97% Trial Retention and No Ad Spend: Ted Betancourt on Building Juvo Leads

Jordan:0:00
How do you pronounce that?

Ted:0:01
Yeah, good luck. D. Betancourt.

Jordan:0:04
The Betancourt, Ted the Betancourt. I was gonna say, feel like I've seen that name, heard that name before. Okay, three, two, welcome back to the High Tech Assistance Podcast. Everyone please welcome the winner and only Mr. Ted Betancourt. Ted, how you doing today my friend?

Ted:0:05
D. Betancourt, There's actually a famous picture, Betancourt, from like the Tigers.

Ted:0:26
You got it wrong Jordan. I'm D Betancourt, but it's close enough. No one can, no one can get it right. No one can get it right. Uh, no, I'm happy to be here. Thanks for having me on the show and, uh, excited to, uh, learn more about what you guys do.

Jordan:0:31
My man!

Jordan:0:39
Absolutely. So first and foremost, what is your offer and who is it for?

Ted:0:44
Sure, so I run a company called Juvo Leads. We're a human powered lead chat service and lead follow-up service. So our primary business is we go on websites, mostly law firms. pop up, have conversations with visitors and turn those conversations into leads. In conjunction with that, we have an intake center that calls leads that businesses give us for the purposes of getting them to sign retainers or book consultations. So anything related to leads and helping law firms grow. through lead acquisition we do.

Jordan:1:16
Gotcha. Not on the customer support side, but for like CS client success managers, the sales side, marketing side, would you say, or what would you say the head count is on that field?

Ted:1:28
On the phone team or the chat team?

Jordan:1:31
Neither on the

Ted:1:33
Oh, no, let's go like non 1015 in that ballpark.

Jordan:1:41
Gotcha. Is that primarily like sales?

Ted:1:44
No, we only have two salespeople, operations. So we're not big, we're hiring eight right now, so we're about to go up pretty big, relative to our size. Account managers, what we got? Sales ops, sales, development, HR, like the stuff you need to make a business run.

Jordan:2:07
Right, right, gotcha. Just to get clarity there, you're running or you're hiring eight sales reps?

Ted:2:12
No, no, no. We don't have a sales problem. We've grown at least 80 % each year for the past five years, so we're pretty good. Our problem used to be trying to get sales, but now we're hiring four account managers, two dev people, and some ops people on the chat side. Yeah, that's for the non on the phone answering team. We're hiring about four a month.

Jordan:2:33
Get it?

Ted:2:41
on that on the chat team, hire about 12 per month.

Jordan:2:45
Okay, cool. So you have a pretty dominant process for hiring. We can definitely talk about that in a little bit, but if sales is not a problem, what's the secret, man? What is your current client acquisition channel?

Ted:2:55
Word of mouth, reputation. We get a lot of our clients through existing partnerships. So I work in a small pond. We answer chats on law firm websites. There's only a few companies that do it. There used to be four or five. There still are, but now it's us and one other company are pretty much the, you're either using us, you're probably using us or somebody else. So we've kind of just grown into that. space. So it's basically a two man race at this point.

Jordan:3:26
Gotcha. And how did you get into this specifically? Like chat bots and call centers for lawyers specifically. That's super niche and super narrow.

Ted:3:33
Super niche. We were doing, I had a marketing agency. was doing law firm marketing and I was using other companies to answer chats and they kept screwing it up. So pretty badly. So I fired them and started doing it myself and was a lot better at it. So I said, all right, let's scale this. And that business is more repeatable and it's easier to scale. Because when you're in an agency, every time you work with an agency, it's like a new thing you gotta. you gotta work with, it's all about customization. So, Chad, it's customized, but it's all within the same wheelhouse. So it's just a lot easier to kind of scale that. For me, it was.

Jordan:4:08
Yeah, no, for everyone, it's probably that way. When you have to a master at 10 different services, it literally, exactly. It is tough. And why would you want to become a master at 10 different things? become a master at one to two things max. You can just have that same avatar coming through your funnel with the same sales process, same onboarding process, same delivery process. It's like, this shit's repeatable. And when it's repeatable, you can replace yourself. And that's what actually creates exit value.

Ted:4:15
It's

Ted:4:35
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, funny, we get asked to get acquired all the time and we have to dance around it politely, but we have no, I know we do not want to exit. So, I'd have to get a job. got four kids at home and so you get enough money to, and we're not, we're about $8 million a year. we're not big enough to, you know, we're two and a half EBITDA or, know, two and a half. Yeah. Two and a half EBITDA. So the multiples four or six, maybe.

Jordan:4:36
Mostly we don't realize that. So you do. Good job, Ted.

Jordan:4:48
What?

Jordan:4:53
picture.

Ted:5:05
Maybe I walk out with 10 million after taxes, I get like five. I'm still gonna have to get a job. While I wait, then I have to get a job or watch the kids more. You think I wanna watch the kids more? I'd rather be doing something I like doing than chasing down, changing diapers all day.

Jordan:5:24
You're a savage for saying that on air. Yeah, I completely agree with you, bro. Congrats on the family. Maybe one day in my life, preferably later, I'll start one, but I'm on the radar now. For me, the goal is 10-figure exit, right? You're there, but even the metrics that you just gave with taxes and all that bullshit, it's not really a 10-figure exit, so it makes sense as to why. And plus, all they really do, all PEs.

PE firms really do, is just buy the future cash flow from you.

Ted:5:55
And why do that? If my cashflow is going up, if I sell now, I'm just gonna be giving away a lot of money for nothing.

Jordan:6:01
Exactly,

Ted:6:04
Yeah, if I was at 10 % growth, like it's more stable, but like my growth rate is pretty good. And why would I want to give up that?

Jordan:6:11
Right, right, right. Yeah, no, keep going, keep going. My end goal, to get personal with you, definitely is to sell one day, but as I was saying, has to be 10 figure exit. Anything less than that, fuck off.

Ted:6:18
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. won't walk away, walk away money so I don't have to think about working again.

Jordan:6:25
You know, you know, for sure. Let's see. And then in regards to growing word of mouth and referrals, is that the only channel you have any outbound or inbound like Mark?

Ted:6:33
No, we do outbound. We're pretty good at it. In the legal marketing space, it's build reputations. So our best marketing is our service. So when we go in and we can say, hey, you're using this company, use us, you get 50 % more. And what we do is we give everyone a free 30-day trial and then sit down with them after. Did you get 50 % more? They say yes. We say great. Tell your friends. They do.

We grow business that way.

Jordan:7:04
That's really a good lead magnet right there. Free trial for 30 days. How can someone argue?

Ted:7:10
Yeah. My, I my sales pitch with the same, the same meeting each time. I still take the, I take the big, I take, I still take about half our sales calls. just like doing it. at the end, you know, do you like the idea of 30 day free trials? You like the idea of 50 % more leads. What do you think? And you know, I get a lot of, a lot of laughs, but mostly smiles like, all right, Ted, I hear what you're saying. Let's give it a shot.

Jordan:7:20
But.

Jordan:7:32
Right, right, right. There's no risk to that at the end of the day, you know what mean?

Ted:7:35
We try to make it risk free. Yeah. And we can do that because we know we have the 97 % of firms that do a 30 day free trial move forward. I'm keeping clients, 97. I keep clients for six and a half years on average. So it's like, it's an easy, like what's one month compared to six and a half times 12, whatever that is.

Jordan:7:43
Bye!

Jordan:7:53
Right, right. What is, you don't have to say this as well, but I guess ballpark pricing if I was an attorney utilizing your services.

Ted:8:00
Sure, we pay per lead or per case we sign. So if a lead comes in that matches the criteria that they want and they get to determine what the criteria is, we charge them $35. If we sign a retainer, it's $100. So it really just depends what they want.

Jordan:8:14
Gotcha. Interesting topic. There's many agencies out there that have a combination of pay per lead, pay per close, or a hybrid model with its retainer plus performance or retainer only. Have you tried all of these different pricing models? And I know this is your current pricing structure. So which one do you prefer out of the two that you just mentioned there?

Ted:8:37
Say that one more time so it's either per lead or per retainer.

Jordan:8:41
Let me clarify the question. It's technically two in one. Have you tried retainer only versus performance only?

Ted:8:48
We've thought about it, but to some extent if it ain't broke, why should we fix it?

Jordan:8:54
Okay, so it sounds like you've always been on performance. Got it. Okay, so that said, what you, okay, going back to the second question, $100 if we're on a retainer, $35 per lead, what do mean there?

Ted:8:56
Yeah, always been performance, yeah.

Ted:9:08
Sure, a lot of firms, so let's say we go, you know, our bread and butter, 80 % of our clients are personal injury law firms. So a lot of our personal injury law firms will say, Ted, sign a retainer for me through chat. Well, by a lot I mean 35%, 40%. The rest, we don't sign retainers. So instead of passing a case to them, we pass them a lead. Not everyone wants to sign a retainer in chat. Sometimes they want to talk to a person, oftentimes. So.

We don't have the ability to sign retainers, so I'm not getting a retainer. But the firms that do want us to sign retainers, every lead we pass them isn't gonna sign a retainer. And even the ones that would want to sign a retainer, they're gonna want to talk to a person first. So in those situations, we don't get a retainer signed for them, we pass it to them, to their phone team and their intake team, then signs them after they talk to

Jordan:9:56
Thanks for the clarity. And yeah, if I was going to sign a retainer with a lawyer, I wouldn't want to speak to somebody first. I'm not trying to be a chat.

Ted:10:00
I get it. Yeah. Well, you'd be surprised though, is every year the percent of leads that come in via SMS, people starting conversation with the law firm via text, has gone up. So we're now up to about 21 % of our mobile leads now come from SMS. So a lot more people are starting conversations, especially the younger people. I'm 43, so I'm not younger anymore. But they're signing cases through SMS without talking to people.

Jordan:10:26
Interesting. Do you have SMS capabilities as well? Is that the same thing as chat? Because that's the same.

Ted:10:31
Yeah, so we answered inbound text messages, inbound chats, local service ads, GBP, meta ads. It doesn't matter. If it's a message type, we probably do it.

Jordan:10:42
Gotcha, and you're not running Google Ads or Facebook Ads, you're just handling the chat function.

Ted:10:46
Correct, yeah, we don't touch the marketing, just the conversion.

Jordan:10:51
Gotcha. Okay, cool. And then getting back to outbound. Are you using LinkedIn, cold email, cold calling for your internal use?

Ted:10:57
A little bit. Mostly email plus phone calls. Most of our stuff is inbound at this point to be honest with you. Yeah.

Jordan:11:03
You know Really? Like 90 % plus?

Ted:11:08
No, not that high. 50. Maybe 60.

Jordan:11:13
Gotcha. That's pretty good to have half your business come from referrals, you know? I mean, I feel like that makes life a little bit easier.

Ted:11:20
Yeah, it does. And you know, when we do well for our, so when we partner with people, it makes them, so we partner with a lot of marketing agencies and it makes them stickier. Because if they're getting more cases through the marketing, then that's a boon for the marketing. So when they know they use us, they get more cases for their clients. So it's a win for them because their clients stay with them longer.

Jordan:11:45
So you part you partner with other marketing agencies, obviously in the industry or PI personal injury space. Gotcha. You guys work in conjunction that way makes total sense. Do you give them a kickback at all or just like good.

Ted:11:45
So it's a natural fit, you know what mean?

Ted:12:00
Usually not. There's a few partners we do, but it's usually not a big thing. They're not doing it for the men. Like if we gave them, 5 % like they are charging PI agencies, you know, anywhere between five to $100,000 a month. So a small kickback from us doesn't do much for them. What does do it for them is that when they're getting their clients more retainers, so when they get more cases than they those $100,000 a month clients stay longer. And when they stay longer, they're happy.

Jordan:12:26
Mm-hmm.

Ted:12:28
So they know when they work with us, we give them the most cases they can possibly get. That means they say in those contracts longer with the firms.

Jordan:12:36
Gotcha, okay, thanks for the insights there. Switching gears, going to recruiting, you're hiring at scale, essentially. How did you dial that in and what were some mistakes that you learned along the way?

Ted:12:48
Higher for experience. We're big on hiring for experience. Higher, slow, fire, fast. Culture fit is probably the most important thing. Being pretty diligent about about culture fit upfront because we've had some non culture fits, but they look great on paper and they were, but just wasn't a good working environment. So didn't work out. Those are the big things we use on that side. No lightning in a bottle moments. We take a lot of.

Jordan:13:10
No for sure.

Ted:13:18
Because of our growth, we've been able to take a lot of people from competitors. So even bad companies will have really good players. So we reach out to companies and poach their best.

Jordan:13:30
Yeah, you head hunts. Good stuff. Good stuff. Do you have any process when it comes to application, personality score, 60 minute video before they ever speak to somebody who would conduct the interview?

Ted:13:32
Aggressively, yeah.

Ted:13:44
I wish like, you know, everyone's talking about, you know, the what's the newest test everyone's taking the there's all these personality tests with scores and all that stuff. We got into doing that. It just slowed down our process. We need a higher, faster. So we chat with someone a few times, make sure they're a fit. The bigger thing is we're looking for is if I have to, in some positions we can train them if they're a good fit. but we're really hiring for experience. So if they're coming to the table, they're good at their job, but they also have, they're bringing something new to the table we don't have. So from pretty much every person that we hire now, it's, you have to be good at your job, but you also have to bring something to the table that is an experience or a learning that we don't have as a company. So they can kind of add to our current pool of, you know, top line knowledge.

Jordan:14:29
Gotcha, and this is, I'm assuming for internal use, not for like your, what should I call these guys? For the PI clients.

Ted:14:39
well, talk about chat agents is a whole different ballgame. So chat. Yeah. Yeah, I'm talking about, I'm talking about like account managers. I'm talking about technical integration setups. I'm talking about developers for a chat team. That's a whole different ballgame and our phone answering team. That's a whole different ballgame to phone answering team. They must have at least four years experience. Are you doing this job chat agent? can chat, teach them down from scratch.

Jordan:14:42
Thank you. Yes, not referring to those, referring to what you're describing. when you're...

Here we go.

Ted:15:05
But those were hiring in classes. So we hire in classes of, I think we're doing at six right now. So we, every, every month we have a new group of six that come in and it staggers. It takes about three months for them to get on the chats and answering them live. We have a whole process. That's a whole different ball game though. And we're, not hiring for the same skills. We're hiring for really big, good attention to detail and following the rules about doing chats and speed, you know, chats all about speed. we're, hiring for those. it's, it's a very, precise type of person we're looking for in that space.

Jordan:15:39
Very, very different. I assume these are overseas like Philippines, maybe South America.

Ted:15:44
All over we are US and Philippines is everyone scored in the same scale so there's no difference in scoring between our US team or Philippines but it really just depends on what client we're looking for for that for that agent.

Jordan:15:56
Okay. I would imagine if you're hiring someone for chat in the U S it's quite expensive.

Ted:16:01
It can be. And we do lean heavily on our overseas team for that as well.

Jordan:16:08
For sure, for sure. Just, I mean, from my own experience.

Ted:16:09
In the Philippines. Yeah, I'll be on. Yeah, we're Philippines. We've tried other countries. It didn't work. Philippines are great. We I love my Filipino team. Yeah.

Jordan:16:15
They fucking, they're awesome dude. They show up on time, they're super happy to work, they never miss a day, they fucking rock dude. For those of out there, fucking love you guys. For sure, for sure. Okay, let's see. Let's talk about like growth and the future of the company. So, right now you're doing about eight million year. I guess in the next 24 months realistically, what is the goal?

Ted:16:22
Yeah, I share those sentiments with you, Jordan.

Ted:16:41
Uh, well, we just try to keep up with the, uh, we, I'd be honest, I'd say, you know, we have our five year plan and all that we don't, we're doing one year at a time. So, uh, whatever 80 % growth is at some point we're going to slow down. Like past two years, I said, no way we're to be 80 % again this year. And then we were 90 % and last year we were 82%. So at some point it'll slow down and go below 80%. Um, and you know, we have to be happy with 50 % growth. Uh, I'm the pessimist in the group, I have a co-founder. He's like, Ted, we keep doing this. I know you keep saying it's not gonna keep going up, but it has. So whatever 80 % is for the next two years, that's our goal. I don't think it's achievable. I think we'll hit 50%, and I'll be grumbling about it. But I've been wrong in the past two years when I thought you can't keep it up. And our new phone, the phone answering side is newer for us. So that has a lot. bigger legs, it's a much bigger market opportunity, and the average client value is higher. So it could even accelerate, because that new ring in the business is a much bigger pond. Chat Pond is fairly big, but I think the other chat companies around our size, there's no $100 million chat company out there in our little niche. But on the phone answering side, there definitely are. So I think that this guy's the limit on that.

Jordan:17:58
No, for sure. Even if you don't grow 80 % from a client under management standpoint, but if you cross sell upsell from chat to call.

You can definitely grow 100%, maybe even 200%, like you said, increase the LTP that way. You and I are pretty similar in regards to being big thinker, big dreamer, but also pessimistic. Like I have high goals, fucking want everything and then some. At the same time, like there's no fucking way that's gonna happen. That's not gonna happen. But like, you still pursue it. You still fucking work hard to try to make it happen. But in the back of your mind, it's like, nah, that's not happening. You know? I think we're just checking ourselves, opposed to being completely optimistic. and just having your fucking world stripped from you. You know what I mean?

Ted:18:42
Yeah, it's a safeguard. So if we don't hit it, we're like, I knew it. I knew it.

Jordan:18:48
Yeah, no, for sure, for sure. Okay, solid. Okay, so I do have a question though. Let's say growth is at 50 % year over year. What would happen? I know you're like, fucking I'll deal with it, but like, have you thought about that?

Ted:19:02
I probably slow, mean. we'd be able to catch up on some stuff. Um, maybe slow down hiring a little bit, which wouldn't be the worst thing. I mean, that's easy to slow down. Um, I mean, honestly, if it's growth, we're still at a healthy clip. Uh, as long as we say, like I always say, I'm happy at anything above 20%. Um, and you know, we've exceeded that. So I, I, we haven't really planned for it cause we try to plan for the most likely outcome and the most likely outcome is continue to grow at 80%.

Jordan:19:31
Gotcha. yeah. Don't average businesses grow like 20%, 12 % year over year. Not, we're not talking to like startups and shit like that. Like the average business across the fucking U S isn't it like 20.

Ted:19:39
Yeah.

Ted:19:42
Yeah, I think you're aiming at 18 % if you're lucky in the high realm. So we're not SaaS. There's no unicorn potential for this business. And I'm OK with that. I have my needs met financially, so everything is going well on that side. So I'm happy, and I like what I'm doing. So we're happy with that 8 % growth. And I know that's above average for most businesses. So we'll take it when we have it.

Jordan:20:07
No, for sure. And I feel like when the financial needs are met and you love what you do, you're kind of like, I'm good right here, man. I'm just going to enjoy life. You know, I'm just going to enjoy life.

Ted:20:14
Yeah. And that's that's kind of what like when people are like, want to sell you want to sell and like, why like, I like what I'm doing. The money's are money's pretty good. Like, I'm not I'm not complaining. Like, I don't want to change up what I'm doing.

Jordan:20:26
for sure. I have a random question. The books behind you, do you have a favorite?

Ted:20:32
I mean, I see you have all like your good business books that you've read. from a business book perspective, we read, I read a lot, but from a business book perspective, probably the E myth was the last one. I know that came out like 20 years ago and everyone's read that a million times. I like the myth. that was probably the last business book I read. I don't even know if that's on the, on the thing on my background, but it might be, but I like that one because the one idea that they talk about in that, that I,

Jordan:20:50
the image.

Ted:21:01
resonated with me is try to turn your business into a franchise in the sense that you create systems so that you can get out of it a little bit more. So we've been kind of doubling down on that and trying to focus on how to make build processes. Because when we were a lot smaller, was just me doing a lot of stuff. But now it gets to point where I can't touch nearly half the things I want to. So I have to create processes by which other team members can do it.

So we're still working on that and we're still trying to productize our business so we can get more removed from it than we are. Because frankly, we're more involved than I should be by a large margin. But those are all the systems we're working on to try to remove ourselves from the data.

Jordan:21:42
Gotcha. That is essentially a phrase differently, but meaning the same thing. Like build a business so it is sellable, which is essentially the franchise model that you're talking about. Yeah. And it kind of goes back to what we were saying earlier, productizing sales, marketing, onboarding, fulfillment, all that fun stuff. Not in the intention to sell it, but just so you can remove yourself and not have to work and still make hella fucking money.

Ted:21:50
Same thing.

Ted:22:06
Yeah, that's the goal. Yeah.

Jordan:22:08
Absolutely. Looking back, well, maybe a few more questions here for you, Ted. Looking back over your career in marketing with the other agency and then now, what is one piece of advice you wish you knew when you first got started?

Ted:22:21
Don't get so upset with the with the failures. You're to make failures. Mistakes are going to happen. Learn from them. We do a lot of AB split testing against us and competitors and a few times we first used to do those and we get. You know, three or four years ago we lose an AB split test and we get devastated and like wouldn't try to get improved from it and just say, that sucks. They cheated. They it was BS and then we're like, you know what? Let's kind of do some deep diving here and see why they want.

And when we started taking that approach, we said, you know what, they're doing X, Y, Z. We didn't, let's try that. And we tried something and then we do another split test and we did better. And then we do better and then we do better. So we just kept coming out with new features based on our failures. So kind of really learning from your failures and not taking them to heart, just not seeing them as an opportunity to grow more than anything else. So we didn't do that soon enough, but we've been doing that in the past few years and that's been really making a profound difference for us.

Jordan:23:17
Not to bring up thinking girl rich, but basically what you said is like a highlight point in that book. It definitely talks about that. Like if you have a failure and you don't learn something, you're a loser. Like you literally missed the entire fucking purpose of failure. Within every failure is a seed of success. And that right there is what you're describing. It's a lesson. When you're

Ted:23:35
That was deep. like it. Yeah, I agree with you. Yeah, 100%. That was deep. liked it. Yeah, 100%. I agree with you.

Jordan:23:38
What's that?

Jordan:23:42
I got you. When you are talking about A-B test, are you talking about the chat widget side, like A-B testing this or like A-B testing like the marketing campaign? Just so I get clarity there.

Ted:23:50
Both for us. It was about widgets and making sure we get more leads from how we answer chats, but it applies to everything. So at first we were applying it just to the chat widgets, but then we started applying it to our hiring to our sales process to our. know everything that you can split test you should, but just make sure you're not over testing for awhile. We try to like test too many things at once, and if you overcome if you over complex it, you're to have a hard time. You have one try to try to get one glean.

One learning for me, shabby split test. Don't try to do multivariate. You'll confuse yourself.

Jordan:24:22
single variable at a time, now you got it. And then kind of already asked this in regards to your goals, but I guess what's one thing you and the company are looking forward to? Personal or I guess on business side?

Ted:24:34
Just continuing to grow and continue to find ways to better pull ourselves out of the business and for me is about letting go. I'm not great at letting go, but my team is yelling at me. I gotta let go more. So being able to trust employees to make the decisions that you've trained them on and have them do that. So we're implementing a lot of new systems internally. A lot of is tell me to get the hell out. So using those, I'm kind of excited for that to see how that was working. trusting in those systems.

Jordan:25:04
Top top. No, you're you're spot on and you're not alone in that that boat. A lot of founders, CEOs that I speak with that I've built nothing into something to the exact same thing like giving up control is the hardest thing to do. But in order to lock true fucking scale, untouchable scale, it's just something you have to do. But you got it. You can't do it within. can't do it within. Absolutely. Where can they find you?

Ted:25:24
Yeah, sure.

Ted:25:31
Ted at juvoleads.com is my email. Check us out. Juvoleads.com or I'm on LinkedIn. Theodore DeBettencourt. I think.

Jordan:25:42
Perfect Ted, you know, thanks for all the gems brother. Appreciate the insights We'll have to have you back on like 12 months to see how the company is doing to see if you guys grew another 80 % in 2026 other than that Thanks again, brother audience. We'll talk

Ted:25:52
Sounds good. Thanks for having me on Jordan. It a pleasure being here. Appreciate it.

Jordan:25:58
Yes, sir.