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I fired my accounting company this month. A firm with a boardroom and a lot of staff quoted me 20 grand to replace him. Someone working from home quoted me about a quarter of that for exactly the same job. Stick around because the reason this happened is coming for your agency. Hey, welcome to the agency hour. I'm your host, Troy Dean. Quick announcement here before we get into it. I'm starting live consults right here on the show. I've already got my first four booked in. Here's the way it works. You bring me the thing that is holding you back. You tell me where you are, exactly what you're trying to achieve and where you are stuck, and I'll coach you through it on air for free. If you want in, go to theagencyhour.com/slash fan mail and leave me a voicemail telling me that you want to come on the show for a free consult and give me a little bit of context. Just tell me a little bit about your agency, uh, what you're doing, what you're trying to achieve and where you're stuck. As I said, I've already got four people booked in, so get amongst it. The caveat, of course, is that it will go to air. It will be on the podcast and it will be on YouTube. So if you're okay with that, go to theagencyhour.com slash fan mail and let me know. Hey, if you want to grow your agency, you want to grow your recurring revenue without growing your headcount and without adding team members unnecessarily, just go to theagencyhour.com slash headless. Uh, I made a quick video showing you how to grow your recurring revenue, how to get paid for your thinking and strategy, and how to use AI employees to grow your revenue and grow your profit. Go to theagencyhour.com slash headless. We only work with a handful of clients each month because it's very high touch. The feed. All right, a lot of uh developments coming out of high level. Of course, they had level up last week in Dallas. More than a hundred new features uh or changes, uh developments, if you like, in high level. They announced more than a hundred things in one day. The big thing is uh high level says AI is free now. Kind of. It's it kind of is, it's kind of not. Here's how it works it's free for agency users. So if you're on the 97, 297, or 497 a month plan, ask AI, AI Studio, Create a Studio, uh Content AI, funnel website AI, email, calendar, layout, knowledge base, workflow AI, all free uh with a fair use policy. I think the credits um you can run out and they reset every five hours, right? I've used it, it's freaking amazing. I basically told it that I wanted to launch an SMS um reactivation campaign and it went into high level, it sorted out all my contacts for me. It split them into US and Australia smart lists, it verified phone numbers, it added plus six one to all those Australian mobile numbers that didn't have it. Uh kind of blew my mind and it set up the workflow for me. It's incredible. Um now, full transparency, what I'm doing is I'm just using Ask AI when I log into the location. I'm just using Ask AI. So instead of actually having to log in and click buttons in high level, I'm now just asking the AI to do it for me, and it's doing it. Uh so it's free for clients. What's free for clients, in other words, your sub accounts is the builders only. Everything that I just talked about there, right? So funnel, website, email, content, uh, um, uh, calendar, layout, knowledge base. Ask AI, AI Studio, Creator, and Content AI still cost the sub accounts, which is good because it means we can uh rebuild it and we can make a margin on it, right? Now, what is still paid for everyone is the agents that do the work, which is conversation AI, voice AI, reviews, managed agents, which I'll talk more about in a moment. Workflow AI actions, right? AI employee plans um are per subaccount. Uh, the starter is uh $20 a month, growth is $50, unlimited is $97. There's a little bit to go through here. I would suggest, and I'm not gonna go through this in detail because it's been written about a lot. Specifically go to the high-level uh help articles and it explains it more. But the point is that, and I've been saying this for a while now, man, the technology is basically free, right? AI is is like it's as close to free as it's ever gonna get. In fact, it'll probably get closer, but it's just like it costs pennies now to do your job with AI, right? If you're not, listen, if you're not using AI to do 80% of what you were doing six months ago, I mean, you may as well send me a fax, right? Like the the the horse has bolted. It's here, the genie's not going back in the bottle, right? If you are not, I'm tell I'm telling you now, if you are not using AI to do 80% of what you were doing six months ago, you're cooked. I'm gonna say this right now on the Agency Our podcast. As of the 2nd of November 2026, 80% of agencies will be dead in the next 12 to 24 months. And I'm not, I'm, I generally do not hype these things, right? But I I'm in an ads masterclass training at the moment. I'm doing I just did a three-day workshop last week. We had a VIP day today. I'm working with these guys over the next eight weeks to help me more with ads. And everything has been done by AI. The scripts, the hooks, uh, the editing, the managing of your ad account, everything is being done by Claude. If you are not using AI in your agency, I just don't know what you're doing. As I said, you may as well send me a fax, right? If you want to, if you want to, you know, I know some people play vinyl records because they love the vintage feel of vinyl records. And, you know, I get it. It's it's old school, it's vintage, right? Well, if you want to log into the meta ads account or high level and click buttons, or, you know, WordPress and Elementor or Divi and click buttons and build, that's what you're doing. You may as well be playing vinyl records and sending a fax, right? Those days are done. So the technology is as close to free as it is ever gonna get. What matters now is the trust that humans have with other humans because people want to buy from humans. I'll talk more about this in a moment. Just back to the high-level features for a second. The $497 plan has been renamed the Founder Plan. I have no fucking idea why. I don't get it. Uh, but you know, whatever, it doesn't matter. One big um development that's come out uh of the uh the level up summit last week is high level are launching their own payment processor. This is massive news, by the way. And if you've never used high level before, this is the reason I would use it. High Level are launching their own payment processor called LC Payments. LC stands for Lead Connector, it is their white label version of High Level. So when you connect high level to anything in Zapia, you use uh the app called LC. When you use their email system, it's called LC. When you use their phone system, it's called LC. LC is just the white label version of high level so that as an agency, when we're reselling it to our clients, they don't know it's high level. Everything's just branded LC. So they're launching LC payments. Uh next to Stripe, PayPal, and Square. So you can basically set up a checkout or invoicing in high level. It's not live yet, it's in labs, so they're still testing it, but it will be live very soon. You'll be able to launch funnels and checkout and invoicing. And instead of using Stripe or PayPal as the payment processor, you can use High Level's own payment processor. And here's why it matters Varun, one of the co-founders of High Level, said that the goal is to share about 40% of High Level's payments profit with founder plan agencies. Now, what this means is that if you are on the $497 a month plan, right? Let me just let me just explain how payment processing works. Every time you use your credit card to pay for a service, uh typically what happens is you will pay a transaction fee and the merchant uh pays a transaction fee and the credit card processor makes a shitload of profit. And some of that profit is shared back to the merchant, right? So if you are a if you do a lot of revenue through Stripe or PayPal, you can negotiate with those guys and say, hey, give me a kickback, right? Visa, MasterCard, Amex, they all give kick kickbacks to Stripe. Typically, though, Square, Stripe, PayPal, those big companies, they're not going to play ball. High level are saying, hey, we get a heap of kickback from the credit card companies. We want to give 40% of that kickback back to agencies. So if you've got a lot of clients and they're doing a lot of revenue, you could make 40 up to 40% of the kickback from those credit card processing fees, right? Now that is not insignificant, and it is one reason to get into high level and start getting your clients using LC payments when it goes live. Is it cheaper than Stripe for clients or is the cut coming out of their fees? What happens to a client's cash flow when the CRM is also their bank? Not really sure. Uh, managed agents. I want to talk about this. So managed agents in high level now basically get their own computer. Hmm. Someone's been paying attention. Think about it. Victor has been running on its own computer. Mainness runs on its own computer. Perplexity runs on its own computer. Claude are now releasing Claude Duet, which will run on its own computer. Claude also now has cloud tasks, so you can just set Claude a task and you can go home and turn your computer off and it'll run in the cloud, and then you can pick it up at home on another computer and see how it's going. ChatGPT dots run on their own computer. Managed agents in high level now get their own computer. They get subagents and memory. So what this means is that you can give AI in high level a job and it can spawn subagents and use its own computer to get things done. You can also import N8N workflows as agents. N8N is cooked, by the way. So is Zapius, so's make. They're all fucked. It's all done, right? No one cares anymore. We don't need it. Agents will do this for us. You can take an N8M workflow and import it as an agent into high level. Think about that for a second. AI campaigns to reactivate old databases. The old database reactivation retainer is now literally a button. You literally, and this is what I said at the top of the episode, I literally ask an AI agent in high level to set up a database reactivation campaign for me, and it's done, right? Um AI uh also high level have launched meeting rooms. I haven't used them. I'm not sure that I will, uh, but the whole plan is that they're just going after uh um Zoom and uh and Google Meet, right? So the tools are basically free. The agents have stayed paid, and now they want a cut of every dollar your clients collect, and they're gonna feed some of that back to you, right? So, what this basically all means is that setting up the AI for you, if you're setting up AI for clients, that's just become a free button. And clients are gonna figure this out very quickly, right? So stop selling the setup, start selling the outcome, and you need to own some intellectual property around AI. You can't just install AI for a client anymore and charge them five grand. Those days are done. Maybe there's a few months left in that business model. They'll figure it out and they'll do it themselves. AI is getting so freaking good, it's moving at breakneck speed. Your business model is selling some of your IP around the AI to help your client get the outcome they want and save them time. Okay. All right, story number two from the feed is uh 44% of SEOs are more worried about AI than they were 12 months ago. This comes from SEO jobs.com. They surveyed 279 search uh professionals. The biggest fear is smaller teams, right? Agency SEOs, 43 out of 85, are worried about smaller teams because they're more agile, they move faster and they're cheaper, right? And so they're gonna undercut in the market. They're worried about they're worried about smaller teams with AI moving faster, and they should be, right? Because if if you if if you know if the deliverable is the thing that you're banking on, if doing SEO or running ads or building a website is what you're charging for, you're cooked. Nobody wants that. And AI is doing it more and more. You know, as I said, I was I'm in this ads masterclass. There's 150 business owners in this ads masterclass, and they're all using AI to write their ads, edit their ads, and run their ad account. And they're all, and there's agencies in there, and most people are talking about how agencies are cooked, and the agencies in there are trying to figure out how to pivot, right? So if you are selling the deliverable, please stop. I'm warning you now, you've got very limited shelf life if you're selling the deliverable, okay? The deep dive. So I fired my accounting firm this month because, well, that's a whole other story that if we ever meet and we have a beer, I might tell you about, but far out. Uh, they were charging me a lot of money and uh not doing the job that I needed them to do. They were the most expensive fucking bookkeeper in the world. Anyway, around the corner from my office, I live around the corner from my house, and so dead smack in the middle of my office and my house, there's an accounting firm. They have a boardroom upstairs, they have lots of staff. And my my business setup is a little complex at the moment, right? I have five entities. I have a uh trust, I have a company, I have a second company, I have my personal tax return, and I have my wife's tax return. So I went in and I spoke to these guys. I said, Hey, look, I need a new accounting firm. Uh in fact, I just called them up and they said, Oh, look, we're around the corner, why don't you pop in, right? I'm like, well, okay, if I really have to. So I popped in and I met them. They kind of put on a bit of a song and dance pony show for me and tried to impress me, took me up to the boardroom and blah, blah, blah. Anyway, a couple of days later, they come back with a quote for $20,000 fucking dollars. $20,000, right? To do the financials and tax return for the five entities. $20,000. And that doesn't include throughout the year, I'm gonna need help with bookkeeping and I'm gonna need Bass. This was just for one financial year, right? The the financials and the tax return for those five entities. 20 grand. And I know exactly where that 20 grand's going. It's paying the rent on their expensive office, it's paying for the unnecessary staff they've got in the office there, right? So I frankly said to them, guys, I don't think you've been listening to my situation. I don't think you're listening at all. Like you, you just you've just missed the mark completely. So I did some more research. I found a company who I don't care where they are. They're based in Melbourne, but I don't give a shit where they are. They have no office, they're remote, they use a lot of AI, and they have a niche. I spoke to them on the phone. They have a niche where they only work with clients that use the zero accounting software, which frankly I don't love. However, it is what it is. It'll do. I've got Claude doing a lot of it these days. The reason they only deal with clients that use zero, and there's something in this for all of us, is because on the back end, they have a product called Zero Tax or whatever it is, which is only available to accountants. And so it takes them a few, the guys told me, young, couple, couple of young guys that run this business, a couple of business partners, probably in their early 30s, they said we use zero tax. It takes us a few minutes to do a tax return. Once all the books are reconciled, if everything's reconciled monthly, it takes us a few minutes to do a tax return because zero tax does it all, right? Now, these guys have a package which suits me perfectly of about 460 bucks a month. They do the bookkeeping, they pay my employees, they do payroll, superannuation, all that kind of shit, right? Same outcome. The uh financials, tax return is done for the entity plus my personal, plus my wife's tax return. 460 bucks a month. It's about five and a half grand a year. It's a quarter of what the other guys quoted me uh around the corner, right? A quarter for the same outcome. Now, why this works, as I said, I'm gonna call the expensive guys headful, I'm gonna call them headful accountants, and I'm gonna call the guys that I actually hired headless accountants, right? The headful accountants have a lot of staff, they have a boardroom which is empty 90% of the time, right? Who pays for that? The client, right? They have a fancy office, they have a lot of staff that, you know, have a receptionist, right? What I mean, you know, like who needs a fucking receptionist, right? These guys just have an old school business model that is dying. My kids are never gonna go to an office to meet an accountant or a lawyer or a financial planner, right? They'll just do it over FaceTime or Zoom or their smart glasses or whatever the technology is at that point, right? They're not gonna go and sit in a fucking office, right? They don't have time and they don't want to do that. It's just not like it's a it's an old school way of doing business. The headless guys have a niche. They only use uh zero client, they only use clients that use the zero accounting system, and that's really smart. They've actually said there's a bunch of business here that we're gonna say no to because you're not using zero. If you're using Tyro or QuickBooks or any other platform, we can't help you because there's too much overhead in us taking your spreadsheet or taking your accounting file from QuickBooks or whatever it is and doing all the reformatting. We just can't be bothered doing it. We don't need to. We're only doing taking on clients that use zero. Okay, so that's a really smart bit, and that is what keeps their expenses down and allows them to offer the same service for 460 bucks a month and still be profitable, okay? The headful uh this is this is what allows them to do what they're doing, and the headful firm can't compete, right? These young guys, they don't want a boardroom. They're like, we don't need to fucking meet in real life. We'll just hang out on Zoom. I mean, if you really want to meet, we can go and have a beer one day, but we don't need to do that. It's unnecessary, right? That's the point. It's unnecessary, okay? So just so I want you to think about this from an agency point of view, right? If you're doing things in your agency that are unnecessary, who's paying for that? It's the client that's paying for that. Now I'm not saying that you have to do things cheaper. I would like you to get paid what you're getting paid right now, but make more profit. I would like you to use AI to do a lot of what you're doing now and get paid the same amount. There is nothing wrong with getting paid the same amount for working less hours. I'm just gonna let that sit with you for a second, right? Because I know it's uncomfortable. There's nothing wrong with getting paid the same amount for working less hours because you're smart with AI. Okay? There is nothing wrong with doing a more efficient job and making more profit for the same amount of work, right? There's nothing wrong with that. No one said you have to work 40 hours a week to earn the money that you're earning now. If you can do it in 15 hours a week, then great. Good on you. Your client doesn't give a shit. Your client's paying for an outcome. Your client is not screen recording your computer and tracking which apps you're using and how much time you're spending on their project. In fact, I bet you most of your clients would be happy if you delivered shit to them faster. Right? And that's what AI allows you to do. So there's nothing wrong with earning the same money, making more profit, working less hours, delivering great outcomes for your clients. Okay? So you know, the reality is if you're doing things that are unnecessary in your business right now, someone has to pay for it. And the chances are that your clients are paying for it, or most of the time, what I see is it's just eating into your profit. Okay? You don't need to do that. So your homework is I want you to list, make a list of everything that you do for a client, whether it's a project or a retainer, and ask yourself, what could you just get rid of? What could you like one, not do? I'm working with some agencies at the moment that send monthly reports to every one of their clients, and it costs them a lot of money in account managers to send monthly reports that nobody fucking reads. I'm like, I get a better idea. How many clients out of your out of your 50 clients, how many clients actually read these reports? And they reckon there's probably about eight that read the reports. I said, great, why don't we just schedule a call with them once a month and walk them through the numbers instead of sending a report? Right? And stop sending the report to the rest of them. And if they say, Where's my report, schedule a call with them? Because now they're paying attention. So what is it that you do that you one don't need to do, you can just delete it, or you can delegate it to AI. Right? That's your homework. That's your homework this week. All right, as I mentioned at the start of this episode, we are rolling out live consults here on the podcast. We have a bunch of people already booked in, so keep your ears out for that coming up. If you want to get in on the action, go to theagencyhour.com slash fan mail and you can let leave me a voicemail and let me know who you are. Tell me a bit about your agency, tell me where you're stuck, what you're trying to achieve, and if you're okay being on the show and it going up on YouTube and on the podcast, then I'll get you on and I'll give you a free coaching session on the show, live on air here, and hopefully get you moving in the right direction. So go to the agencyhow.com slash fan mail. I'm also going to leave links in the show notes here to get started with high level. I think now is a fantastic opportunity to start with high level. Uh, the AI is almost free. You can get a lot more done with the AI in high level now than you could a week ago. Uh, and and a lot of it is free under their fair use uh policy. So definitely get started with high level. And I'm also going to leave a link uh under the show notes to to get started with Victor. Uh Victor, I've said this before, I really think Victor is the easiest way to make money with AI right now because once you use it and you see how powerful it is, all you need to do is send your link to people. They sign up, they start using it, and you get 15% of whatever they spend, right? I mean, I it's it's kind of ridiculous how much affiliate commission I'm earning with Victor these days. And it's completely passive. I don't have to do anything for that. I just literally recommend and say people, you should use this because it's freaking amazing. Once you use it, you see how powerful it is, it'll blow your mind. They also now have a desktop app, so you don't have to be in Slack to use it if you don't want to. You can just use it as a standalone desktop app. And it's very easy to organize your channels and your projects in the desktop app. Uh, and if you just recommend it to your friends and they sign up and or your clients and they sign up and start using it, it's very, very passive income. I think it's the fastest and easiest way to actually make real money with AI these days. All right, uh check out High Level, check out Victor, go to theagencyout.com slash fan mail, leave me a voicemail, and if uh if I like the sound of what you're doing, I'll I'll shoot you an email back with a link that you can book in and we can hang out uh for half an hour and have a bit of a chat about your agency, and hopefully I can get you unstuck and we'll put that on the show, which will be fun for everyone. All right, I hope you're enjoying the podcast as much as I am. My name's Troy Dean. Let's get to work.