When I first ran paid ads for my agency back in 2021, every still image creative had to either be built by me in Canva or sent to a graphic designer at $20 to $50 a pop. Testing a batch of, say, 22 to 24 creatives could cost you close to $1,500 before you drop a penny on ads. Right now I'm spending $900 a day on my low ticket funnel and some of my best performing creatives are still images that came out of one workflow. A few agency owners we've shown it to have pulled their cheapest cost per leads ever from the same process. The best part is that the ads were created entirely by AI and cost maybe 10 to 20 cents in credits each per creative. The actual tools are simple. Claude writes the image prompt, Higgsfield produces the image. The part that makes it work is what you do before you prompt anything. Most people open an AI tool and type "give me 12 ad concepts for a roofing lead gen offer" and let it rip. What comes back is generic because the strategy was generic. The image is only ever as good as the thinking you feed it. So instead I steal formats that are already proven. I go into the ads library of the biggest B2B advertisers I can find, sort by impressions, and look for still image formats they keep running. If a format shows up over and over near the top, it's working. From doing this for a client last week across four niches (roofing, tree services, siding, tint and PPF) I landed on four formats: A phone mockup where the notifications on the screen are the client's dream outcome. For a roofer that's a $40,000 deposit hitting the bank and a text saying "new roof restoration quote." A fake news article layout with the client avatar in their work environment and a headline that matches the hooks from the video scripts. A whiteboard sketch comparing the old way against the new way, with a little diorama of a finished job sitting in front of it. Bold text on a red background. Stupidly simple and it's one of Cole Gordon's top performers. Four formats, four niches, sixteen ads. Each format is deliberately nothing like the others, and that matters. If your first batch is four colour variations of the same layout, you're not testing anything.

Every week there's a new tool, a new model, a new automation everyone swears is a game changer. And if you're anything like most agency owners right now, it's quietly paralysing you. You feel like the goalposts are moving faster than you can run. Like there's this constantly growing pile of stuff you're supposed to learn before you're allowed to move, and you're falling further behind on it every single day. Here's the truth that takes the weight off, wherever you're at. The agency owners scaling the fastest right now are not winning because they built some magical AI automation nobody else has. I work with a lot of people moving very quickly, and almost none of it comes down to a genius use case buried in their fulfilment or some clever system running in the background. They're winning on the fundamentals. A good offer. Solid ads. A tight sales process. Clients they actually retain. The exact same things that worked 5 years ago, executed well and consistently. Nobody wants the hear that because it's not exciting. But it's the truth, and the people chasing the shiny stuff instead of doubling down on the fundamentals are the ones spinning their wheels. Now let me be clear, because I'm not anti-AI at all. There are genuinely powerful things AI is doing that make this business dramatically easier. I use it constantly. But here's the distinction almost everyone is getting wrong, and it's the whole thing. AI enhances a skillset. It doesn't replace one. The people getting real leverage from it are the ones who already had the skill. The great media buyer. The strong copywriter. The sharp creative strategist. The operator who already knew how to build a workflow and, just as importantly, knew which work was actually worth doing in the first place. AI makes those people faster and more powerful because they know what good looks like, so they can steer the tool and catch it when it's wrong. The people getting stuck are the ones treating AI as a substitute for a skill they never built, or as an excuse to tinker instead of sell. They can't tell good output from garbage, so they just ship whatever it hands them, or they disappear down a rabbit hole building something impressive that produces nothing.

Something I've been getting asked constantly is why ads stop working so fast. Someone launches a fresh batch of creatives, gets a nice burst of results for about two weeks, then everything tapers off. So they go make new ads, launch again, get another short burst, and it dies again. They're stuck on this hamster wheel of constantly refreshing creatives and they can't work out why nothing lasts. If that's happening to you, you're almost certainly diagnosing the wrong problem. Because there are two completely different types of ad fatigue, and most people only know about one of them. The first one is creative fatigue. That's the one everybody knows. Your ad has been running for a while, your audience has seen it too many times, performance drops off. Normal. Expected. You refresh the creative and you're fine. The second one is market fatigue, and this is the one that quietly kills people. Here's what I mean. Say there are five big agencies in your niche all running a similar version of the same offer. You've never run a single ad in your ad account. You're brand new. You go and make an ad that looks and sounds a lot like theirs. On paper, your ad isn't fatigued at all. It's fresh. It's never been shown to anyone. But it's already fatigued in the market, because your prospects have been hearing that exact message for the last two years. Your ad account doesn't know that. Meta doesn't know that. The only thing that knows it is the person scrolling past your ad thinking "yeah, I've seen this one before." And this is where I think most agency owners are getting it wrong right now. It's not just that the offers are getting saturated. It's that the style of creative is getting saturated too. Everyone in the agency space is making the same ad. Same talking head standing in front of the camera. Same edit style. Same cadence. Same guarantee-shaped promise. So when your prospect scrolls past, they get billboard blindness. They've seen that ad a hundred times, even though they've never seen yours.

Had a good question come up on a call this week about pricing and upsells, and it's something I see almost everyone get wrong, so let's break it down. The situation is usually some version of this. A client's happy. Things are working. They start asking for more. Can you build our website? Can you run our Google ads? Can you add this, can you manage that? So you think, great, time to charge more. And the way most people go about it is by stacking features. Basic package gets meta ads. Next tier adds a landing page. The one above that throws in automations, an AI bot, a fancy pipeline, and so on up the ladder. Here's the problem with that.Your client doesn't give two shits about any of it. They don't care how many automations are humming away in the background. They don't care if there's an AI bot, or three landing pages, or a colour-coded pipeline. None of that is why they pay you. They pay you for one thing. More leads. More appointments. More sales. That's the value. Everything else is just plumbing. So when you price your tiers around features, you're charging more for stuff the client never asked to care about in the first place. And it usually ends with you doing a pile of extra work for an extra few bucks that you'll resent inside a month. Here's how to think about it instead. First, separate project work from retainer work. A website is a project. It has a start and an end. So bill it as a standalone project, not baked into your monthly retainer. If it needs ongoing upkeep, either charge a small maintenance fee for that specifically, or go find someone on Upwork, drop them in a Slack channel, and now they're your website guy. Do not let one-off favours quietly turn into unpaid scope creep on the service you're actually trying to scale. Those little jobs add up. They drain your energy and pull your focus off the work that moves the business. Second, base your real upsells on scale, not features. The reason a higher tier should cost more is because the client is spending more on ads, generating more leads, and booking more appointments.

Here's a practical video showing an end to end setup for a buyer lead generation campaign. I run through the meta campaign setup. The creative strategy. The ad copy strategy. The AI Agent setup that follows up with leads via SMS and books sales consults on autopilot. It's been a while since I did a training outside of the private mastermind on tactical service delivery strategy. For context this exact setup I've charged $9K USD to build out for clients. Enjoy (: