How to Stack AI Leverage to Grow Sales and Get Your Time Back

I was sixteen when I went to my first network marketing event in the Bay Area. My mom had to give me permission to join because I was still a minor.

This dude got up on stage wearing a super flashy watch and started talking about leverage. I don't remember what the watch was, but sixteen-year-old me was sufficiently impressed with his financial qualifications.

He quoted J. Paul Getty:

"I'd rather have 1% of 100 people's efforts than 100% of my own effort."

That's the line I remember hearing, anyway. And it made complete sense to me.

I recently read Getty's biography, and let’s just say I’m not a fan. But he was on the mark about leverage.

I've spent the years since then using different kinds of leverage to grow businesses. Some of the biggest improvements came from combining things that worked well together, like paid traffic with an ebook people bought, or a qualification form that helped an overwhelmed sales guy spend his time with better prospects.

Now I'm applying the same thinking to AI, and it's changing how much of the work I have to do myself.

If you're already working sixty hours a week, "do more" is a pretty shitty growth strategy. You need a way to bring in more sales that gives you some of those hours back.

There are six forms of leverage I look at when I'm figuring out how to do that: labor, media, systems, money, knowledge, and network. AI makes it possible to connect more of them without hiring a department to manage each one.

Fair warning... this gets a little nerdy. But stick with me. The useful part is spotting where two of these could work together in your business, so something that's currently eating your week can start getting done without you.

Then you can use some of what you gain to make the next part work better. That's where the compounding comes in.

1. Labor: eventually you run out of hours

There's a limit to what you can accomplish with your own hours. As an employee, you sell those hours to an employer. When you become self-employed, you can end up owning a job that follows you home and somehow thinks weekends are available.

Ask me how I know.

Hiring people lets you expand beyond that. Ten people working forty hours a week gives the business four hundred hours of labor. You still have to manage them, but at least the work has somewhere to go when your own week is full.

With AI, you can build specialists to handle jobs like preparing content, researching prospects, following up with leads, building pages, or helping customers get unstuck.

They can run work overnight. They don't call in sick or ask for a raise. Although they do have a remarkable ability to run up a bill if you let them enthusiastically solve the wrong problem for six hours.

And yes, I know the objection. "AI ain't there yet."

A few months ago, I would have agreed about a lot of this. Today, I'm watching agents do work I would previously have hired people to do, and that's changing how I build a business.

I still want human judgment on important decisions, and work gets checked. The agents get defined jobs, the information they need, and rules about what they can do on their own.

You get much more useful labor that way than asking a chatbot to "help with marketing" and hoping it develops a career plan.

2. Media: I got paid for the leads my competitors were buying

Early on, I ran classified ads to find people for my network marketing business.

People responded, I'd talk to them, and a few would join. Later, in insurance, we used fax broadcasts to generate leads.

Actual faxes. I've been doing this long enough that some of my marketing experience belongs in a museum.

When I moved into internet marketing, I learned how to get found in Google through search engine optimization and paid ads.

One of my businesses sold an ebook about negotiating debt. People bought it because they were searching for help with a problem they already had. Some of those buyers then became leads for our service, where a paralegal team helped them negotiate their debt.

We were competing with large debt-negotiation companies and nonprofits, and I could show up in both the paid and organic search results.

The part I loved was that people were paying me for the ebook before we ever talked about the service.

My competitors were paying to acquire leads. I was getting paid to generate mine.

That ebook let me explain something useful to people without personally walking every one of them through it. Search and advertising got it in front of people who needed it. The service gave the right buyers a next step.

You can already see several kinds of leverage working together there.

Today, social media gives you access to attention on a scale I couldn't have imagined when I was writing those classified ads. A useful post, video, or newsletter can reach thousands of people while you're doing something else.

AI can help you turn your experience into that material and adapt it for different places. The same idea can become a newsletter, a video, and several social posts without you spending the entire week recreating it.

Of course, eventually some of those people are going to raise their hands.

That's where my next lesson got expensive.

3. Systems: my sales guy couldn't keep up

Back in 2003, when I was growing my first seven-figure company, we started with me and one sales guy.

I handled the marketing. He handled the sales. We got into six figures in our first year, and for a while that arrangement worked pretty damn well.

Then the lead flow started overwhelming him.

I remember a Friday meeting where he was frustrated. He'd spoken with something like forty people, and about three had bought. Meanwhile, more leads were coming in, people were falling through the cracks, and he was spending too much of his day talking to people who were never going to buy.

So I put a qualification form in front of the sales conversation. It asked questions that helped us identify the people who were a fit and actually wanted to take action.

Nothing wildly sophisticated. A web form.

I don't remember the exact percentages all these years later, but his close rate went from roughly 10% of the people he spoke with to well over 40% among the qualified people who got through to him.

That last part matters. We changed who he was talking to. I've watched guys quote numbers on stage and leave that part out.

The email follow-up helped in a different way. It brought more people back and got more conversations booked over time, so we were doing a better job with both the people ready to talk and the people who needed longer.

The marketing was already bringing us leads. Now my sales guy could spend more of his day having conversations that were actually worth having.

Today, something like AwesomeCRM.com can manage those follow-up sequences and keep track of where people are in the process. An agent can handle pieces of the conversation, too.

For example, someone asks to learn more through a social post. Using the platform's permitted messaging tools, your agent can ask qualifying questions, answer from the information you've given it, and offer a call when there's a fit. When the person agrees to an available time, it books the appointment.

You set the rules about what it can promise, when it hands over to a person, and which follow-up messages the prospect has agreed to receive. Otherwise, you risk building an extremely productive pain in the ass.

The newsletter you're reading is another example of connected work. I talk through the idea, work with my agents to develop it, review the result, and have the system handle the production steps. I still make the final publishing decisions.

I walked through that in last week's letter, How to Build a Newsletter That Pre-Sells Your Offers.

If you've already got a process in mind that needs this kind of help, my Agentic Build Plan is where we can work out what to install first.

But there's another layer to add once the thing is working.

4. Money: now you can put more people through it

Once the follow-up works and you know what a customer is worth, paid advertising lets you put more people through the process.

Look at what's working together here. The ad platform gets your message out, the agents handle pieces of the response, and the funnel and follow-up keep interested people moving toward a purchase or a call.

That's media, labor, and systems. Your money funds more traffic through the whole thing.

Last month, one of my companies spent six figures on ads. We expect that spend to bring in roughly three to four times as much in revenue over the next few months, as people buy and some go on to purchase more.

The money arrives over time, and delivery, the team, and software still have to get paid. I care about what we keep and when it hits the bank, because you can't pay the bills with an encouraging forecast.

As actual profit comes in, you can put some of it back into better ads, better follow-up, or more of the traffic that's working.

It's the same basic idea as reinvesting investment returns: the gains give you more to work with on the next round. In a business, you also get to improve the process that produces those gains.

You do have to earn the right to turn up the budget. If your offer doesn't convert and your follow-up sucks, more traffic gives you a larger and more expensive collection of people you failed to sell anything to.

Fix the weak part before you pay to send more people into it.

5. Knowledge: your experience can keep working when you're busy

The qualification form took very little technology. Knowing what to ask and where to put it was the valuable part.

You've probably got knowledge like that in your own business. You know which customers are a fit, which offer makes sense for them, and what usually goes wrong after somebody buys. After enough years, some of that feels so obvious you forget somebody else would have to learn it.

Unfortunately, when it all lives in your head, people keep coming back to borrow your head.

You get dragged into the same decisions, review the same mistakes, and explain the same thing again. Eventually you start typing a response and realize you could probably finish it with your eyes closed.

With agents, you can capture the judgment behind that response. Give them examples of good work, the questions you ask, the mistakes to avoid, and the situations that need your attention. Then your experience can guide work you aren't personally doing.

I covered the foundation in Your AI Agent Is Only As Smart As The Brain You Give It. This is where the time you've spent learning your business starts helping the agent make better decisions.

And it gives your knowledge somewhere to accumulate. A prospect asks a question you hadn't considered. You improve the answer, the agent reviews the call, and then updates the brain. The next person benefits from the conversation you already had.

That combination of business judgment and the ability to put it into a working system is a valuable skill. An agent might take over work that currently consumes time across several employees, but somebody has to understand the job well enough to set it up and tell whether it's working.

I'm betting demand for people who can do that keeps growing over the next few years. There's plenty of expensive, repetitive work waiting for somebody who understands it.

6. Network: even an introvert can get some help here

Back in my network marketing days, I was on Robert G. Allen's team. I remember hearing him say, "Your network is your net worth."

Cliché as hell. Also, there's a lot of truth in it.

This is probably my weakest area. I'm extremely introverted, and connecting with people and consistently keeping up with them doesn't come naturally to me.

But you can't spend twenty-five years in business without meeting some smart, accomplished people. The relationships I've built have led to many millions of dollars through joint ventures, business partnerships, and introductions to people who could help me solve expensive problems.

I'm also in a mastermind that helps me keep expanding that network.

What I like about publishing is that it gives those relationships more opportunities to happen without requiring me to become the guy who loves networking events.

Every week, sharing what I'm working on helps me connect or reconnect with people. Somebody sends a referral. Somebody wants to talk about a problem in their business. Somebody introduces me to a person I should know.

The content gives them a reason to reach out, and it gives them something useful to send to somebody else.

AI helps me keep showing up with that content. It can also help organize the conversations and remind me to follow through, which is useful when my natural networking strategy is to forget I haven't spoken to somebody in nine months.

I still have to be worth knowing. I still have to deliver, care about the relationship, and do what I said I'd do.

But the labor, media, systems, and knowledge we've already talked about can help create more opportunities for those relationships to form.

And a good relationship can improve every other part of the business.

How the whole thing starts feeding itself

Think about what happens after a customer buys. You've earned revenue, and you've also learned something about what got them to act, what almost stopped them, and what they need help with next.

If that information stays in a call recording nobody listens to, it doesn't do much for you. But work it back into the business and the next round can benefit from it.

A question that keeps coming up can become a newsletter that brings in more of the right people. An objection can help you improve the sales page and the answer your agent gives. As those changes produce more sales, some of the profit can pay to get the improved message in front of a bigger audience.

Now the gains from one round are helping fund and improve the next. That's the compounding part, and it goes beyond having several useful tools running at the same time.

You'll still have bad tests and things that need fixing. But you can keep building on the knowledge, content, relationships, and processes you've already developed. And with less of the routine work coming back to you, there's room to make those improvements during the day.

That's a much better place to operate from when you're already tired.

Start with the thing that keeps waiting on you

Please don't finish this letter and decide your weekend needs six new AI departments.

Pick one bottleneck where work repeatedly stops until you show up. Follow-up is a good candidate for a lot of businesses. So are content production and customer onboarding.

Write down what happens now, including the part you keep doing manually. Then connect two forms of leverage around it.

For follow-up, that might mean a simple qualification process and an agent that handles the first response. For content, it might mean documenting your expertise and giving an agent a repeatable production job.

Choose a result you can measure: time you spend on the task, qualified calls booked, response time, or customers successfully onboarded. Check the quality along with the number. An agent booking your calendar full of people who can't buy has recreated my old sales problem at impressive speed.

Get that one process working, see what it gives back, and use some of the gain to improve the next part.

You can also choose to keep some of the time. A free afternoon is a perfectly legitimate return on a business improvement.

What I'm putting together

I'm putting together a membership for operators who want to use these systems to generate more revenue and get some breathing room back into their lives. It'll bring together the work I'm doing on Video OS, Content OS, Revenue OS, and Design OS, covering video and content production, offers and sales material, and the pages that support them.

You've seen a piece of that in how I make videos by talking to Claude on my phone. I'll keep you posted as the membership comes together. It's still in progress.

If there's already a problem in your business you want my help with, the Agentic Build Plan is available now.

It costs $500. You tell me about your business through the intake, and I identify the biggest leverage problem, map the workflows and tools, and lay out the order to build them in. Your plan is finished before our call, so we can spend that time reviewing something concrete.

You keep the plan whether you build it yourself or have me help implement it. If we do the build together, the $500 is credited toward it.

Start with the problem you keep losing time to every week. Getting that handled would give you a little room to think about what you actually want to do with the business.

To your next launch,

—Tim Erway

P.S. If content is the first piece you want help with, grab the Magnetic Brand System here. It gives you AI specialists trained on your Brand DNA to help create content that sounds like you. That's a useful place to start putting your knowledge and media to work together.