Gareth B. Davies

How to build and sell an AI automation agency

Straight answers to the questions AI agency builders actually ask. Two lines: Build it (the technical how-to) and Sell it (winning and pricing the work).

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Topic

Showing 1-24 of 28

Answers

Sell it

Project, retainer or hourly: how to price AI automation work

Project, retainer, or hourly looks like a formatting choice until you realize each one prices a different thing entirely.

Pricing
Sell it

Closing without a track record: using case studies and proof

When you have no client history to point to, testimonials and proof-of-work substitute for a track record, and the fastest path there is a structured pilot, not a bigger pitch deck.

Salesn8n
Sell it

Warm outreach before cold: getting the order right

Cold outreach without proof is a numbers game with terrible numbers. Warm contacts first, and the testimonials they hand you make cold work at all.

Outreach
Sell it

Position yourself as 'AI and automation', not just 'AI'

AI alone gets outsourced to a chatbot subscription, but the client only pays when you show up as the person who rewires how their business actually runs.

Positioning
Sell it

The words that win a proposal (investment, not cost)

Clients don't reject a price. They reject a proposal that never proved the number was smaller than what the problem already costs them.

SalesGo High Level
Build it

How to build a knowledge base an AI can actually answer from

A knowledge base that reads fine to a human can still make an AI hallucinate, because the two are searching it in completely different ways.

AI & RAGAirtable, n8n, Supabase
Sell it

Framing automation ROI: the cost-of-an-employee math

Clients don't compare your fee to a workflow diagram. They compare it to what a person costs, so put that number on the table first.

Sales
Build it

Airtable, Google Sheets or a real database: what to store data in

The choice between a spreadsheet, Airtable, and a real database isn't about size. It's about how much the data needs to protect itself.

Data & StorageAirtable, Google Sheets, Postgres
Sell it

Moving a client from a one-off build to a retainer

A finished build doesn't sell itself into a retainer. Here is how to make the ongoing fee feel obvious instead of forced.

Delivery
Sell it

Should you niche down your AI automation agency?

Niching narrows your pitch and speeds up trust, but the wrong niche too early can trap you in a market that can't pay. Here's how to weigh it.

Positioning
Build it

Make vs n8n: which automation platform should you start with?

A non-developer building their first client automations needs speed, not architectural purity, and that changes which platform wins.

Tools & PlatformsMake, n8n, Docker
Sell it

Should you pitch "automation" instead of "AI" to break into real estate and construction?

Real estate and construction don't distrust AI. They distrust the word AI, and swapping in "automation" changes how fast the door opens.

Positioning
Sell it

Should you turn your automation into a SaaS product?

A step-by-step client fee grows only as fast as you find clients. A SaaS product can grow while you sleep, but it can also sit there costing you money while nobody signs up.

GrowthVoiceFlow, Airtable, Go High Level
Sell it

What does a paid AI audit engagement actually look like, and how do you structure one for an enterprise client?

A paid audit is not a discount trial run for the real work. It is a distinct product with its own scope, price, and deliverable.

AI Audits
Sell it

Onboarding a client without a dozen back-and-forth emails

The endless email thread happens when discovery, decisions, and paperwork are split across separate touchpoints instead of one.

DeliveryLoom, DocuSign, Stripe
Sell it

How many outreach conversations does it actually take to land AI automation clients?

The number that predicts closed deals isn't calls per day, it's whether the outreach still happens on the day it feels pointless.

Outreach VolumeAirtable
Sell it

Diagnose the client's problem before you pitch a solution

The pitch that fails on price almost never failed on price. It failed because nobody found out what was actually broken first.

Sales
Sell it

Start with one high-impact automation to build trust

The client who watches one painful task disappear becomes your best salesperson, so start there before you build anything clever.

Delivery
Build it

Building a voice AI agent: the speech-to-text, LLM and text-to-speech pipeline

Speech-to-text, the model, and text-to-speech look like three separate tools to wire together, but the real difficulty is the seams between them.

Voice AIElevenLabs, VAPI, Twilio
Build it

OAuth2 vs service accounts: authenticating to an API cleanly

Every integration eventually asks the same question: log in as the client, or mint a key and move on. Here is how to actually decide.

Auth & Credentialsn8n, Google Drive, Google Calendar
Build it

Email trigger vs database trigger: which should fire your workflow?

Both triggers look simple to wire up, but one of them quietly breaks the moment a client's inbox behaves like an inbox instead of a data feed.

Workflow Designn8n, Airtable, Make
Build it

How to break a big automation into reliable, retryable steps

Big automations fail as one unit unless you split them into small, retryable pieces with real checkpoints between each one.

Workflow Designn8n, Airtable
Build it

Scraping sites that fight back: Cloudflare, dynamic loading and empty HTML

Cloudflare walls, JavaScript-rendered pages, and pagination that breaks past page one all kill naive scrapers, and each one has a different fix.

APIs & ScrapingApify, Firecrawl, n8n
Sell it

Why a three-tier price beats quoting a single number

A single quote invites a yes or no answer. Three tiers turn the same conversation into a choice about how much value the client wants.

Pricing