How a 50-Question Test Replaced the Job Interview: Ian Almasi

Jordan:0:00
Welcome back to the [High Ticket AI Systems] Podcast. Everyone, please welcome the winner and only Mr. Ian O'Macy. Ian, how you doing today, my friend?

Ian Almasi:0:09
I'm doing well, excited to be on here. I always enjoy speaking on these types of platforms, especially about topics I care about.

Jordan:0:15
Yes sir, yes sir. It's an honor to have you my friend. Now for those of us that do not know the brand or the company yet, can you please give us a high level overview of essentially what you guys do and who you guys serve.

Ian Almasi:0:27
Yeah, so I started a company called Immigration Finder. For immigration lawyers, they want to build systems, have a streamlined flow, have a firm that doesn't revolve around them, that revolves around the system, hence the topic of the podcast, is that they hire us, they want somebody to go in, set up their software, build out the procedures, and overall build a firm that works more like a franchise. I mean, you see like every industry kind of has a lot of these efficient procedures that are very streamlined. Law is very much behind in that sense.

And the other thing is, lawyers take lot of pride in what they do too, which is a good thing. But the other side of it too, though, is that can lead to a very burned out business owner that isn't always able to grow or grow sustainably or tapers off at a certain revenue level.

Jordan:1:09
Gotcha. When you say systems, are you referring to marketing systems specifically, or do you expand into sales, onboarding processes, things like that?

Ian Almasi:1:18
Yeah, I mean, all of the above. We largely work on the intake process and legal production, which has a lot of subsystems, but largely like, you know, after a lead comes in, how do actually get them to pay for something? I mean, I think a lot of marketing companies don't know how to do that. I mean, they're good at getting the leads. They understand that they qualify on paper, but what do you actually say to the person to get them to pay for a console or get to the next, next step of the process? And after they sign up, how do you actually properly process this case? It's going to last for years and keep the person happy at the same time.

Jordan:1:47
Absolutely. I think there's a fine line between generating leads and turning leads into paying clients, right? I think a lot of agencies need to adapt that mindset of, yes, we can generate leads, but where everyone's happy and where everyone makes money is when we turn leads into paying clients. So for your systems in place for lawyers and attorneys, I guess, could you give us an example of what that would look like from a nurturing process?

Ian Almasi:1:57
Yeah.

Ian Almasi:2:13
Yeah, absolutely. I so after a lead comes in, I mean, most firms are really used to referrals. They do good work. They get those. That's just not a predictable way to always grow the business. It doesn't mean the business won't grow over that it shouldn't. But essentially, you need to have a process coming in. So when someone comes into a firm, they need to get contacted right away. But you need to give them the impression that you care more than the other people that they're talking to. And that's another big thing is that it's like you really want to just communicate that you value this person.

Because a lot of firms, when they answer the phone, they're just like, yeah, law office. If you want to talk to the attorney about it, it'll be $200. And I was like, all right, I'm going hang up. And that's it. But you want to be bit more exciting. Because once they get done shopping around, they're going to go back to the person that made them feel the best. They don't really know a lot about their case or law or anything. They're just going to go with the firm that has a good reputation, sells the best, makes them feel good. Because until they have that green card in the hand, that's essentially what they're gauging the service on, for the most part.

So that's that, but essentially when you nurture someone and take them through a process, we want to have like a simple rubric to follow. But for us, we always want to put procedures always into five steps or less or five phases or less. But essentially what we do with sales is newly case evaluation, consult, agreement sent, and then client onboarding or client signed. But that's a very simple rubric. And then also every part of the process should get you a different data point. Like how many new leads did he get? How many got evaluated? How many signed up for consults? How many, you know, got agreements and how many signed up and became clients. I those are five very simple data points that you can use in your firm that you can easily find out from the sales process.

Jordan:3:47
I like how you broke that down, like the five major steps in that sales process. But if you really, really like pull up a microscope or a magnifying glass and look at each big five pillar, there's like 10, maybe 15 checklists or steps that go into each pillar to ensure that the lead goes through to the next step. I like that. And I think a lot of people actually miss that, you You definitely broke it down pretty simple, but...

Ian Almasi:4:03
Yeah.

Jordan:4:13
There's really a lot that goes into it. the, sure. Like how to get that lead from the, new lead from flip the form to the, to the rubric, right? To the actual, is that what you call it? The Rubic or the, what was the next step?

Ian Almasi:4:26
Yeah, rubric, I mean, it's a sales rubric, those kinds of things. I mean, we build procedures that are really easy for people to come in and manage without a lot of experience. And so that's, yeah, that's what I'm really focused on is that, like when we work with a firm, we want to build something out that people can work on without needing to have a huge background, or even if they have a viable background, there's not a long learning curve in learning the system and getting up to speed, which is why with the case evaluation, you can have an intake agent that you hire that's competent.

And they just have to get on the phone and fill a questionnaire about the person and ask, hey, are you in the US or outside? OK, you're in the US. Did he come in with a visa? All right, he came in with a visa. What type of visa? Where do you live now? Have you traveled outside the US? So it's just a very simple pre-consult interview. And they put that in. But in the meantime, the attorney is going to go into the console with a list of information about all the cases. And it's really easy to review because you can go review 20 of these case evaluations at once and tell them, hey, next time ask this question, next time ask this question, next time ask this question.

Jordan:5:24
That is really, really important where you're speaking on right now, because in essentially the receptionist or the intake person is like the appointment center in a way, right? Where in like, I guess my world, a lot of miscommunication happens if we're not taking detailed notes, if we are not taking, making note of the next steps that need to happen for this for the specific lead. In this case, it's the, I guess, citizen trying to get their

Ian Almasi:5:25
and then go from there.

Jordan:5:54
full-time citizenship or whatever the case is. But yeah, I think there definitely needs to be handoff notes, a process in order to exchange information from this stage into into this stage here. Because it looks a little unprofessional if you're the attorney or the closer in this case, where you ask repetitive questions that were already asked on that initial intake form. It's like, dude, I already told the other guy over here, why are you asking the same question?

Ian Almasi:6:15
Yeah.

Ian Almasi:6:21
Yeah, you're absolutely right. And that's kind of the thing. You'd be amazed how many firms sign up clients and they have no information from the sales process whatsoever. I'm amazed. And then that's a big source of issue because sometimes the people will talk to the firm for months, years even before they sign up. And then it's like, oh, I've talked to this like people four times. I did a consult and then I'm signing up and then they don't know like what my background is or anything about me when I've provided all this info. Cause some of the cases you have to submit your CD, you have to submit. our criminal record, you have to submit some documents for them to review, just even see if the case is viable. So it's amazing how that all works.

Jordan:6:58
Do you, in addition to installing the systems, which are vitally important to any business for the, do you help them on the Legion side or is it primarily just like systems?

Ian Almasi:7:05
Well, we used to do a lot of that, but we primarily help them generate leads from their existing marketing. So we look for firms that already have a bit more of a flow and then focus on them. We know how to do lead generation. We do it for our business. We definitely consult on it a lot. But if someone needs only that, we'll generally just refer them out so they can get out that they need. And that's not a bad thing at all because we just want to hand people out to experts. A big part of the service is consolidating resources and centralizing everything, which doesn't always involve us doing all of it.

Jordan:7:22
Okay.

Ian Almasi:7:35
need a lot of different things, you're generally going to have to go to different people.

Jordan:7:38
Make sense, make sense. In regards to your client acquisition process, do you mind shedding some light on that? How do you guys generate law firms?

Ian Almasi:7:45
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And when I started the business, some of my first clients I got as referrals from a coaching program for lawyers that I knew, that was good. Then also when you have a few good case studies, I mean, our business people pay us monthly until we're finished, which can be years later. We've had some clients for years. So that's a big thing for sure. But overall, lot of what we do is we do conferences and we do online ads. Then we also just have a database that we call through because with B2B, it's a little different. I people's needs are going to evolve over time.

Jordan:7:54
Nice.

Ian Almasi:8:14
Like the immigration case is somebody needs kind of sign up when they sign up and that's kind of it until the concurrent thing. But I just called and talked to a prospect this morning, you know, little light on leads. They just hired a marketing company. Not a good time for us, but that doesn't mean in a year from now, they won't be in a perfect place. They hired that marketing company that works out. What I told them is, Hey, like your goal should be to create those problems that like we were just talking about. You should get to the point where you don't know how you're going to get all the work done. How are we going to handle all these phone calls? You know, we have all these billing requests we need to get out.

You know, make good problems for yourself, and that's the idea. But a big thing about how we get clients is we run online ads. I'm a big fan of those. Let's bring in, it's very predictable. Cold Outreach works well for us, but just like anything, it's a little return game. And if you're a lawyer watching this, you know, you get a lot of ad. I get a lot of it too. I a lot of people wanting to reach out, so we lead gen services on LinkedIn and that, different things as well. Then we also do conferences. We're a big fan of the ALE organization, American Immigration Lawyers Association.

And what we do is we have the booths there. It's a good, we support the nonprofit there. People come by the booths, see our services. And then from there, you know, even if they don't sign up from the event, they get into our ecosystem. And when they get into our ecosystem, they start seeing us online. They see us at other events or on our email list. You know, every once in while, I'll reach out to them. I mean, about half my clients are people I met from a year ago plus that sign up with us after that because they, you know, it's just the timing wasn't right. They didn't trust us at the time. You know, they didn't know what we did. So a number of different reasons.

Jordan:9:40
Now get it into the ecosystem is vitally important. It's almost like building an email list in another marketing. For inbound traffic for your ads, do you utilize Google or Meta right now?

Ian Almasi:9:44
Yeah.

Ian Almasi:9:50
Meta. Yeah, we do meta. To a video sales letter. Then they fill out a quiz and book a call.

Jordan:9:55
So a call funeral essentially. How long is your VSL?

Ian Almasi:9:57
Yeah.

That's about six minutes. Yeah, yeah, not super long. Most people don't even watch it when we look at the analytics. I just think they like the fact that it's there.

Jordan:10:10
It's so interesting. So it depends on the demographic that you're selling to. That's going to determine if they're going to watch the video or if they're going to read the headline and say, this is for me. And then just book a call for your ads specifically. I assume they're direct response video ads.

Ian Almasi:10:25
Yeah, we're starting to do just video ads just so people get to know us. And then we remarketed the video views, which is something we're consulting our clients on too, because they can just run ads. People get to know the firm as a coaching program. they're talking about focusing on the seven hour rule, which is people need to spend seven hours with you before they trust you enough to buy something. And, but also you can pay for that too. You can pay low amounts of money. They can see the posts and their feed and then go from there. Then you can also just make those ads and then serve them to people that really potentially need your help. But also the thing though is everybody's consuming video. I they're on these platforms. I mean, I'm getting clients that are very high-end lawyers on there just scrolling essentially. So it's pretty much everybody's using these things. I mean, a few niche markets that don't.

Jordan:11:08
Absolutely.

Yeah, Jeremy Haynes, not sure if you know who that is.

Ian Almasi:11:13
Yeah, I I am. I met him a few times. I used to work for Ty Lopez. So I saw him at a few events. Yeah. I was on his sales team, but I didn't really work with Ty ever. was just at home calling people selling courses.

Jordan:11:19
damn, that's crazy. What did you do for Ty? guys.

Jordan:11:29
That makes sense. When did you make that transition into what you do now then?

Ian Almasi:11:33
Well, I started the company and then I just failed miserably. know, it's, didn't really want to a business, lost a lot of money. It's actually a sleeping car at one point, know, 50 grand in debt. I was between apartments and I'm wanting for a hotel. then, you know, and ironically, that's when I got that job. My friend got hired and I was like, Hey, can I do that too? Otherwise I don't know what would have gotten done. I almost got evicted from the place I was in. But I just, you know, I got paid later, a few days later because the wire transfer bounced. But anyway, I started working for him.

Jordan:11:40
I know.

Ian Almasi:11:59
And we're just on the sales team. That's where we really learned a bit, learned a lot about business structure and systems. Like I really knew a lot about it before, like knowledge wise, but that's when I really saw it in place. Like a whole business that was owner independent. That was completely team led. mean, they had like a mogul, you know, with Ty, but that was a big thing too. I was actually seeing that. And then that's where I built up a lot of the sales skills and structure. Then I built up, rebuilt the business on the side that became a migration finder. Then I built that and then kept it towards doing about 20,000 a month while I had that job.

Jordan:12:24
Thank you.

Ian Almasi:12:28
Then after I did that for six months, I quit the job and then decided to go all in on it. And that was February, 2021. And ironically then, that monthly just happened to get a lot of clients that came in, which is good. It's kind of a, I mean, the beginning of the business was still a little rough. They had some bad partnerships I was a part of, but we're still here.

Jordan:12:45
I think you brought up something really important that you said, you know, when you were working with Ty, that's what you really learn about systems and team structure and just optimize them to the best of your ability. Because no one really sees that on the outside. All we see is Ty Lopez being Ty or Grant Cardone being Grant Cardone or Alex Hermosy being Alex Hermosy. But underneath all of that, there's real systems in place and they're all operating at an A player level, you know?

Ian Almasi:12:54
Yeah.

Jordan:13:15
I think it's super cool to be a part of that culture, you know?

Ian Almasi:13:19
I remember even working there, we would use Google Sheets a lot, even though they had Zoho. Business still remains so basic and all those things. And even like the firms I work with now, some of the people that just kind of keep it simple, caveman style, they don't overdo it. They're able just to service their clients really well. Not to they don't have challenges, but they're not going crazy on the wrong things.

Jordan:13:40
Never sure. Going back to the VSO call funnel, do you have, since you do know Jeremy Haynes, do you have any like pre-framing assets or sales building assets or backend selling systems as he calls it, and what's in the prospect like booking the call and the live consultation?

Ian Almasi:13:57
Well, most of the people booked the call. Right now we're at about 85 % that filled the form versus book, which is really good. We used to be at about 50. So essentially we switched to more. I used to not do as much video marketing in the ads, even though I recorded videos. So that's actually been a good thing was that. Then a big thing is for that is yeah, just the pre-framing is you just got to have something people want. mean, that's kind of this all this stuff about like what you just mentioned, the phrasing. But if you just have what people want and can phrase it in a way that makes it seem like you can solve a problem. the curiosity will be there. And I know we definitely get people coming to us because we only work with immigration lawyers. Like this is our only clientele. People are kind of curious just because of that. And there are a of other businesses that work with immigration lawyers, but it's not their only thing. Yeah. So what I tell a lot of people is you want to have, you know, just get a niche you can work with or get kind of a style you can work with. Like when I first started the business, even before immigration, I always worked at businesses that, you know, always, but a lot of the businesses I worked with for a while were just heavy phone sales.

And they were industries that required a credit score. like cardio ships, real estate, mortgage. So you could have a lot of these niches that go together and different things. But also, I you want to have some continuity too. And then the other thing too, though, is it's good to build a business where you can start referring your clients to each other. They can do that. We do that a lot with the immigration lawyers. get that. So they can refer clients to each other that have different specialties within immigration.

Jordan:15:19
That's very funny. I have started to do that over the past like three or four months and my clients, my clients love me for that dude. It's like, dude, you're giving me a great service and you're helping my business grow and like from a referral partnership. So really appreciate you Jordan. Like you're welcome buddy. Let's see, you said it.

Ian Almasi:15:23
and so on.

Ian Almasi:15:33
Yeah.

Jordan:15:36
Used to be 50 % between application to actually scheduling. And then that was 85%. So I assume you're not embedding the colony URL or I guess we use colony, but colony with the type form. I guess what's your, what's your tech stack for the.

Ian Almasi:15:52
Yeah, so I mean, we use Go High Level for pretty much everything, which we resell to businesses. And I've seen that before where people can just fill out the calendar widget in the form. Nothing wrong with that. We're not against testing it. What we've been doing though, because also when I found out about that, the data wasn't telling us that we needed to do anything different. So that's that. But we could also put that form in there, no problem at all. So that way people could get that created and submitted in there. But the other thing is those, you know, just...

Focus on what the data is telling you. Focus on what's actually just kind of presenting information. Because eventually, mean, something's going to stop working. But it hasn't really been a problem. I mean, like, we don't necessarily need to solve problems that aren't there. It's going to be proactive. But, you know, you want to actually build systems somewhat responsibly to what's going on. And you also need to forecast, like, what is going to be a problem in the future.

Jordan:16:25
I appreciate it.

Jordan:16:40
Absolutely. With that being said, what are your thoughts regarding hiring?

Ian Almasi:16:47
hiring? Yeah. Well, we do a lot of it. Part of the business is a hiring service. So we hire five to 10 people a month for the client. Sometimes it's more. And so that's

Jordan:16:58
So sorry, how would that work? What do mean you hire five to 10 staff per client?

Ian Almasi:17:05
So just our assortment of clients. I have a full-time person that hires people internationally and places them with firms. Usually they're from Latin America, so they work for a thousand to sixteen hundred a month or so. And so they go in and then work with the firm. And then from there what they do is, you know, they just do back-end jobs. So generally it's intake, sales, administrative work. But we just go and interview them. The law firm interviews them, picks the one or the ones they want, and then they take them over from there.

Jordan:17:30
Got you. I assume that's an upsell ascension pathway or is that inclusive?

Ian Almasi:17:33
It's part of the monthly retainer, we do sell it a la carte. Like one of those we just closed out yesterday. People just pay a one-time charge, then we'll play some.

Jordan:17:42
So, okay, is there like a guarantee with that? Like if it don't work out, we replace it.

Ian Almasi:17:46
Yeah, within 90 days we'll replace them and then, yeah, it doesn't happen too much. We know when it does happen, we just replace them. And we're there for the onboarding too. So we'll help get them situated in the firm, make sure everything's working.

Jordan:17:52
for sure.

Jordan:17:58
Gotcha. In regards to, I love call funnels. They're my freaking favorite, bro. I sense you are using GHL's calendar. Are you familiar with the term, like pixel conditioning? So essentially they fill out the application. If it doesn't look good, they redirect to the calendar that's not pixeled. Yeah. Okay.

Ian Almasi:18:02
Yeah, yeah, I do too.

Ian Almasi:18:13
Yeah.

Ian Almasi:18:19
Yeah, yeah, we do that a lot. That's a lot of how we help firms get qualified leads or with quizzes like that.

Jordan:18:26
Gotcha. Yeah. It's so funny, like really cool to talk to somebody that actually knows shit like this. Cause most people are pretty not ignorant, but just unaware of that at the high level tactics. you say, did you say you ended up like meeting Jeremy Hanes or work with him because of tie?

Ian Almasi:18:34
Yeah.

Ian Almasi:18:41
Well, he spoke at a few events that I went to. Like I went to one of Ty's events. This is after I stopped working for him. He was there and then we would just help. Sometimes I would have to talk to people to have organized speakers and things for events. So that was one. And I think I only met him on one real occasion where I actually talked to him. He was there with his now wife, you know, just at this event. Then I started talking to him because I recognized him from the chorus and it was just telling him, Hey, I learned about your data stuff. We always focused on members after that.

Jordan:18:44
you

Ian Almasi:19:08
And it's, you know, he thought it was cool because there was a video he'd recorded, you know, whatever seven, eight years prior. And so here I am telling him, learn something. Most of these online people, they don't know what happens with all this information they cast out there. Someone just buys the chorus and then they don't talk to him much after six months or kind of that. So it's always happy hearing, especially when it's through a third platform like Tai Lopez Knowledge Society.

Jordan:19:14
So it's like.

Jordan:19:31
Right, right. It's not even, it wasn't even Jeremy's chorus, it was Ty's chorus that Jeremy filmed for.

Ian Almasi:19:37
Yeah, I think that was brand. That was a big thing for sure.

Jordan:19:42
Yeah, that's like his biggest case study. Not to go on like the Jeremy Haynes topic, but he always talks about time in his YouTube videos. Do you have his course, by the way? Jeremy's?

Ian Almasi:19:51
Jeremy Gaines' chorus or Ty's chorus? I don't have Jeremy Gaines' chorus. I just have the sections of it that are inside of Ty Bunker's SMMA program.

Jordan:20:00
For sure, for sure. Talk to me about your sales process. One call closed, two call closed.

Ian Almasi:20:05
We generally do a two call close. I mean, largely because our service is very evaluation based. We're going to meet them, hear what they got going. Then afterwards we'll do a presentation, tell them how we can help them. And then they'll sign up from there they won't. So that's a big thing. But the whole two call close, because when I first started the business, I was doing one call close, or just sending the agreement, not hearing back from people. We switched to two calls because it just felt a bit more.

Jordan:20:19
Right.

Jordan:20:26
Ha ha ha.

Ian Almasi:20:30
personal and I guess when we started the business or when I started the business I hired someone to do cold calling for me so a lot of the people they weren't warm in inquiries as far as that goes and overall people like to see stuff I mean the most people are fairly visual even if they're not visual they usually like to see that you put something together and so so that's that's one thing yeah so that was that and now like generally like from books calls to sales it's about 11 10 percent of like those go down between people we reject no shows and whatever else happens.

Jordan:21:02
Gotcha, okay, thanks for the context. Yeah, it's very interesting whenever you close on Zoom or Google Meet with no slides, it's like, you gonna show me some? I'm like, nah, we're just gonna have a conversation. They're like, what? Because I guess normally people have like sales decks, like proposals that they like to cover. It's very interesting. I mean, now I have one, because like you said, people are attracted to visuals and whatnot.

Ian Almasi:21:25
Yeah. So it's so much easier to make that stuff now. Like this morning, I needed to make a few write-ups and guides for clients. And I just spoke in the cloud on my phone for a few minutes. Like it was about three and a half to five minutes per one, where I just set in specific detail. And I've always been able to kind of like recant details easily in my head as far as that goes. Very auditory person. Then anyways, like I was able to have these guides like on my computer when I logged in. you know, two of which I used to show a client, of which I'm sending or a prospective client, one of which I'm sending to a client as an intake guide because we need that reviewed for a sales team that we're building with them.

Jordan:22:02
For you, what proposals that you craft for sales consultations, are you customizing these or personalizing these at all?

Ian Almasi:22:08
So normally we just have a template we use, but if it's something really specific, I will write that out. But usually that's kind of, it's kind of a kiss of death. Usually when we make the custom ones or people that don't buy, it's usually like when following a linear process is when we get signups.

Jordan:22:23
Gotcha. I know for me, because we do like outbound email and like LinkedIn and like lead magazine and whatnot, I like to personalize it to like show them exactly what the emails would look like for their company and lead. But because you're selling systems, it's not really like a done for you agency. makes more sense as to why like the linear path would make more sense for sure. How many sell jobs you have right now?

Ian Almasi:22:28
Yeah.

Ian Almasi:22:32
Yeah.

Ian Almasi:22:36
yeah, yeah, that's fine.

Ian Almasi:22:49
I have one and then myself.

Jordan:22:51
Do you, because of your sales background, do you still like taking sales calls?

Ian Almasi:22:54
Yeah, he also just the volume of leads we have isn't there at another one, but he mostly books appointments for me, helps set up things that I would use.

Jordan:23:02
Gotcha. Yeah, I still love sales calls. It's one of my favorite things in the business. Did you find this center by yourself? Did you use like Cole Gordon and closes that I have?

Ian Almasi:23:13
No, no, we just followed our sales process or our hiring process to find someone. So that whole hiring process, we have an email list of people, about 17, 1800 people or so might be a little bit less than that. But yeah, anyways, the people just applied when they apply with us, they fill out a 50 question test. They have to do some aptitude testing and show their computer specs, internet speed, all those things.

Jordan:23:18
So.

Jordan:23:35
It's, I feel like not a of people talk about that. It's so much easier to just recruiting your recruiting pipeline and recruiting funnel should be exactly like your client acquisition funnel. where you're weeding people out between each freaking step, each freaking layer, and you only interview the top dogs, the best of the best, you know? That pass the 50 questionnaire, that recorded a 60 second video, if that's one of the pieces in your process, you know, pass the freaking internet test, you know, things like that. I don't think people... utilize that to the best of their ability. think they, you know, they received 10 applications. They say, okay, these two look best. And then they interview those. And I think it's kind of a waste of time. I think you should, you know, have more volume for your recruiting process.

Ian Almasi:24:23
Yeah, yeah, I most people just get burned out on it. But also if you want to run ads outside the country, you're going to get 300 applicants in two or three days. You're going to need a way to sift through them. So that's something big. mean, generally like local business or hiring an attorney, not really the case, it's fairly specialized. But if you're hiring like a legal assistant from a company or a country like Argentina, you're going to get two or 300 applicants in a matter of days. you're either going to have to sift through those or have a process for it.

We just send them the form they fill out. They fill out the form. They go to like a webinar presentation where essentially they just go and say who they are, why they want to apply, and we share a bit of info about the business. They then do a one-on-one interview. Then after the one-on-one interview, we decide which firm they would be a good match to interview with. We send the CVs to the firm, and then they interview them and then pick the ones they want.

Jordan:25:13
Gotcha. That's a part of your services. If you don't mind me asking, what do you typically charge for your retainer?

Ian Almasi:25:22
A one-time hire is $2,500, but most people pay us $3,000 to $5,000 a month for the retainers.

Jordan:25:27
Okay, okay. That makes sense. Do you have any like back end ascension pathways or back end offers?

Ian Almasi:25:34
Well, we do have, we sell IFCRM, which is our version of high level. We have an answering service and just those two, but the backend upsells, mean, we don't really have it in the sense, what we want to do is retain them longterm. A lot of the backend things are things we're going to offer after to continue the working relationship, which most people will do if things are going well. That's not always a problem for them.

Jordan:25:39
Okay.

Jordan:25:58
Yeah, why would they leave if they're happy making money, right? Is your initial term like three months, four months, or is it months a month?

Ian Almasi:26:00
Yeah, exactly.

Ian Almasi:26:06
It's three and then month to month.

Jordan:26:10
Have you thought about doing, yeah, there's some Alex and Cole, Gordon, but have you thought about doing the initial term three months and then essentially two extra price, two extra length as the backend offer? So six months.

Ian Almasi:26:24
Yeah, I mean I can see why that would be valuable. It's just we're just looking for a seamless transition. I don't see that being a bad thing, but I get the point though. You just provide so much results, make it so profitable for them that when they get to that point, it's just obvious for them to keep paying.

Jordan:26:39
Yeah, I I like the, you know, 2X, 2X the length, 2X the time of a price, excuse me, because it makes the deal more sticky opposed to month to month, you know, because like maybe in the client's head, they can like back out anytime because it's month to month. I guess they could with the with the term agreement as well, but just some food for thought there. Let's see, I probably two or three more questions for you. You know, looking back over your career, what is one thing you wish you knew before starting your current business?

Ian Almasi:26:59
Yeah.

Ian Almasi:27:09
Well, wouldn't say this is something I wasn't new. I've always been fairly stubborn. I think I've become a lot more kind of easier to listen. Like I had a really great mentor. I still have a great mentor. He's done great things in his business and he told me all this stuff. One thing I would just focus on repeatability and just kind of that. Just find one thing at one price point to sell people or just a simple menu of services, like customizing everything. And then the other thing that I would focus on too is really focused on putting profit first. Like when I started the business, I spent a lot of money on just development and that.

And when I meet business owners that say, I'm reinvesting everything into the business. The first thing I always ask is like, how much are you reinvesting? And usually they have no answer. that's like, you know, spending all your money and reinvesting into the business is different. You have to know like what your actual costs are and what, like how much money you're reinvesting. That's different than saying, Oh, I got a few grand in the account. I'll just spend that. That one's careless and one's very much like, okay, I'm going to reinvest this. I, you know, whatever my business makes $25,000 and I spend I have $10,000 and I'll spend that back on the business. One's irresponsible and one's calculated. And then the other thing too, those just get contracts and writing for everything that really screwed me on just about every bad business interaction I ever had was that a lot of money. Like I put over a hundred grand into helping build a sales team for a business under a percentage of sale, but all the sales agents took all that training and only applied it toward closing sales that got them more commission money instead of actually closing sales that we would have been. been paid for and got percentage of. And that was a big catch-22 is I never even thought that that would be an issue. That would be a big thing or that I'd be like, our systems work, but you're not using it to actually benefit us. That kind of thing.

Jordan:28:53
Well, curious about where you learned the first thing that you mentioned, putting profit first and kind of like understanding how much you're actually reinvesting and being strategic.

Ian Almasi:29:02
A little mentor of mine told me to study accounting and this was after I'd like had a very unsuccessful first go at the business. And so I went to the library and I literally just went this like this on the shelf and took every accounting book on there. And it was a pile of them too. It was on all sorts of things like project cost accounting, software, all these things. And that's where I really learned the value of tracking times for specific deliverables. Like even right now I'm tracking time to marketing for my personal business. so we can then know how much time gets split to that. Because I want to know that I need to spend at least 50 % of my time revenue generation for the firm and the other 50 % on client fulfillment, administrative things, that kind of thing. Ideally, it's more, but that's realistically with the split. That's what we focus on.

Jordan:29:40
Gotcha.

Jordan:29:45
For sure, for sure. And then looking forward over the next 12 months, what are some things that you're looking forward to for the company, even personally?

Ian Almasi:29:52
Well, one thing though is I have a really good team now. So we're looking forward to implementing more AI. I just went to a business mastermind program I'm in, Bulletproof Entrepreneur. And then we were talking a lot about... Yeah. Yeah, John Whiting. Yeah.

Jordan:30:04
No, that is. Is white guy bald? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Question. Sorry, I'm going to ramble on this. How is that program? I thought about joining.

Ian Almasi:30:15
Yeah, I really enjoy it. I I started the, when I started the business, I got into John's test room. So I pretty much built the business with what I learned from him, but it's a great thing because one, he focuses on data clearing, mental blockages. It's very kind of prescription based. it's like, you'll prescribe like whatever lesson would be, the right thing for you. That's that I've really enjoyed it so far. I mean, I was already a believer, but it's, I haven't really heard any bad reviews from anyone in the program either.

Jordan:30:42
Yeah, great, great case studies I've seen. It's like performance psychology based. It's not necessarily like... Love performance psychology. Cool. Thanks for that. can continue. Anymore AI you were saying?

Ian Almasi:30:46
Yeah, that's good way to put it. Yeah.

Ian Almasi:30:55
Yeah. Yeah. Anyways, mean, implementing more AI in the business, something we're excited about, but also we're excited to do this for clients. I mean, it's kind like a whole new era and no one's really mastered this. need a lot of help. But the other thing is those, most firms need help at the pace that they can sustain. Like they don't just need help. They need help actually implementing things, helping them build things out. Like we have some clients that are a lot slower and making decisions. Other ones want to go really fast and then someone needs to slow down a bit because the owner wants to go faster than make an implement. But that's kind of the whole visionary thing part of it.

But as far as AI goes, we're looking forward to actually having it as a structural component. Like I went in and had an AI recently review all my ads against all my CRM sales and say, hey, you close these sales from ads and you had a certain return. was a 6.61 times return from dollars spent on ads. We now know retrospectively that we've spent $1,354 to acquire each client for meta ads. And there's other factors in that. Like some people we ran into at conferences and trade shows that had seen us at the ads, they signed up there.

So that's kind of a blended cost, but then we know like dollar per dollar, like kind of what idea that is. Cause most lawyers don't have any data on the business. And that's really what they need a lot more of.

Jordan:32:03
Right, right. You have to make data driven decisions, not, you know, gut feeling decisions. Do you use any third party attribution software like high roast or another one to talk about what you're to attribute and track what you're

Ian Almasi:32:06
Yeah.

Ian Almasi:32:15
No, I don't. just use high level, which for our volume of leads is enough because high level can show which campaign it comes from. And we know our costs. But also the thing is it's easy for us to track down where leads come from because we also like, like in a month for us, if we signed three or four clients, that's not a bad month. And so that's where we're at essentially on that side. But the thing is for a business that sells 50 clients a month, processes 500 leads a month. That's becomes a bit more necessary.

Jordan:32:27
for sure.

Ian Almasi:32:42
Well, one of our clients actually with high roast, he had high roast and he had all the clients that bought from his firm and then that moved over to ads. So they had 20,000 qualified leads and 400 clients came from it a month, but only the 400 clients got put into the high roast data and back to the ad platforms and not the 20,000. So it actually lowered their returns on that side. So high roast is great, but you have to look at it kind of like in its totality, like what its purpose is. Cause they had a quiz that would filter and screen people and get leads through and then put that on there.

Jordan:33:06
Right.

Jordan:33:12
Gotcha, okay, thanks for the context there. Let's see, where can they find you, my friend?

Ian Almasi:33:17
If you want to look us up, know, LinkedIn is my most active platform. just as a company, we're getting more into Instagram right now. You can check out our YouTube channel we post on there. But yeah, LinkedIn's I'd say kind of the place to check us out. So most of these shorts from this interview will be posted at least for me. we'll be able to go from there.

Jordan:33:34
Awesome Ian, was great having you on man. Thanks for the gems in the game and we'll have that coming pretty soon. Thanks boss.

Ian Almasi:33:38
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Jordan. Appreciate the time here. Thanks.