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Somewhere out there is a business owner paying a full salary to a human being whose actual job two weeks of every month is copying and pasting between spreadsheets. Command C, Command V, lunch. One of our headless agency members told us this on a call last week and we all pissed ourselves. And then I remembered how most agency owners spend their Tuesday, and I stopped laughing and had a little sit-down and a cup of tea and a kick cat and a think. And so by the end of this episode, I'm going to give you one question to ask before you hire anyone ever again. Most agency owners that I talk to cannot answer this simple question, and the answer will tell you if you're about to pay someone a full salary to be a very expensive Command V. I'm Troy Dean, and this is the agency hour. And this one's for anyone who wants more revenue and would rather eat a stapler than manage another staff member. Here's how most agencies grow. You win a client, you drown in work, you hire someone, you spend six months training them, and then they leave for a job with a ping pong table. Repeat until gray. I'm speaking from experience, of course. All right, here's the plan. We've got three news stories from the week. We're going to talk about what's going on inside real agencies right now from inside our business, and then the big idea will get into the deep dive. There is no hotline this week because you all got a little bit spooked by me answering Jonathan's call last week. Uh, your voicemails hopefully are back next episode. Keep them coming in. Go to the agencyhour.com slash fan mail to leave us a voicemail. And please don't call from the car. Concentrate on driving. The feed. All right, story one in the feed. Marie Haynes looked at twelve months of Google Analytics data across a hundred websites, more than a hundred and forty-five million sessions. ChatGPT drove zero point six two percent as many sessions as Google Organic. I'll repeat that. ChatGPT drove zero point six two percent as many sessions as Google Organic. Add every other AI chatbot, and you get to a whopping 0.73% of all AI chatbots are driving as much traffic as Google Organic. However, ChatGPT visitors converted better 13.8% against about 3% from Google. But Google still drove 27 times as many conversions as all the other AI tools combined. Haynes called GEO a distraction. I don't think that's right. I think the proof is that if people find you in AI and they land on your site, they're way more likely to convert than if they find you in Google Organic. The volume's just not there yet. So I don't think GEO's a distraction or a waste of time. I think we are just at the beginning of a massive wave. Now I love this one. Half the industry spent the year selling AI visibility retainers with a slide deck that basically said that they should be afraid of AI search. Your clients can read Search Engine Land 2, which is where this article comes from, searchenland.com. So if you sold, if you're selling AI based on fear, maybe don't forward them this article because the volume really is so small at the moment that it's kind of irrelevant for most businesses. What clients want is someone with an opinion telling them where the money is this quarter. So don't ignore Google organic, but make sure you get in front of the wave that's happening with AI. Having that opinion is the job, by the way. Your job is to have an opinion based on data and put that opinion in front of your prospects and lead them into the new frontier because that's what they will pay you for. Right now, the answer is still mostly Google, and it's a bit embarrassing how long it took us all to check. All right, the second story in the feed the Financial Times reports Anthropic told investors its revenue for July to September was sixteen point eight billion dollars. That's with a B. $16.8 billion. That's up nearly 50% on the quarter before, which was $11.5 billion. And January to March was about $4.8 billion. $16.8 billion in three months. That's almost a $400% increase on the January to March quarter. I've had agency quarters where the big win was the printer working. Businesses are buying computer work by the billions, and the number is just accelerating rapidly every quarter, and your clients will buy it too, right? I'd like them to buy it from you with your brain and your thinking and your experience detached. Because if they buy it directly from Anthropic or OpenAI, the lab is never going to ask them what their margins are. So I firmly believe that your job is to be selling AI to your clients before they go and try and figure it out themselves. Story number three from the feed the manager of HubSpot's blog team wrote up a year of going AI first. So this was an article they wrote up about HubSpot going AI first. The writers, wired for outcomes, loved it. Those writers that know, hey, our job is to write content to bring traffic in and convert them into customers, they loved it. And the ones who joined for the craft felt like someone had nicked their favorite toy. Please don't take the craft of writing posts away from us. Their former blog director said this, and I want you to remember it the only truly effortless process produces AI slop. The same piece cites Lily Ray, who tracked more than 220 sites using AI content platforms. More than half of them lost at least 30% of their peak organic traffic, and nearly a quarter lost 75% or more. And this ties into what I was saying the other week about Google's Helpful Content Index. If you are just producing AI content without someone looking at it and passing human judgment, you're just not, it's just not going to work, right? Put that next to a survey in MIT Technology Review this week. Only 30% of managers and owners rate judging whether AI output is right or wrong as an absolute must. Just park here for a second. Only 30% of managers and owners rated judging whether AI output is right or wrong as an absolute must. In other words, 70% of owners and managers are just happy to publish AI slop. In fact, that skill came sixth on a list of seven skills. So seven out of ten bosses thinking that checking AI's homework is optional. And those are the same seven who'll be on LinkedIn in March explaining that AI doesn't work. A quarter of those sites lost three-quarters of their traffic, right? And all they needed was one grown-up in the room saying, Hey mate, this is rubbish, put it in the bin. Hang on to that grown-up. They're the whole deep dive this week on the podcast, which we'll get to shortly. Before we get there, let me tell you what's actually going on inside the agencies we work with from the last two weeks of client calls. Now, obviously, I'm keeping everyone anonymous so nobody gets in trouble with their spouse. There's a lead gen agency in Sydney running 80 lead gen sites, and they've added 35 clients this year. They moved more than a thousand pages off Thrive Theme, which still remarkably still exists, onto Divi, which also remarkably still exists, using an AI employee. Now, most of the preparation was done in Claude, most of the heavy lifting was done in Victor. The first site was predicted to cost about 500 US dollars. It turned out that it cost 200 US dollars in credits. The second site cost about 60, and the last one was about 10 bucks. 10 bucks. Now that used to be a junior developer's entire week and a lot of frustration copying and pasting. The setup, the quote, everything done in Claude, and then Victor is the workhorse, right? The agency owner's verdict, better than hiring someone. And then on the same call, he said keyword research is where the AI fell over. It couldn't tell a particular keyword whether it was residential or commercial. And he could, and that's what he's for. That's what he's there for, to supervise the AI. In New Zealand, the person an agency hired to write content rebuilt their entire sales dashboard with AI in a day. Nobody asked her to. And the owner then closed a roadmap worth $78,000 for the year by showing the price as 1.45% of the client's target revenue, right? Because of the dashboard that was built by the person that was hired to write content. Good luck getting an AI to come up with that framing on a Tuesday afternoon. So the agency owner knows that if they present your investment with us as 1.45% of the client's target revenue, and because of this AI-built dashboard that was right at their fingertips, they could they could tap dance and frame that conversation on the spot. There's an Australian agency owner who was completely maxed out, and she said, I can't split myself in enough ways that I can do everything that I want to do properly. And uh when we talked about hiring, they said every time we've had staff, it's just annoyed me having to manage them. And I felt that one. The only cure anyone's ever offered her is more people to be annoyed by. Until now, of course, because we're talking about AI employees. In the UK, there's a web agency that focuses on a particular niche. They have two partners. One of them said about his team, no one's running towards me saying, Look what I've done with AI, which is frustrating, right? This is what managers and business owners want. They want you to be running towards them saying, Look what I built in AI. Meanwhile, his business partner made 61-minute reels in two weeks and sold an annual growth plan focusing on the right activity that generates revenue. So that's an interesting Christmas party. Why aren't you running to me showing me what you can do with AI? We've got an Australian SEO agency owner here who finally handed his high-end client work over. He finally handed his high-end client work over to the team and said, you know what, they're just not my babies anymore. It took him years to do that. I'm super proud of him. And we have an agency in Europe who said he is handing less and less development work to his outsourced development partner because, frankly, AI is getting so good. Every one of these people has the tools and the technology exactly the same that you've got at your fingertips. The agencies who are flying have changed what they keep doing themselves, which is judgment supervision. And that brings me to the big idea this week: the deep dive. Typing on a keyboard is basically free now. Let's let's start with the way this used to work, because every agency grows the same way. You win a client, you do more work, you work more hours until you max out, you burn out, and you realize you need to hire someone. So you hire someone, and you essentially end up renting that person to your clients. Profit stays exactly where it was, or sometimes goes backwards, because apparently it's nailed to the floor, and you are now the bottleneck, so you hire to fix the bottleneck. A project manager, an account manager, a senior, congratulations. You now do all the work you did before, plus you manage a person, plus you check their work, plus you do their work when they're sick. Ryan Matthews told us that before working with us, his capacity was about one new client a month. They just couldn't handle any more than that. And the belief underneath all of that is that the more revenue means more hands-on keyboards, and it's just wrong. It's expensive. I've been banging on about this for a long time now. You are worth way more to your clients than you give yourself credit for. You are in a tiny slice of the planet who knows how to make the internet produce business results. Your mum doesn't know how to do this. Your clients don't know how to do this. Clients pay you for knowing what to do. They don't pay you to operate a computer, right? That's the cheap bit. We just build it by the hour because that's all we knew how to do. Look at what our clients sell when they sell thinking. Sarah charges $1,800 for paid discovery workshops and landed a $78,000 project out of one paid discovery workshop. Jeremy sold a $1,500 paid discovery that turned into a 12-month project at $2,100 a month, and he thought it was a $3,000 website. Right? Peter runs a design agency here in Australia and he recently put his discovery sessions up from $500 to $1,500 and sold four of them with no pushback because he's now more confident and prouder of the deliverables because he's AI employees helping him with the brand guides. Candy pitched a $12,000 website and the client cut the meeting short and asked to add another three grand a month for SEO. They cut the meeting short, said yes, and gave her more money. And that New Zealand roadmap, up to 78 grand, sold us 1.45% of target revenue. Look, if you've been listening to this thinking and saying I'm the person copying and pasting between spreadsheets in my own agency, then this is for you. In the headless agency, we build your AI employee with you over 90 days. With you. You'll be in the room, you'll get homework, and yes, I will check it. And your AI employee takes the computer work, you keep the thinking, you grow revenue without growing payroll. We only take a handful of clients each month, so go to the agencyall.com slash headless and grab a time with our team. All right, let's get back to it. So the typing is basically free now. The agency in Sydney, that migration went from $200 to $60 to about $10, right? Next month, he'll be getting paid to do it. The New Zealand content writer built a sales dashboard in a day as a side hustle. Anthropic is pulling in $16.8 billion a quarter because businesses are buying computer work by the truckload. And Claude just used Claude just launched Juet. And look at what our clients are doing with it. Daniel runs a marketing agency in the US. His VA resigned, so he delegated 95% of her work to AI, then went back to selling and brought in 58 grand in new revenue. The VA is fine. She went on to a better opportunity in her mind. Bashir here in Australia uses AI to pitch a website built by his AI employee and sold it for $25,000. He said it was the best website they've ever built. All right, built by an AI employee. James used an AI employee to build a personalized proposal page and closed a $2,800 a month client. Peter's AI employee builds his brand guides, which is what freed him up to start charging for Discovery in the first place. Work with a property investment advisor here in Melbourne, told us he can now take on three times the number of clients because his AI employee is doing the admin. Right? So here's the uncomfortable bit, and then I'll shut up. Remember the HubSpot writers who loved the craft and felt the loss? Programmers are literally riding obituaries for programming this week. The same thing is happening in your agency right now across every role. For 45 years, we've got our identity from tapping away on a keyboard and waiting for the computer to do something brilliant. Now the AI does the computer work and we don't know what to do with ourselves. And that's where the fear comes from. It's the designer saying, I can't just sit in the seat of wanting to design websites anymore because they know they're done. It's the SEO agency saying, These aren't my babies anymore. I don't need to be doing this. I need to be doing higher value, more strategic work. And so my call to arms for everyone listening to this is that every time you sit down at the computer and put your hands on the keyboard or pick up the mouse, ask yourself, is what I'm doing critical work that requires a human? Or am I just filling in time and doing this because it's comfortable and it feels like I'm being productive? So here's the question I promised you at the top of the episode. Before your next hire, ask yourself this. What will this person decide? Write down every task in the role that you're about to hire for, and next to each one, put a D if it needs a decision or an S if it's just a step that someone can follow off a checklist. If it's mostly S's, you're about to pay a salary for computer work, and that's an AI employee's job. Right? This is the spreadsheet person command C, Command V, lunch. Seriously, I I've had multiple conversations with agencies and non-agencies who have someone that works in the business and spends two weeks a month copying and pasting shit between supplier spreadsheets and their own internal systems. If that if that role that you've just written out is full of D's, that's great. Hire a brilliant human and give them an AI employee on day one so they never touch a spreadsheet. Now here's your homework for this week. You've got one job. Open last week's calendar, highlight every hour you spent at the keyboard doing steps someone else could follow, and be honest with yourself. Nobody's watching, there's no judgment here. Pick the biggest block and write the steps down in plain English. Ten lines maximum, just bullet points. It doesn't even need to be that detailed. That's the first job you hand to an AI employee. I strongly encourage you, give it to Claude on Opus 5.5 or give it to Victor, and then tell me how many hours you've found and how many hours you're saving. I'm guessing it's more than you'd say out loud at a dinner party, right? Because it's probably a little bit embarrassing how much time we've been spending tapping away on the keyboard. And then leave me a voicemail, go to theagencl.com slash fan mail and tell me the thing that you've given to Claude or Victor or Claude Juet or ChatGPT Dots or whatever you use, I don't care, Grokbot, whatever. Send me a voicemail, theagencl.com slash fan mail, and let me know what you've given to your AI employee and more importantly, what you're now going to do with that time. So just to recap, we had an agency move a thousand web pages for a couple of hundred bucks from one theme to another. Right? If you're still paying a salary or working Saturday doing that, well, that's on you. You don't need to do that anymore. Get off the keyboard. Spend your time on the tasks that require your thinking and your experience and charge accordingly. If you want the full method here, watch Tuesday's video where I walk through the three things that get an agency to a million a year with AI, without more hours, and without hiring any unnecessary headcount. I'm not saying you should fire your team. I love humans. I just think I believe in the potential of every human. I just think we're more valuable than tapping away on a keyboard. All right, your voicemails hopefully are back next week. Go to theagencyhour.com slash fan mail and leave us a fan mail. Tell us what's going on, tell us what you're giving to AI, tell us how many hours you're saving, or ask any question about growing your agency. Uh feel free to like, subscribe, share this with anyone you know. I'm looking forward to hanging out with you again next week on the agency hour. Until then, I'm Troy Dean. Let's get to work.