning so if you want to get any of the value out of that people are are really loving it at the moment everything on screen is going to be available in the description the pen comment don't waste the resources I put them there for a reason so thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next onein this video I'm going to be explaining how you can structure your AI automation agency offers in order to generate juicy monthly recurring Revenue in the form of retainers there are a number of ways that you can achieve this but if not done carefully and in the correct way the golden prize of monthly recurring Revenue can quickly become a dead weight in your young business and really cause you more headaches than it's worth so I thought I'd come on here and share with you some of my honest learnings and pitfalls of running retainers of my own AI automation agency so that hopefully you can avoid some of the mistakes that I've made along the way now to properly explain retainer offers for AI automation agencies I've broken this video up into a few different parts so if you want to skip around them as you need feel free to do that firstly I'll be very quickly going over what retainers actually are and whether you even need them in your AI automation agency then I'll be taking you through a few different types of AAA retainer offers that I've seen work best then we'll be following that up with four common retainer mistakes that you need to avoid then I'll be giving you guys a look into my own company and the retainer only variation of the AI automation agency model that we've been running recently now before we any further if you're watching this and going what in the hell is an AI automation agency be sure to check out my beginners guide here this is a 2hour long video that I created we've had some insane feedback from it the likes and comments on it as you can see on screen here have been ridiculous so that's really my marker of whether or not this video is valuable that video will be linked up here if you want to go and watch that now and then you come back to this and you'll be ready for this information and I do want to briefly show some of the results coming out of my community just a week after I released that video these people are using the exact method that I covered and gave away for free in that 2hour video and they're seeing the kind of results on screen within their first week of starting an AI automation agency model so if you want to get started go watch that video and then be sure to join my community to get the resources that they've had access to in order to get these results so firstly what are retainers and do you really need them in your AI automation agency well if we ask Dr Google we get an official definition here of retainers are structured agreements in which the client agrees to pay a specific amount of money to a business usually monthly and in return receives a set of services during that same time period so what is that actually look like in a business well firstly it's going to be a a month-to-month agreement maybe you're signed on for just a month at a time but it might be sort of an ongoing for six months so six-month contract month-to Monon retainer where you're getting paid a fixed amount of money every month for doing a fixed set of services essentially you are going to be providing a set of services in exchange for a fixed monthly fee for example you might get $11,000 per month from your client for doing XYZ Services now the key thing here is that if you have clients on retainer within your business you are generating monthly recurring revenue or M you'll be seeing Mr pop up a lot throughout this video so here's a very basic diagram of how retainers works so say you signed the client in May on a $1,000 per month retainer you're going to collect that payment at the start of the month and then every month from then on until they cancel you're going to be paid $1,000 per month so in this case this business is generating $1,000 in Mr now what is the relationship between retainers and the AI automation agency model that I've created by default the AAA model does not include retainers the way that I've created and structured this model means that you don't have to have retainers at the start it is actually works better at the start as you're going to see later to not include retainers so by default it doesn't have retainers this isn't something like smma where everything is basically built on retainers this is more of a contract based initially and then retainers are sort of extra icing on the cake as you're going to see later in this video now for example if your AI automation agency deliverable as a prospecting chatbot for restaurants you might be charging upfront a oneoff setup fee of $997 now it is completely fine to set things up in a way that the client no longer needs you and then you can walk away and get straight onto your next client but if you are absolutely set on getting some kind of Mr for your business there are options that do exist for squeezing more money out of each client now before we get into explaining the different types of retainer offers for automation agencies we need to answer the question of do you actually need retainers to succeed as an automation agency owner in order to properly answer the question of whether or not you need retainers to succeed as a AAA owner we first need to look at why you'd even want retainers in the first place firstly m is the lifeblood of small businesses like AI automation agency it's what keeps them afloat when times are tough as I've put on screen Mr creates a cushion of safety that keeps the machine going keeps your business moving forward even when times get tough if your business only relies on those setup fees then you're going to potentially have huge months followed by absolutely nothing so by having some kind of recurring income that you build up over time you can increase the Baseline and ensure that even if you have a complete flop over one month and you aren't able to get any new clients cuz you're on this hamster wheel or something happens you need to travel or something pops up at least if you stop trying to sell you're still going to have some kind of income coming in each month so your Baseline has increased when you have some sort of Mr also by having retainers you can actually increase the lifetime value of your client so instead of just getting a $1,000 upfront setup fee that client could now be worth up to $2,000 because they've got a couple months of retainers after that it can be a little bit complex for beginners but essentially by increasing their lifetime value you can afford to spend more in order to acquire that Customer because you've got this total amount of money that they're going to be worth eventually another reason why you might want to do retainers is because it can be very profitable if if you've done it right if you have the right team setup if you know what you're doing and you structure the contract and the fees in the right way so can be very profitable if done right and the final Point here which kind of circles back to that cushion of safety is that having some sort of Mr in your business or retainers clients that are on retainers is going to give you peace of mind as a business owner that uh your bills can be paid the next month if you have any people who are on payroll you know that you you can at least cover those with the retainers that are going to be coming in each month and this idea of Peace of Mind for entrepreneurs really goes back to to why we're doing this in the first place right it might sound a little bit backwards but as entrepreneurs we are trying to get to easy we want things to be easy we're just choosing to go through the hard in order to get this we are trying to build these businesses so that we can have peace of mind we can have all of the the fun things enjoy the life that we want to but we're willing to do the hard work now and by getting a bunch of retainers stacked up you're actually setting yourself up for that easy bit eventually because everything else is going to be taken care of by those fees there's a bunch of different ways you can do it but essentially that's why M can really be such a a price position within small businesses because as a business owner having that that baseline or that cushion of safety can be really really the game changer between having a business that you enjoy running and you have lower stress levels or having a really nightmarish business whe you're on a hamster wheel constantly I thought I'd throw in a couple little diagrams here for you guys to just be able to visualize how Mr can affect the business and how having retainers in your agency can actually affect your bottom line here's a AAA with no monthly recurring Revenue as you can see April to May to June is bouncing up and down no sort of consistent level of of income and the black line here is a trend line and here you can see what the AI automation agency that uses a couple retainers can look like in the difference it Mak so the orange line here is the retainers which is sort of slowly increasing over time but sort of staying fairly stable then you have the sales bouncing around in the same erratic way but the purple line here of the total revenue is the key thing here so you can see that rather than going all the way down to zero in June you've still got some baseline here of around 20 so in that case you can still pay your employees you can still pay yourself out of the company even and you don't have to worry about running into the red for that month and as you can see the trend line this is obviously on a much higher gradient so over time you're going to be making more money and stacking up those dollars as you need them in the business account now we've identified why you would want retainers we can now look at why you don't need them or why you wouldn't want them at least initially so to be clear I think retainers can be a great thing for people who have enough experience and who have had enough time to really build out the systems required to manage them but initially for beginners who are servicing their first second third client I do not recommend trying to build some kind of retainer offer and for the reasons on screen here firstly as a beginner your focus needs to be on perfecting the delivery of your main product your job as a beginner is already hard enough to be delivering this thing and doing this entirely new business that you've never done before you do not need to add things in like oh I got to calculate how often set up systems for when I'm going to be checking the client's thing and oh I've got all these obligations I have over the next month just cut all of that out focus on getting your one product your main product delivering it and moving on to the next and getting really familiar with that delivery process I get so many questions on how to structure retainer offers from complete beginners in my community and it's really sad for me to to honestly see them struggling with these sort of more complex things that they should not be worrying about your job is to find one Niche and pick one deliverable and sell that thing over and over again and build up some kind of results before you even think about going out and adding these things in so please do not get distracted and do not let your lack of understanding on how to put together a retainer offer because it's far more difficult than just delivering one product do not let that from getting in the way of you signing your first client or first couple of clients secondly here for why you don't need them initially is that to handle multiple retainers without employees is actually going to be fairly difficult for you if you're a so business owner most of you initially are probably going to be delivering these Services yourself you're going to be setting up the zapia Integrations or you're going to be creating the chat Bots and duplicating them over you're going to be doing a lot of that stuff yourself and now if you add in running the business getting clients Service delivery for the clients that you've got coming in and then also doing regular maintenance for these different clients that you've sold previously that's a lot of stuff on your plate and ideally you can start offering these retainers as soon as you have your first employee so you can set up some systems and say okay I need you to once a week check on this this this or message the client it's just going to be too much on your plate as I say you always need to focus 80% of your time on sales and bringing in new business adding this big retainer thing and retainer obligation really is going to just screw up your time organization and mean that you're spending time doing things that are really not what the business needs at the current time and furthermore the amount you can charge for your attainers as a complete beginner without any kind of credibility or results to show clients is going to be too small for you to even bother with and it goes back to what I just said about time management unless you're getting paid thousands of dollar a month for the stuff initially there's no way it's going to be worth more than you going out and getting new clients and getting new case studies and testimonials and results also when it comes to pricing retainers this going to be a lot more complex than copy and pasting over chat bot and passing it off to a new client being able to properly estimate how many hours you're going to have to spend or your team members are going to have to spend or the usage that's going to be put on accounts and all of these kind of calculations can be really difficult for a beginner to do and until you have some kind of experience and track record of being able to estimate these cost is going to be very difficult and you're likely going to either get lost in the details and and put together a really bad offer or you're going to get it completely wrong and you're going to end up wasting or losing a lot of money on that retainer offer so it's difficult to price so this is another reason I recommend beginners just do not focus on it and stick to selling your main product over and over and over again at start and finally I wanted to put this on here because I think this is why a lot of people I see in my community and all over the place really getting hung up on this retainer thing is that they're so used and they think AI automation agencies are smma just on AI it's not they are different and one of the main ways that they are different is that you don't need to have a retainer with an AI automation agency you have the luxury as an AI automation agency business owner you're able to come into a business and set something up basically copy and paste it over from a prior client and then still get paid a handsome amount for that which is something that SM don't really get to do you can't go in there and copy and paste and add strategy over because you need to constantly maintain it and edit the campaigns and things like that don't think of it as a negative think of it as a positive you get to go in there with a product you've already created and already sold charge it a decent amount for it and then just go to the next one you don't have to be worried too much about trying to get these big retainers just focus on selling your product to your Niche and and getting the money in that way so what are the different retainer offers for AI automation agencies so firstly I'm going to be giving away an AI automation agency retainer cheat sheet it's going to be on my free resource Hub and not only is it going to be this cheat sheet for retainer offers but there's going to be all my other workshops that I do within my Discord so weekly workshops on lead generation on website creation on anything I've done a workshop on it by now there's also going to be a lot of my chatbot templates so if you want to steal my ABNB chatbot template my onboarding chatbot there's going to be all sorts of free resources uh and people in the community already getting a ton of value out of my resource subub so if you want to get this and then all of my other resources it's for free available in the first link in the description if you want to get through to that so be sure to check that out at the end of the video on screen are the four main types of retainer offers for AI automation agencies firstly we have a maintenance fee secondly we have maintenance and Improvement fee thirdly we have automation as a service service and finally we have a product tise automation package which is a lot more advanced but something I'm going to cover at the end of the video now an important aspect of your retainers is going to be where the automation actually set up now you have two options for this either to set them up on your client's accounts or to set them up on your own so obviously two very different ways of doing it and the retainers that you can do off these two different types are very different this includes the accounts for things like bot press for your chatbot stack AI for any AI functionality you need and also on zapier as well or make.com whichever you're preferring to use so first off you have a basic main package now this is something that a lot of the businesses you work with are going to want this is more so just a bit of Peace of Mind for them that if anything breaks or anything goes wrong you'll there to help them out and ensure that everything is working as it's supposed to for a basic maintenance package I would recommend setting up the automations on their accounts of course they're going to cover all the cost for the different platforms and then you're going to be charging a fixed monthly fee to fix any little bugs that pop up with deployment or any issues that they notice and finally a good thing about having people at least on some kind of small maintenance package is that if something comes along and they want to add a new feature to it your already there and they're ready to ask you for it so you can just quote them and say hey this is going to cost you $500 or $600 to set up and then B me take the payment set it up and then continue the maintenance package as normal secondly and one of my personal favorites that I like to recommend to people is to have a maintenance plus Improvement package now this is sort of the same as your maintenance obviously you're going to set them up on their account they're going to cover all the costs but then you're going to have a fixed fee for the regular bug fixes and support but you're also going to say I'm going to give you additional features um when they come available so if you you want to offer them something that you create say for another client say it's within the same industry for example the Airbnb thing if you create a prototype and you sell it to one client and then when you're working with another client they ask for a specific feature which is I wanted to be able to have instant reports if any damages is done within the property I want to feature within the chat bot that they can report that once you've made that for that client you can then go and offer it to all of the clients that you have on your maintenance and Improvement package and say hey I've just got this new feature we've been working on it's been working really well with other clients would you like me to set it up for you for free so by this you can add a lot of value to the retainer because they're like well I can get one new feature a month and I would recommend to set it at a a specific limit so they're not expecting infinite improvements it's saying I can add a new feature in once per month for you based on what I'm working on I'm really on The Cutting Edge of this within our Niche and I'm seeing new things all the time so if either you want something so they can bring an idea to you and say hey would it be possible for us to get this you can say I can do one of those per month or you can say I'm also going to be coming with you with ideas and I present them to you and if you want to implement them then I can do that under the contract and there's also a little bit of extra source I wanted to give away for chatbots in particular so if you're doing a Improvement in maintenance service for a chatbot a lot of the time if you're doing some kind of knowledge bot where people are asking questions to a knowledge base and it's giving them back in the form of a an assistant answer that knows this information you can actually set something up so that every time the bot replies with I don't know and so they ask a question that's outside of the scope of the information that the client has provided you with and you've put into the chat bot every time it says I don't know you can trigger that using zapia to save it to a Google sheet and then you can say look if you go on to my maintenance and Improvement package I'm going to be improving your Bot maybe four times a month like at the end of every week is a good way to do it on a on a Sunday or something going you're going to go into that Google sheet and you'll say I'm going to take all of these questions I'm going to go back and forth with you or your team going to get the answers to that and then I'm going to add them back into the knowledge base you're maintaining and improving the knowledge base so that the chat boot can answer questions better and the way that you set these chat Bots up typically they're not going to have all of the answers right off the bat so this is a really good way to continually improve it and a lot more than a typical maintenance package setting up something like this is actually very basic and I've actually covered it in another video I'll link it up here for you guys to watch that now but yeah this is a really really powerful way and a really big value add for different clients depending on what their Niche is and what the uses of the chatbot are another way of charging retainers to your automation agency clients is to package your automation as a service so a AAS is not very nice to say but automation as a service is when you're going to be putting the automations on your own accounts and you're going to be covering all of the cost yourself so in set up they don't have it set up on their accounts they're going to be relying on you solely as a provider and essentially in order to benefit from the automations they're going to need to stay working with you the whole time this is obviously a far more sticky business model and that once you've set them up for the client and they're getting benefit from them it's highly unlikely that they're going to want to chop them off unless you start charging ridiculous retainers so it's going to be a bit harder to sell clients on this where you're going to have all of the access to it and as I say you're going to be asked fairly regularly do I even own this am I going to get access to this bot or this this this so will be harder to sell but if you want to take this angle and charge it as an automation as a service then this is an option when it comes to charging your automation as a service clients you can charge them either monthly just a flat sort of $2,000 $3,000 monthly or you can charge them on a monthly flat fee plus usage so you add a little markup on top of whatever they're using on your account or you can just do it purely by usage as well on these platforms zapia bot press stack AI you get charged by usage so if you want to charge them by usage you're going to have to track that based on whatever they're using so it's going to include some sort of support as well if you want to do this kind of package they're going to be paying you monthly you're going to have to provide some kind of uh maintenance and tweaking for the client in that situation but when it comes to Major improvements and new features that they want added you can charge them and say hey I'm going to quote you $800 for this upgrade this is what it's going to cost you and these are the terms of the contract so you can include support basic support of of maintaining it but if it comes to actually getting new things built into it then you should charge them a fixed price and then finally we have the Holy Grail of AI automation agencies which is a productized AI automation package which I'm going to be touching on later in the video which is something that we do with morning side at the moment this is really the final form of a retainer-based AI automation agency so if you're interested in hearing more about that and how we're running it and we can potentially take your agency in future then be sure to stick around cuz I'm going over that the entire process at the end of the video an important point of course as I mentioned earlier in the video is the correct pricing of retainers if you get this wrong you can be stuck into something that's not going to be very beneficial for you in the long term pricing your retainers can actually be quite risky and if you're not careful you could easily start running into the red or just attach to something that you really don't want to be so the way that you can start to price them and estimate is by by estimating the number of hours your developer will spend per month on maintaining the software so if it's a maintenance package only you could say okay you might be spending 3 hours a week maximum okay times that by 4.3 okay that's roughly how many hours we're going to be spending on this or you can limit them and tell your developer you are to spend no more than 2 hours per week on this particular client when it comes to maintaining so there's two different ways you can do it once you have that estimate or that hard limit that you're going to provide to your developer you want to mark it up at least 2 to three times ideally more if you can get it depending on your prior results but you do need a significant margin because depending on the client as you'll see later you could have that suddenly double or triple in size so make sure you have a nice healthy margin that's worth your time and when it comes to billing by usage you can do the same process marking up the usage cost that you're paying on zap and things like this markting that up two or three or four times very very easy way to be making a nice margin on those kind of services that are ongoing so if it's by usage it's a lot easier to manage the cost and to be tracking how much you're paying and how much you need to build them so that takes a lot of variable cost out of it when you Belling them by usage rather than by the hours that your developer spending on it just to give you an idea of the kind of prices you can charge these can go anywhere from $300 per month for a very very basic maintenance package to $1,000 or more depending on what value you're packing into that package when it comes to Improvement and things like I've discussed with the chat Bots it's really up to you how much you can charge because you can really direct that value back into this thing's going to get better over time sell it as best as you can and see how much you can start charging those retainers for to illustrate these different pricing formats I thought I'd give you a couple examples so here on screen we have a say you set up a chat bot for $1,000 and then you're going to have a $30 per month maintenance you're of course collecting $1,000 and then the $300 in the month of May and then from then on you're making your $300 per month to maintain it and then if they cancel mid August then you're not going to get paid in September so pretty basic and then same sort of deal with this if you're doing a $2,500 chatbot plus zapia automation package you'll get that collected up front you're going to get the $2500 and then also $1,000 for the maintenance in that month and then so on from there now looking at this you can actually play around with it a little bit and this comes back to the offer creation that I covered in my beginner's guide if you have these two different price points so say we have the setup fee and then we also have the monthly retainer when you have those and you're trying to sign the client you can play around with them and say hey look I'll wave this $2,500 up front if you buy today or if you buy this week so you can really use those or you can say I'll give you your first month of Maintenance cuz if you're a client and you're looking at this I'm already paying 2,500 to set it up I don't really want to pay another $1,000 in that same month for maintenance so you can play around with those variables and really adjust them to create a really irresistible offer for your clients and finally here's an example of a basic $500 system setup depending on whatever you you're providing the client with but then billing them by usage so here we have your $500 setup fee and then we have a usage based billing so this is a random number 567 849 so it's variable depending on how much they're using the systems now this isn't great if you're looking to get some sort of consistent income in the business on the client side depending how much money you're really going to make but if you think they're going to be a high value client that's going to be running a lot of volume to these different automations you're creating then this can actually give you a really really healthy upside and huge upside potential really for making a lot of money per month so if you can get the right client on the on a usage based billing then you could be uh up for making a lot of money as well now I couldn't make a video on retainer offers for AI automation agencies without at least covering some of the mistakes that I commonly see and the mistakes that I've even made myself so that you guys can do this without making the same mistake so mistake one is accepting the wrong kind of clients onto your retainer offers now there's probably isn't the most obvious thing for you beginners out there but accepting the Ry kind of clients onto your retainer office can be a absolute nightmare that you do not want to be a part of as I say on screen here some clients can be problematic and trust me you do not want to sign on to a three or six Monon retainer with a client who you just can't stand to deal with so for your own peace of mind and also for the reputation of your business you need to be very very cautious about who you want to work with do not just open the doors to everyone and anyone to hop on a retainer offer with you if you're going to be getting paid and you're going to be working with this ongoing basis you need to be 100% sure 110% sure that these are the kind of people that you're going to want to work with on ongoing basis and more so you don't think they have the potential to potentially go sour on you cuz it might be all good at the start when you're first hopping on the calls but uh by the end of the first month and the second month things could really get ugly if it's not a good relationship so be very very cautious about who you start offering these to it shouldn't be to everyone don't just accept retainers willy-nilly CU you want the money need to be aware that you're going to be working with these people for potentially a long time and do the proper due diligence before accepting that deal and chatbot specifically if you combine a hard to work with client with a chatbot deliverable where the outputs are really subjective that could be can be a very very bad mix because this person's grumpy and they're able to nitpick about the kind of quality the responses if you can avoid getting in that situation I would seriously recommend it because chat bots on their own without having a grumpy client can be very very hard to agree on the outputs and say yes we've achieved what we wanted to achieve with this particular deliverable and the second retainer mistake that you want to avoid is is of course charging too little you need to be making sure that these retainer offers are going to be worth your time and I know when you're first starting out you might think well $300 $500 that is worth my time but if you're going to do all of that work you better make sure you're making some reasonable amount of money and there can be a lot of admin a lot of just messaging and mental clutter for you as the entrepreneur if you have two or three different uh clients who are on $300 or $500 a month at the end of the day if you've hired someone on and they're putting in a couple hours a week on those kind of projects you might be making one $100 profit per client and you have to ask yourself is that worth my time is it worth the stress is it worth exposing my business to potential risk of clients going sour and having bad experiences and then wanting their money back it's just there's a huge opportunity cost as I've got on screen here an opportunity cost for you as a business owner to be dealing with these ongoing commitments that are really not bringing in that much money to the business as a business owner your job is to sell your main product and that is all you should be focusing on really if you're dealing with these kind of retainer offers and ongoing Communications with clients who are paying you 300 to $500 a month it's just there's so much more upside and you get such a higher return on your time if you're going out and selling new clients and trying to get those $1,000 $1,500 $2,000 uh upfront fees rather than trying to play around for $500 $200 in profit you know it's just not worth your time unless you charge enough that it is so my point with this is that if you're going to charge a retainer make sure you're leaving plenty of room and that plenty of margin so that it's worth your time thirdly another mistake that I want you guys to avoid is getting into contracts that are too sticky particularly on your end you do not want to get locked into these maintenance contracts for many many months if you are going to be doing retainers you need to negotiate as a ideally a month to Monon not something like a six-month locked in so the month to month is going to be far superior because if you want to get out of it you should be able to get out of it within a month because if it's a six-month locking contract and you're making $300 $500 $100 profit a month whatever it ends up being locking into that for 6 month commitment is going to be a dead weight in your business as you scale and as you start to make more money you get more results you can Char more for your main product and you begin to upsell suddenly you're making $3 to $5,000 with your main product and then you still have to play around with with servicing and maintaining these things that are making you $100 or $200 a month so always make sure you have some sort of back door in your in your contract so that if you want to get out of it and if you think this is not a good use of my time or my team's time you can say hey look sorry I'm going to give you all the resources you need to manage it yourself but I got to get out of here I I can't do this contract for you anymore long story short do not get locked into uh long contract with client unless they're paying you a ton of money if they offer you $3,000 $5,000 a month to manage it then sure maybe that's worthwhile but if it's something small back yourself that in the in the next 2 3 4 months that amount of money that they're offering you is going to be very very small so it's a bit of a a mindset thing and a belief in yourself and your future ability to generate money but just know that if you do the right steps and you're willing to put in the work those little $300 $500 monthly retainers are going to be Pebbles compared to what you're dealing with within a couple months and that brings us on to our final mistake here which is going for retainer offers and trying to secure retainers too early in your in your business and too early in your in your time as a AAA owner as I always say in my videos and you guys are probably getting sick of me saying it by now but your first few clients are meant to get case studies you're not trying to bag a ton of money on these first couple of clients because you're probably going to be absolutely terrible at delivering a service you're going to have a product that's Half Baked and it's not really of massive value to a business you need to be using these first few clients to learn to further improve your product and to create case study so get some result results from your clients and use those to then go later on to other clients and start to charge them a ton more so you need to get those first few and as I said the focus of the first few clients is to get those case studies the goal in those initial clients where most of you guys are probably looking to to get now is not to build monthly recurring Revenue the goal in this stage is to learn and for you to get locked onto itty bitty little retainer contracts because as as I say on screen here once you have results you can actually charge a reasonable amount but if you don't have any results you're not going to be able to charge them 500,000 ,500 $2,000 a month for retainer because you don't have the results to back it up so doing it too early is going to mean you're taking these little tiny retainers that are going to distract you from the business what you really should be doing what you're selling so just wait a bit longer when you're working solo as I say here you should be focusing on sales not maintaining these clients for a couple hundred a month just trust the process and know that in time you're going to be able to charge those higher retainers which are worth your time so don't get stuck into it too early uh you need to be patient in order to get the real money once you have some results to back up those retainers now I couldn't make video about retainer offers for AI automation agencies without at least sharing a little bit about what we're doing at Morningside AI my automation agency and development company we have created a pure retainer variation of the AI automation agency model and I'm going to give you a bit of a look into how we're doing this now so that you can sort of look ahead and see potentially where you want to get your business in future after you've done the hard work of learning more about the model and delivering at least a ton of different clients so that you're familiar and you have enough knowledge to be able to start making this offer because it is quite difficult to do this is a pure retaining AAA version and this is really the final form of the AAA model at the moment at least on the retainer side of things this is a first of its kind AI automation offer at morning side automation I do have to give credit where credit is due as I always do in my videos You'll see a lot of similarities between what we do with our retainer model here and what the teamw that design Joy are doing if you're not familiar design Joy is a design agency where you pay an upfront monthly fee I want to say thank you to the design Joy team and the guys over there credit with credits du thank you to the design Joy team for putting this thing out there for people to share with this pure retain of variation you'll be charging a monthly fee at the moment Al is here at $88,000 per month but I think we've cut it down for our beta test at the moment which are running to about 6,400 this is more of an automation partnership an ongoing partnership between your business and their business where you are a automation partner and you're not doing this sort of scoping Contracting proposing this like little cycle because when you're dealing with automations that can be fairly small and easy to deliver that only take a couple of days it's not worth spending days and days and days going back and forth over email it's better just say look you've got a lot of stuff we can do a lot of stuff we can help let's just jump into a contract like this where you're getting a ton of value from us you have people working around the clock on your on your projects in exchange you're just going to pay us a monthly fee and we can work as us as partners from our experience of running this offer we have noticed not only a benefit for the customer and that they get a sort of conage service where they've always got attention from our team constantly getting things built and they can sort of let us know and guide the development process without all the admin but but on our side as well by removing all of that admin and email communication and Contracting and things like that our team gets to focus on what they're actually good at the developers get to just work constantly and us as the admin team and the guys leading the business can actually just focus on driving more sales rather than spending a ton of time on emails and stuff like that so how does this pure retainer version of the model actually work well step one is that clients need to come onto our website and purchase a subscription here you can see is our morning side automation website and down below is a subscription section so they can click monthly they can actually buy quarterly or yearly which aren't available right now cuz we're in our beta test but they can click here and apply for the beta in the final version they're just going to be able to click there and purchase it out right so from there we go to step two which is a workshop call so after the client has purchased the subscription they've sent a link to book in a workshop call with us and their team these calls typically last an hour or more and it's really just getting to know their business inside out and picking out all the different automation opportunities they have so we actually get the client to walk us through their business using a a framework or a set of questions that we have so that really takes us from top to bottom and we can start to jot down the whole team's Jing away identifying different things that we can help them out with and then they may also have some ideas themselves we often have businesses that come to us and they say hey man I've been seeing these different things and I want to get this this this involved and we go great we can put those down on the list and then we go through that framework and that questionnaire with them we also identify a ton more that they never even thought of that we know from our own experience of working with businesses like them and at the end of the call we have 10 to 20 different automation ideas uh that we can then go and boil down into a actionable list for them once we have that list of ideas boiled down to some actionable tasks then we create a trailer board for them and populate the trailer board with all of these different automation tasks so our developers will scope each one of the little tasks and say for this thing it's going to take 3 days for this thing it's going to take 10 days cuz it's a bit more complex and once they're all put onto the Traer board then the client can come on and have a look around and say h yeah that one's going to take 3 days okay sure let's get started on that and once they drag it across and put it in the current request column then on our back end our developers are going to see what requests are being asked for and which clients are in need of work so that takes us to the next step of Service delivery we're using air table here to just track all of those different Traer boards and so whenever there's someone who who's waiting for a review or they've asked for a new task to start our developers can just come onto the air table and see everything and and determine which projects are currently on pause or or waiting for review and which things they actually need to do work on so very easy all centralized sort of project management Hy here works very very well at the moment and we're we're really happy with the system that we've got set up a few more notes that I'll mentioned just to clarify the service delivery a little bit all communication is done on trow via comments this is to eliminate as much slack back and forth as possible which is a bit of a a black hole you can get stuck into as agency owner but by keeping all the communication on Trello includes a lot more friction right so as soon as it's on slack and and other communication channels there can be a lot more chatter back and forth with comments it's a bit more blocky and a little bit more friction right so only messaging us when you really really need to Once to happy with it we can move it across to complete we can start on the next task so this basically results in more work and a ton less admin for us and a ton less back and forth for the client and I will mention that this kind of thing does require a lot of experience but the results are worth it and I wanted to include it in this video so that you guys can see where you can get to with this model once you have enough experience obviously to to have a business come to you and you do a full audit of their operations and figure out a ton of different automation opportunities for them that takes quite a lot of experience and TI a lot of skill and and a good team of developers behind you to back it up and and really build those things out I seriously would not recommend it for beginners this is a very very difficult thing to do if you don't have the experience as I always say you need to focus get it as simple as possible get your foot in the door with a specific Niche and a specific delivery and if you keep at it and you continue to to expand that eventually you can get to something like this and I'd love to see some of you guys do this in the future so that is your full rundown of retainer offers for AI automation agencies key takeaways here that I just want to reiterate is that you don't need retainers especially early on it's not your focus to be running up retainers early on your goal is to learn your goal is to get case studies and get testimonials and use that to start charging more for your main product more for your lead product so that you can make money on that setup fee right so don't worry about it too early on it's too complicated there's too many variables it is something that you should really really avoid early on secondly you need to be cautious about the timing and the terms of your retainers as I said if you're getting with a client that you don't necessarily want to work with for a long time or you're not charging enough as I said there's a lot of variables in there be very very cautious at least when you're doing your first ones before you have any kind of data points to base your your numbers off so you could get locked into something you really don't want to be in for way too long you could really lose money every single month if you do the math wrong so be very cautious about it but uh there's always plenty of help in my community if you want to have a chat to our guys in there and finally a full retainer or retainer only model does exist and we're running it at warning side automation but it is not for beginners now if you guys want me to do more of a deep dive on what we're doing on the automation side at morning side I'd love to do a deeper dive into how we're running our processes so let me know in the comments below if any of that would be interesting for you guys the next steps for any of you who are looking to make money with your own AI automation agency is to firstly subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and while you're down there please leave a like if you've enjoyed this video it would mean the world to me as the creator of this model I've already done a bunch of other videos on it so check out my recent upload if you want to check out more content like this of course join my AAA Community we have the biggest community of AAA owners in the world we're very very proud to say that we' got about 17,000 people at time of filming this and we're growing rapidly so if you want any kind of help from myself we do weekly workshops in their weekly q&as that I just had a couple hours ago so if you want to talk to me if you want to talk to uh people who are making money with the model if you want to see the results people are getting be sure to join there and extract some of the value that people are giving away for free in there including myself if you want to sign up to my free resource Hub where all of my old Discord Workshop record in so each week my recordings are going up on there I have chatbot templates I have contract templates I have all sorts of value that's free on my resource Hub so you can sign up to the resource Hub including the document that I gave away within this video it's going to be available in the description the pin comment as well and finally I also have a AAA newsletter specifically for AAA owners AI automation agency owners I give away my personal notebook my my secrets and my little jotting Downs during the week on how I'm running my automation agency and how you can benefit from my learning so if you want to get any of the value out of that people are are really loving it at the moment everything on screen is going to be available in the description the pen comment don't waste the resources I put them there for a reason so thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one