A couple of weeks ago I sat down with Mike Kolev, CEO and co-owner of Carbon Box Media. His agency is doing $356K a month at 70% gross profit, growing 17-23% month on month. And he hasn't lost a single team member while transitioning to an AI-native agency.
The 80% rule nobody wants to hear
Mike's single most important point on AI isn't about which tool to use. A lot of founders run around implementing AI everywhere and "feel" productive. Mike's point is that much of it is noise. The 20% that moves the needle is almost always in delivery, the part that costs the most, takes the longest, and keeps founders trapped in operations. So that's where he started.
His first AI build was a tool for the SEO division that could deliver 90 blogs in 90 days, previously done by $23,000 a month in Upwork writers. With the tool, delivery dropped from 60-70 days to hours. He can now onboard unlimited clients for that service.
The second was "Advertisable," an AI creative tool for paid media (70% AI, 30% human). Why creative? Because paid agencies everywhere struggle with it. They built it internally first, then started packaging it as a product.
The AI example every agency should steal
They had a trading client who'd been in the market for 6-7 years. At some point he couldn't differentiate himself from newer competitors. So Mike's team built a sentiment analysis tool. They scraped comments from the client's competitors' YouTube videos, categorised them as neutral, negative, or positive, and found the five topics the ICP kept coming back to.
Those five topics became a lead magnet. The paid team ran ads against them. Result: record sales in six to seven years.
Where to start if you have zero AI right now
Mike's framework is straightforward.
- Download the brain. The biggest problem in a lot of $1-5M agencies is that the smartest thinking only exists in the founder's head. The strategist's head. Senior leadership's head. Nobody else can access it, so every decision escalates up. Build a knowledge base trained on how the key people think. Now anybody in the agency can tap into that thinking without needing a meeting.
- Fix acquisition follow-up. A lot of agencies are slow to respond to leads. An AI system acting as a virtual SDR - nurturing, following up, sequencing - captures what would otherwise fall through.
Before you watch the full conversation, sit with this. What's the one thing in your agency that only exists in your head right now? The thing that creates bottlenecks week after week because nobody else can answer without you?
What should your agency build with AI first?
The Founder Dependency Audit finds the 20% that actually moves the needle - the delivery work that costs the most and keeps you trapped - and sequences what to build. We work through it together.
See where your agency depends on you- Romans