The Biggest Mistake Agencies Make When Hiring — The Agency Hour

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Somewhere out there, a business is paying a full salary to a person whose 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 about it on a call last week. We all lost it. Then I remembered how most agency owners spend their Tuesday, and I stopped laughing. This week I give you one question to ask before you hire anyone, and it tells you whether you're about to pay a salary for computer work that an AI employee should be doing.

This is a solo episode. Three stories from the Feed (AI search traffic, Anthropic's $16.8 billion quarter and what HubSpot's blog team learned from a year of going AI first), what's happening inside real agencies on our client calls, then the big idea: typing on a keyboard is basically free now, and your clients pay you for knowing what to do.

In this episode:

The D or S test: write every task in a role, mark D if it needs a decision and S if someone could follow it off a checklist
Why Marie Haynes's data on 145 million sessions shows ChatGPT sending 0.62% as many visits as Google organic, and why those visitors still convert at 13.8% against about 3%
Anthropic's July to September revenue of $16.8 billion, up from $11.5 billion the quarter before, and why you should sell AI to your clients before they buy it from the lab
What HubSpot's blog team found after a year of going AI first, and the MIT Technology Review finding that only 30% of managers and owners rate judging AI output as an absolute must
A Sydney lead gen agency that moved more than 1,000 pages from Thrive Theme to Divi with an AI employee, at about $200, then $60, then $10 per site
How a New Zealand content writer rebuilt a sales dashboard in a day, and the $78,000 roadmap it helped close at 1.45% of the client's target revenue
Peter lifting his discovery sessions from $500 to $1,500, plus Jeremy, Candy, Daniel, Bashir and James and what an AI employee did for each of them
Why more revenue does not need more hands on keyboards, and how the fear of AI comes from 45 years of identity built on typing
This week's homework: open last week's calendar, mark every hour spent on steps someone else could follow, write the biggest block as 10 plain-English lines and hand it to an AI employee

Chapters:
0:00 Cold open: the copy and paste salary
0:47 Intro
1:08 The plan and fan mail
1:39 The Feed: ChatGPT traffic against Google organic
3:52 The Feed: Anthropic's $16.8B quarter
5:03 The Feed: HubSpot's year of going AI first
7:01 Inside real agencies: client calls
10:41 The big idea: typing is basically free now
15:49 The one question before you hire anyone
16:48 Homework and fan mail
18:38 Outro

Mentioned in this episode:

Search Engine Land (Marie Haynes's AI search traffic data): https://searchengineland.com
Viktor: https://mvrx.link/get-viktor (affiliate link)
Tuesday's video, the three things that get an agency to a million with AI: https://youtu.be/9WeTF557N8g
Leave us fan mail: https://mvrx.link/fanmail
Work with us: https://theagencyhour.com/headless

Every episode of The Agency Hour: https://theagencyhour.com