Inside the Agency Model: Pressure, Performance & the Power of Manus AI Part 3

Inside the Agency Model: Pressure, Performance & the Power of Manus AI Part 3 Speaker 1: And you're going to get all the fire. It's not intentional, but they're under pressure. So that pressure is on you now. So by taking that, you're taking on that pressure as well to turn the ship. And quite often, anyone who's had their head under a thousand different accounts like me over 10 years, some people are a lot more than me, will know what's going to work, what's not, realistically. And if you think you're unsure what you can do, and I'm not talking about take me to the top, babe, with some fucking proven strategy, Nonsense. It's going to be like, do you really think you can do this? Because you've got to think about them as a customer. They're switching costs. Or you find a way of helping them by giving them feedback and suggestions. You know, people come to me and they'll say, they'll go, I was at such and such. I went, OK, so what brings you here? Well, I wasn't really happy. OK, how much are you turning over? And they go 20 grand a month. I'm like, why the fuck are you an agency at 20 grand a month? You're paying them a fee. You've got your ad spend. Your percentage of ad spend, the numbers don't work. Yeah, but I thought they're going to scale it. You shouldn't be with a fucking agency at 20 grand a month. Sorry. Go and get yourself someone who can help you. Of course. And spend the adequate time on the 20 grand a month business. Yes, you want to grow and there's that tough cycle of moving between the gears. But the fact that people are taking a 20 grand turnover brand, taking three and a half grand a month off them, plus ad spend, plus a percentage of ad spend, They know well they ain't making any money. That money should be going back into inventory. Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, from the agency perspective, it's it's it's these are And it sounds bad, but it's actually the easiest type of client to acquire if you're a big agency, because a client like this looks at your portfolio of work. So let's say you're a brand that's turning around $20,000 in revenue or profit, and you look at an agency that serves the biggest brands out there, and they have the most amazing portfolio. So you subconsciously think, OK, they're going to get me there. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: But from the agency perspective, they will put in place the lowest experienced manager to handle your account. Because it just doesn't matter because they will not spend additional effort, especially the stakeholders, the top managers, they will not assign them to your account. They won't. Speaker 1: Yeah. You think you've got a talent drought, yeah? Look, people have to have different models, yeah? So if you're going to scale, you need good people if you're going to scale. Or what do you do? You work off SOPs and build a back line of sweatshop workers and then you add people that sit on top of those that fill back the sweatshop to the key people. Because you've got to find means and ways of running that business, yeah? So some people are constantly trying to scale their business, yeah? But if they took their positions and paid the amount that it truly costs for that level of skill, this is why you have juniors and stuff like that. And unfortunately, you're not going to be able to track You know, if you've got ten account managers, two of them are probably like next level. They'd be like golf between them and the rest. Do you know what I mean? And then you don't know of the two out of the ten which one you're going to get. Are you going to get the bottom of the barrel? Because if you're coming to someone's agency, you're going to get assigned an account manager. And you'll just assume that the agency itself Because you look at the level of the agency not necessarily the account manager. It's the same as software. So if you look at software and then you've got managed services. People think, great, I'll get the software and then I'll bang on the account management services. And normally they can be six to 12 months contracts tied in with the software and maybe it's only just a bit on top. So you think, great, I've got the software. They know how to use it. They can do the account managing. But what you've got is trumped up demo people that know how to use that software a lot of the time. Not all the time, but a lot of the time. But they don't have the dynamics of working across multiple softwares, across multiple different businesses, because they've been trained on the system that is developed and designed that works based on their system. So then someone from the outside comes in, and I'm not saying always, but that can play a role. You will get an account manager month one, month two call, but they run out of strategies because they don't have the depth of knowledge and experience because it was only a year and a half ago they started in with the demo in trade shows or whatever they did. And suddenly they become that demonstrators stroke salesperson into an account manager but not necessarily expertise as a PPC manager that has a width of knowledge where they've worked at that agency. They've worked these kind of brands. They've used five to seven different softwares over the last five or six years. Because the contract that you get in is to lock you in on The software, the account managing is an add-on. Does that make sense? Speaker 2: Yeah, I feel like we're really ranting here. No, no, no, it's not. Speaker 1: We're having an open conversation. I wrote about this a year ago and I'm not complaining with sour grapes. I accept the situation. Speaker 2: And I totally agree. And it's really, you know, at the end of the day, as I said, reputation is really important in this industry. Everyone knows each other. And it's a bloodbath. But if you focus on the right stuff, you will survive and you will thrive. And I have a question regarding hiring and team. Something that just popped into my head. In terms of the AI especially, I'm not sure if you're hiring at the moment and doing any type of onboarding. Do you or would you look for certain AI skills in any employee these days? Speaker 1: Okay, so let me give the current situation. I'm not hiring at the moment because as I said we had to unfortunately lay team members off and then I've been on the phone and everything getting them placed because you know that for me that closes the loop on karma. They still they earn their money and then they go into a new job and their lives because these people got family, right? I'm sick to death for seeing these fucking clowns on clown world over at LinkedIn, right? I'm boasting how they got rid of 10 people and it's 10 people with 10 families. I don't like that. I think you've got to treat people well. The way I'm seeing it now, I've got two people on my accounts team across the two businesses. In a couple of weeks, all their work, the manual work, will disappear. But then I've got other things for them to do because I think you need the domain knowledge and the checks and balances. So some people look at it as like you get rid of them people, you've saved money, right? But where you've created that efficiency, ideally, you're going to create more output. And if you're creating more output in that loop, like say, for instance, I'm not saying it's the case, and it would happen in a few weeks. Let's say all of the stuff that my accounting team All the manual stuff disappears and they're down to checks and balances working with the full-time accountants. We're talking bookkeeping, right? So bear with me. If I've done that, and I've done that to other areas of the business, and I'm increasing the volume of output, which allows me to do more sales, they then still have more accounting work to do. But what else skills do accountants have? They have skills calculation, mathematic skills. It's transferable for them to deal with all the dashboards and all of the Setting certain tests or, you know, reporting on ads and not like a PPC manager. But when you look at all the metrics across the business, as you're going to get more throughput, you need to add more benchmark is more measurement. So instead of them doing getting receipts, downloading, uploading, put them up, we'll use we've got book AI and basically scans my inbox. So I haven't got given the receipts. They always wait on me and I've got to log into Barclays Bank and You know, and get them all the statements, all this stuff's automated. But then the stuff what we're doing at the moment, which is going through that automation, is more creation. More creation in terms of more work on the administration end. Even if you've got AI, to a certain point, whilst you might see they've replaced the roles in the laborious task, I still need them for checks and balances for guardrails for the implementation that's put in that's been automated because by the time we use Xero, by the time it hits there, It still needs to be validated. It still has to have the correct nominal codes. The reporting has to be correct to push out the cash flow dashboard. Do you understand what I'm saying? So they start to adapt. It may mean that it won't catch up on itself, but what I've got planned and doing at the moment, they will have plenty of work to do that isn't downloading the receipt and then reconciling it against bank transactions from the bank feed. Do you understand what I'm saying? And then you apply that across other areas of your business. Like next year, I'll streamline Seller Sessions. I'll remove 90% of the headache. Because there's a load of stuff that we're doing now, even that's not AI. One ticket, one venue. I can do a model that doesn't require subsidizing the ticket because I used AI to put that in place. So I won't have to use the larger venues. I always warn people, don't do hotels and conference centers because They've worked out just every way that you can't make money. So I'll give an example. I've got a friend of mine in Germany. He said, Dan, I've been doing these every year. I sell my event out and we're just about break even. And because he's got an agency, he sees that as lead gen. Now there's different types of event. I make, my event is meant to stand on its own. It's not a lead gen for a course or a community. And it's not a lead gen for a software company. That you can wipe your mouth off because basically what that is, is that's marketing. It's no longer event. That's lead gen. And you go, okay, we broke even. I run a business in the sense that it's not relied on the back end and that's the front end marketing. So with AI in that four-hour period, I've been able to spend that time in Manus. Up until that point, I was in... I did Manus 10 days. And I'll be honest with you, amongst flicking around, I was spending 16 hours a day. I'm like, I'm getting results here. Speaker 2: It's addictive, isn't it? Speaker 1: Well, I'm on my second lot of 39,000 credits and my 40-year-month bill. But do you know what? Because I said to someone the other day, and I think this mindset is where people will start to lose. I was excited. I said, get on Manus. He was going to go and spend a couple of days with a lady friend. I said, fuck that off. Go and do this. Sort your business out and stuff like that. And he took it on board. And he said, yeah, I've been doing Manus. I see some of the people in the chats what they're doing reports. And I built this report. But then I run out of free credits. And I went, yeah, exactly. I was about to say to you, it's going to blow up, Manus. And then I forgot about that mindset. And that mindset was, I'll use it until I blow through the credits. So basically, let me explain something. Two, one, two, three, four things have come up off my use of Manus. Now, I've only just redone the credits. Speaker 2: Maybe tell people what Manus is. Speaker 1: I'm going to do that bit in a minute. Yeah, we'll go into that section. But when we add it up, all the things I wanted to resolve, including the new venue, everything for next year, the change of model, everything, accounts, department, all these things I want to do, managed to resolve in four days and now we're on the rollout. I spent $240 in credits for the pleasure. $240. The return on investment on that is absolutely fucking priceless. However, 99% of people wouldn't have done what I did. So, do you want to explain? Let's talk about what Manus is, if they don't know. I think a lot of people do now. Speaker 2: Yeah, it's just another LLM. It works just like a ChatGPT prompted. But the main difference, and you pitch in as well, for me, it's breaking down the task to completely, it breaks down its own tasks to much more, at a much more granular level, much more granular. And then it has this amazing scraping capabilities, but it just doesn't read the text, but also It goes through the page and you can see a preview. It actually watches the page, clicks on images, goes through links and so they scrape and it goes much deeper at every single level compared to GPT and breaks down the tasks. So you can give it a very simple prompt. But it's going to enhance it. It's going to break, okay, I need to do X, Y, and Z, and this needs to, and then it will break down that point to make sure that it covers all this, everything, all the workflow. So what you get from a prompt in GPT is, let's say, like a summary. It's good. It's a good summary. Whereas in Manus, what you get is a Bible. Speaker 1: Yeah. All right. Let me give you a version of what you just explained. So basically, People may be forgiven to think that Manus is a rapper sitting on top of Claude because Claude is the base of Manus. Manus is an autonomous AI that works off its own system and its own checklists, right, as we've discovered. So it's like partly dealing with a human. So when I did my research, I wanted to find a venue very close to me. I wanted to fit this price criteria. I wanted it to be a dry hire. I told them the venues I don't want them to contact because I've already used David Game and the I'm the American Square Conference Center and notify them of what's not useful. So they have that context. Then they build the list. The unique thing about it, because you might go, oh, OK, it's just Claude with a wrapper. They have 30 native tools, including what you're talking about there, about their magnificent scraper, along with other tools. I don't know what they all are, but I looked into it because I wanted to see Where we are with that and what makes it different because someone said, you know, it's built on Claude. It's just a wrapper. And then I found out what actually makes it work and why you pay the money is it's because it's fucking amazing, right? And I'll tell you why because staying on Manus, I've been doing a lot of work looking at various different options in terms of LLMs that are on like the one I'm looking at now, which I've been playing around with is called LM Studio. And LM Studio has an open source version of most of the models out there. And it works without internet. So I'm going to put it on my laptop because if you're on a plane, you can use it. You don't need an internet connection. Yes. Speaker 2: What is it called again? Speaker 1: It's called LM Studio. But what I tried to do is with it, I put DeepSeek and this one is DeepSeek with Quell. Quell is another, from my understanding, another Chinese company. I think DeepSeek and Manus are Chinese as well, right? And the Chinese are killing it. I think contextually they're better than a lot of the American LLMs, right? But I tried to use it DeepSeek, this version, like I was using Manus, and I went for the same role, right? To look for a venue close by, give it the same context. Fucking useless. But then it doesn't make the autonomous self list. I'm not an AI expert, so I may be using some of the wrong language. So there can be a less than there. Because I'm thinking, I'm burning for all these, what about if I use something, because there are open sources versions of Manus. But the bits I've tried, What do you want? Do you want to fiddle around and save yourself forty hundred bucks a month for something that's really good, that works? Or do you want to fiddle around for hours looking at open source things, Pageant, McEver? Because what is time if you're a business person? It's money. The two most important things you've got is your time and your attention and where you put them.