He Broke a $30K Ceiling and Built a $349K Legal Marketing Agency

Full transcript of Josh Nelson’s interview with Austin Irabor. Lightly edited for readability.

Josh Nelson: This is part of our Agency Success series, where we're interviewing highly successful digital marketing agencies from across the country on what they're doing to land clients, deliver world-class results, retain clients, and scale their agencies. Today, I'm super excited. We have Austin Irabor with us from Netfly. He is our fastest-growing agency in the seven-figure agency community over the last, over the last year. He's had explosive growth. From what I understand, over the last twelve to twenty-four months, something like from thirty grand to over three hundred and forty thousand in monthly recurring revenue. I'm super excited. I hope you guys are exci-excited. Put a dollar sign in the comments if you're excited about this interview with Austin. Let's go. And, Austin, man, thanks so much for being here, and congratulations on your success.

Austin Irabor: Oh, thanks so much for having me, man. I'm very excited to share.

Josh Nelson: So I guess the best place to start, just kinda give us the lay of the land for everybody that's listening. Tell us a little bit about your agency, kinda what the business looks like as it sits today.

Austin Irabor: Sure. As it sits today, headcount is twelve people, including myself. We have a client-side kinda deliverable team and an organizational-side deliverable team. And, we focus primarily on PPC, and we, we make sure that the clients have the operational makeup that is conducive to success around here. It's very important that, we don't do any sales. That's– we preface everything with, "We're not gonna sell you anything. We are going to show you what we do, who we do it for, and if you and we see a operational lookalike, then it makes sense to have a further conversation." that's helped us very much. It's, allowed us to be defined by who gets let in and who we say no to, rather than just sheer results across the board for everybody, because that may not be realistic for every, agency. And, yeah, so it's, it's worked very well. We've been able to take clients that we– that trusted us with smaller dollar amounts, ten thousand, twenty thousand dollars, and scale them up to, mid five figures, even six-figure advertising budgets and things of that nature. So it's been very fruitful.

Josh Nelson: So good. So obv- you're serving the legal niche predominantly, right, at Netfly?

Austin Irabor: Correct. Yes. Yeah. All, all, legal. We have a personal injury side, and then we have basically a non-personal injury side or B2C. So that would be immigration, family, DUI, I'm missing one. A little bit of bankruptcy, but we try to stay away from that right now. And, that works pretty well. I'm actually removing myself from that situation completely so that that lower dollar amount sales cycle can run without me, and I'm focusing more on, A, enterprise-level, clientele and growing them out, and B, implementing visionary, you know, innovative kind of ideas that I think are gonna help us build a technological moat moving forward and get us to eight figures.

Josh Nelson: So good, man. Congratulations. So, so over three hundred and forty thousand in monthly recurring, you know, obviously explosive growth. Take us back a little bit, like, how did you get in, into the agency space, and kinda what, what did it look like twelve to twenty-four months ago?

Austin Irabor: Yeah, sure. So, how I got into it, I won't say that I fell into it. I'll say that I fell back on it. I played some collegiate rugby, and it turned out that my coach was really best friends with a, with a politician in Colorado. So we did a tournament. I got invited to hang out, and I was, I was building websites at that time. I guess you could call it a le-legacy agency where I would, you know, host your website and build it for you for, like, ninety bucks a month, and that kinda, you know, kept my belly full and stuff like that. But, they were impressed with me. The– it turned out that I knew, you know, more than anybody else in the room knew. Go figure, a bunch of sixty-year-old men didn't know anything about marketing. You know, long story short, they trust me with a campaign. About a year later, I am the digital marketing manager for a campaign for governor. So, I get to spend– I have a, I have the advantage of being able to spend lots and lots of somebody else's money very quickly. And I learned a lot, and I got to meet a lot of people. And that particular campaign broke a record. I can't be– I'm not a hundred percent responsible for that, but it was the most efficient campaign for governor at that time in terms of dollars per, dollars per vote, which is cool. Wow. We had some help from, like, celebrities and stuff like that. But in any case, you would be surprised to learn that working in politics actually sucks. So I was ready to get out of that once that campaign ended, and I came back home, and I started working with, the startup scene out here in, SoCal. I'm from here. And that worked pretty well. I helped a company get to the Inc. Five Thousand. I helped another company get to the Forbes forty under forty for the CEO. Wow. And then I helped a couple of brands that you would know or that you would remember that have moved over to China now. So it was really cool. The problem with startups is that no matter what you do, they can run out of money, and that's not my favorite, you know, kind of situation. And so you wind up freelancing, moving around. So I said, "Okay, let me, let me figure out what I can do here, where I can use my skills, and we've got savvy business owners that just want marketing help." So I chose lawyers. That wasn't the best choice because they're not all a bunch of savvy business owners that knew– that know what they're doing. But in any case, I managed to figure it out. I listened to your book, while I'm washing my car one day, and I'm like, "This guy kinda knows what he's talking about." Nice. And then washing the car turns into a walk down the, you know, walk down the street, and then I'm walking to the park, and I just didn't wanna stop listening to you.

Josh Nelson: Put you on about double, triple speed so I could get back home and- Let's get it going quicker, right?

Austin Irabor: Yeah. And, yeah, I was, I was sold, and, I loved everything about it. I was capped at about thirty-ish K. Like, could not break thirty-five K, we'll say. And, I knew it was operational, and I knew Seven Figure Agency was probably a good idea. And you had someone follow up with me, which was great because, again, I was all over the place. And, yeah, o-one thing led to another. I actually wound up in the wrong part of Seven Figure Agency at the beginning. I wound up in, like, the beginner's zone instead of the- The on-ramp s- yeah, the on-ramp section. Yeah. It actually turned into a… It was a blessing, though, because I learned a lot about the foundational stuff that I'd skipped over originally. And I went back- Mm-hmm… And I asked myself the right questions, thanks to Danny, thanks to Danny Barrera. And, that really helped me hone in on who I wanted to be, who I wanted to serve, and what kind of value I bring to the market. And, yeah, one thing led to another, and we decided to become, you know, kind of a solutions-oriented situation. And, one year later, I'm at over two fifty. I'm over two fifty, I think two eighty-ish by the end of twenty twenty-two, and that's grown to, three forty-nine and change as of today.

Josh Nelson: So good, man. Explosive, explosive growth. So kind of take us back. If you think about, like, when you were at that three thirty range- Mm-hmm… There were three challenges you had to solve for, that you were looking to, you know, get some help from Seven Figure Agency and the coaching. Like, what would those three challenges be that helped kind of accelerate the growth?

Austin Irabor: Yeah, absolutely. Well, excuse me. Marketing to the specific people that we wanted to market to was important. The lawyer base is very varied, so you have everything from solos to people that make ten million dollars a year all in the same kind of pool of people. There aren't a lot of people that understand, how to reach out to them. But one of the coaches at Seven Figure Agency really helped us hone in on our cold email approach. Hmm. He gave us kind of a head start, and then we took it from there. I guess you could say he gave us a push start, and then that got us off to the races. Also, the sales aspect of it, a-again, another Seven Figure Agency coach, shout out to Josh Koenigsberg, who's been a huge help- Nice… In this past year, just with his insight and his tutelage and just the fact that he was so open, even though we're in the exact same niche, and he understood that there was, you know, plenty to go around for everybody. So he really sat down with me and trained me up on the proper way to sell to a lawyer, where we weren't doing it as efficiently as we could have. Hmm. And what's, interesting about that is I would always go for the one-call close, and I learned that a two-call close was a way better idea, where I'm not even involved in the first call. So that's number two. And then number three would actually be, getting specific about our identity. I actually redid the website. I redid our messaging, and I changed the way that I spoke to clients, and it became a velvet rope situation- Hmm… Rather than, you know, we really wanna work with you, let us sell you something.

Josh Nelson: Love it. Love it. Three big shifts, right? Mm-hmm. Figuring out how to get the attention of the prospects, whether it's through cold outreach or whatnot. Di-tidying up the sales process, so you get them to really believe in what you were doing and say yes. And then just being a little bit more decisive on not every attorney is a fit, right? And kind of having that velvet rope policy. Powerful, powerful stuff. – Right. You know, I usually like to talk a little bit about the niche selection process- Sure… And why being in a niche is so powerful. I don't wanna spend a ton of time there, but, you know, thinking back, you know, you went from, politics to- Yeah… Agency to legal specific. Yeah. How did you land on the legal niche and kind of what was your process there?

Austin Irabor: Yeah, sure. So, coming from situations where there was tons of money getting thrown around or not so much money getting thrown around, I wanted something straightforward where there was, there was a for sure budget in the organization. And I knew that if we could cut into that budget, we could get some wins for them. I believed in my own ability to do whatever, do whatever it was better than their internal people, I will say. So I selected law firms, honestly, because, I had a short list of, I guess, not dream clients, but ideal types of clients. So I wanted white-collar professionals. From my web design days, I knew I didn't want, landscapers or, painters or anything like that. It's just not my vibe. I think other agencies vibe better with those guys, and I vibe better with the white-collar guys. Hmm. So it came down to, like, doctors, specifically plastic surgeons, lawyers, things of that nature. I also wanted my clients to have a high-ticket sale. So I didn't want clients that did e-commerce or, they were charging a hundred bucks or ninety-nine bucks for their services. I wanted them to make a big win, a big profit when we got at least one thing right. And so, I shortlisted it and flipped a coin.

Josh Nelson: Love it. Love it.

Austin Irabor: Landed on legal, went to, went to work.

Josh Nelson: Can you talk s- talk to us a little bit about what the package looks like and kind of what you're– I know you're on the higher end of the spectrum- Sure… But selling to these attorneys in the different practice areas- Mm-hmm… Like, what does the program look like, you know, from a, from a high level?

Austin Irabor: Yeah, sure. So our, all of our offerings are PPC heavy. So, we want clients that are basically already established in their business, and they already have an advertising budget, and we wanna cut into that advertising budget so that they can do an apples to apples comparison of what they're doing now versus what we just did for them. Because I believe that we're going to show a better result. So it's PPC heavy. I'll talk about both sides of the business because there are two sides. So there's the personal injury side, and then there is the non-personal injury side. So speaking to the personal injury side, it's basically purely PPC, where we go after, – Targets that are exhibiting, a kind of fact-finding behavior. So they might be looking for, treatment options, diminished value on their vehicle. They're asking the kinds of questions of Siri and Google that a person who's been in a car accident would ask. They might, they might be asking for the claims department phone number, things of that nature. And we offer them up a portal where the portal says, "Hey, why don't you just talk to a law firm? Click this button, and they'll tell you everything that you need to know." And so that works pretty well for the law firms. And then when it comes to the non-personal injury stuff, that is a-another thing, if we could add a fourth thing that I learned from pers- from Seven Figure Agency, and that's to be as comprehensive as you can, within your kind of range of ability. And so my strengths are PPC, and so that kind of cascades down into the team. And what we do is we do a PPC-heavy campaign where in addition to that, we're gonna, as a value add, we're gonna add, Google business page optimization, and we're gonna create monthly content for you, which is gonna get syndicated to your blog, your social media, and, obviously to your Google business page. So as you work with us, you're gonna get those quick wins right away, as you like to put it, but you're also going to, you know, in nine to twelve months from now, you're gonna see some leads come in that you didn't have to pay for, and your ROI is gonna have a kink in it, right? It's gonna shoot up. There's gonna be an inflection point where it just makes perfect sense to work with us forever, and we become a utility. We become a light bill, and we're there to keep the money flowing. Now when it comes to the PPC, it is about eighty percent Google and twenty percent social media. I guess I could say it's seventy percent Google, twenty percent social media, ten percent retargeting- Mm… Like through the display network and stuff like that. But, very straightforward. We stay away from people that are on the lower end of the income spectrum, as best as we can these days, because the targeting isn't what it was. And we eliminate, searchers who are looking for things like free, pro bono, legal aid, cheap, affordable, five hundred dollars- Mm… Things of that nature. Works very well. We tie that into High Level. A fifth thing that, we learned from you, or I learned from you specifically, is to tie it into High Level because that's really good software for them. We give that to them for free. I don't charge additionally for it. I show them how to use the opportunity movement, in High Level so that the person in charge of monitoring them can kind of see what's going on and help the PPC manager double down on whatever platform is delivering results that month. This also gives us a lay of the land, and it allows us to go in and preemptively consult with the client. So we're, we're getting away from just being strictly marketing, and we're kind of influencing other aspects of a campaign that would lead to an ROI.

Josh Nelson: Love it. Love it. Can you give us an idea, kind of price points? I know that you're on the higher side of the spectrum.

Austin Irabor: Yeah, sure. Actually, the lowest price point right now would be, twenty-five hundred. If you are, you know, let's say you're a solo and you're coming in, but you've got a budget and you've got experience and stuff like that. The higher side of the price spectrum, we're making anywhere from, I think thirty-ish to thirty-five to forty-ish grand. If we averaged out our client base, it's actually averaging out to about seventeen and a half thousand per client. Wow. Which is, sounds really high. But when you look at the people on the edges of that, you know, really pushing that average up, it makes a lot of sense. They're spending six figures a month with us, some of them.

Josh Nelson: Love it. So would you say, like, that program package with the higher price point has helped you to kind of accelerate the growth at the rate that you have?

Austin Irabor: Oh, one hundred percent. I mean, you have to, you have to elevate your deliverable so that you can elevate your prices, put it that way. Whatever you have to do to differentiate, to, to differentiate yourself, you do that, and then you add value on top of that. So speaking back to, the non-personal injury people, you know, typically law firms, they're still run like it's the 1970s, 1980s, right? So if you go in and you're generating leads, you can be sure that they're gonna leave some money on the table. But if you're keeping them honest about follow-up and you're helping them with automations and things of that nature, so all they have to do is follow your advice, it's a big win for them. Now, in addition to the PPC and the SEO that we're doing, we do some other value adds on top of that. So, for example, one of the main complaints a lot of agency owners get is that, "Yes, I'm getting leads, but some of them can't afford me," or some contingency of them, are looking for something discounted or whatever. So what I did was I went in and I made some partnerships with some lenders, and I said, "Hey, I want to make you part of our program. You're gonna be on the back end, and my clients can sign up with you optionally." It's an option for them because not all of them are gonna wanna do it. But what's going to happen is I want for my clients to be able to sell their services the way a car dealership sells a car, where they're gonna get their retainer up front, they're gonna get all their money up front, and the client can pay you, the lender, back plus interest in payments over however many months you decide, twenty-four, forty-eight or whatever. And so what we have on the back end is for every client of ours has the ability to, sign up with lenders. They can actually, send a link to their potential client. That potential client can then, apply. All they need is a five hundred credit score or better. It does not affect their credit to check on this. And then they will be given, lending options so that they can work with my clients. And I get to see in my, you know, my partner-ish dashboard here, my affiliate dashboard, that my clients do use the service and that it does make a difference and an impact on their ROI. So being more of a solutions-oriented company is the difference, for us at least. I love it.

Josh Nelson: I think, you know, a common thread with you and o-other agencies that are having explosive growth is focus on the result, right? If you, if you're not knocking it out of the park for the client, you can't justify charging high fees, and innovation, right? It's not just, hey, here's like we do pay-per-click and some automation. It's really figuring out what you can bring to the table to make your offering stand out. And there's obviously some innovative things you're doing that are making people choose you, out of the, out of the plethora of options within this competitive niche. Yeah.

Austin Irabor: Yeah, absolutely. I have a certain philosophy about it. I tell my wife all the time, who is also my business coach/therapist/boss- Love it… Every day. So, there are basically three, you know, kinda tiers of KPIs that we wanna either control directly or influence indirectly. And those are the cost per lead, the rate of contact, and the rate of sale. So obviously, as an agency, we have the most control and influence over the cost per lead, obviously. However, if we stop there, we're, we're an also-ran. We're just like everybody else, and there's always somebody else offering some crazy, you know, if I'll get you ten cases or it's free or something like that. But if we dig a little bit deeper, there's something called a contact rate, right? And so what a lot of these law firms have is a dialer system. They've got a pool of like twenty-five, forty numbers, something like that. And, they have no idea whether or not these numbers are flagged as spam likely or not, or whether they're falling off of those lists, whether they're on those lists. They could have all twenty-five of those numbers on those lists, and that's gonna affect their contact rate. You ask them, and they have no idea. And there are… They all– Most people don't know that there are so many different carriers out there. Not carriers, but, anti-spam companies that latch onto the carrier. So you've got Hiya- Mm-hmm… You've got Nomorobo, and then you've got the internal carrier systems, AT&T-Mobile, et cetera. And what they're doing is they're using an algorithm to judge whether or not something is likely to be spam based upon how often calls are made and how often people are hitting the red button, the length of those calls, whether or not people are hanging up mid-conversation, things of that nature. These are things that the law firms can't control, especially when they're high volume. But what we can do as agency owners is track that for them. So what we do is we take their phone number pool, and I have a partner company that comes in and, we have a dashboard with them. All of the numbers sit on that dashboard. I have a lay of the land every day. And what they do is they do remediation and mitigation of a spam likely. So there's a formal process where you fill out a form, almost the same way that you would do w- if your email was blacklisted. You gotta say, "Hey, we're not spamming," or, "Our phone number has been spoofed by somebody in Pakistan or India, and they're using it for something else that it's not intended for." by doing that, we can get those numbers cleaned up, which affects the contact rate for my client. Now, if we have a higher contact rate, we're gonna speak to more people, which is going to affect their ROI. Now, speaking about ROI, something that we just launched in Q2, which I'm super happy and excited about, is implementing AI to affect sales. So we're going to have the ability, and probably by the end of the year, to understand every conversation that our clients are having. The AI gets to listen to one hundred percent of them. It can pick out… We'll, we'll treat it like a league, and it can pick out the Michael Jordan of that league, of that league. The one, person or the group of people that sell at a much higher rate than all of the other clients', salespeople. We can take those conversations, we can train the AI to analyze that, pick out what's really going right about that, and then distribute a smart script to the rest of our client roster. The client roster will then, as long as they have a Windows machine, be able to have a display of the smart script, what to say, what not to say, talk versus listen time. It… The, the AI can listen for intent. It can listen for inflection in the voice. It can listen for anger. It can listen for happiness. And, most importantly, it can listen for objections. So the AI can hear an objection, and if the Michael Jordans of the league or if anybody, a-across our client roster has dealt with that objection before and has, overcome it will display a pop-up right on, an agent's screen and say, "Hey, say this because it works." And what that's going to do is it's gonna bring the acquisition rate up for all of the clients and bring the cost of acquisition down for all of the clients. The goal is to bring every client, under, six hundred dollars per acquisition. And if you know anything about personal injury, it's a hundred, two hundred dollars- Geez… Per click. So to bring them that number, per acquisition is abs– is absurd. Right now we have clients that are around five hundred-ish dollars per acquisition in personal injury. Not heard of. But we also have clients that are around eleven hundred, which is still fantastic. But, you know, I'm, I'm hitting– I'm going for home runs here, and I think AI's gonna be the thing.

Josh Nelson: So good. So I think there's… If there's one theme from what you just said there, it's, it's innovation, right? I mean, it's innovation and coming to the market with a slightly different offer so you stand out, and it's innovation on the delivery. Like, what can we do to provide, like, next level results to our clients? So they would be crazy to leave us, and you're thinking about AI, you're thinking about automation, you're thinking about all kinds of strategies along those lines. Give me a one in the comments, guys, if that makes sense, if that tracks, if you feel like, wow, there's some good insights there, at least with how you think about how you deliver these results to clients. Like, get out of the mindset of just, I do a website, I do SEO, I claim the GMB, I drive some paid ads, right? Really think how can you innovate your offer, to really stand out.

Austin Irabor: Yeah, I would say stay with the client, if that makes a lot of– if that makes sense to you. The client is going to be happy about their lead flow because we're all good agency owners. They're gonna be happy about their cost per lead because we're all good agency owners. But what's next? What is the next thing that they struggle with? All of these ideas that I've come up with, they… I didn't just wake up one day in a, in a cold sweat thinking, "Oh, yeah, AI." It was, "Well, this is the problem, so what would the solution be? Let me go out and find it for them," because, you know, are they gonna take the initiative to do that? No. They're g- just gonna find the next shiny object that makes some crazy offer a-and go with that. And what really winds up happening is our industry takes a hit every time we fail to create something, like, really innovative or that solves that next problem. I don't even wanna call it innovation. I wanna call it solving the next problem, and there's always that next problem to either solve directly or influence indirectly, and I'm just a vessel for that.

Josh Nelson: So good. Right? You know, the kind of the fundamental of entrepreneurship is solving problems for a profit, and so look deeply in your clients. Figure out where they're getting stuck, where it's not working, and innovate and solve those problems. There's profit to be had on the other side of that. So, so good. So I wanna shift gears a little bit. We talked about kinda what the program looks like, what the price points are. I think that's great and kinda gives us context. We know what the niche is. Going back to, like, when you first decided, "Okay, I'm gonna go after this legal space," and you, like you said, you flipped a coin. What was the approach to land the first five clients? 'Cause for a lot of the agencies that are trying to break into the niche- Mm-hmm. Like, what worked for you to get those first couple of introductions and those first couple of wins?

Austin Irabor: Yeah, sure. Those first five clients all came from Facebook ads. I just tried a bunch of stuff, spent a little bit of money, and generated leads. Luckily, there are a lot of what they call solos, attorneys that are just one-man operations, one-woman operations that are hungry for lead flow and things of that nature. Be a- be aware that there are two sides of this whole lead generation game for lawyers. There, a lot of them like to purchase leads, and so they might confuse you with that. But, if you put in the advertising that, you know, it's, it's an a- it's an advertising campaign and that that's how you're gonna do it. One of our most successful campaigns that we still run today is above the fold. When you click on that, on that ad, it says, "Stop chasing leads and start letting clients, you know, chase you." Right? Mm. And, that kind of messaging is, it's good enough, I'm telling you. So do that. Spend the money, spend the time, and generate the appointments, and then have those conversations. Those first five clients were all closed on that kind of Kevin Nations one-call close kind of format. And looking back, I probably lost a lot of, opportunities to trying to get them to make a decision right away. But at the time, you know what? Honestly, I was… I needed to close something anyway, so it needed to happen right then and there anyway.

Josh Nelson: So- So good. So Facebook ads, "Hey, we'll generate more leads," to appointment to sales call, sales call- Very simple… "Where are you at right now? What's the goals? What's not working?" Ask for the business, close the deal.

Austin Irabor: – Close the deal.

Josh Nelson: So that's working. Like, a lot of agents are like, "I don't know if Facebook ads don't work." they absolutely can work in just about any niche, right?

Austin Irabor: When you've got the right targeting- Yeah… You've got the right message. Don't try and take them through hundreds of hoops. Like, take them straight to your calendar and get some appointments, get some opportunities in play.

Josh Nelson: So now you've got this exponential growth. I mean, and now you're at over three hundred and thirty thousand in monthly recurring revenue. Obviously, you're landing clients on a consistent basis. What's working best right now? Like, what is it that's filling the funnel and getting these guys so excited about working with you?

Austin Irabor: Sure. Because there are kinda two sides of it, I'll speak about both sides really briefly. Perfect. So the personal injury side, we have, seen tremendous traction over the past year with cold email. What really helps cold email work is showing the results that you're delivering. And if you can show it, if you can actually name, you know, the client that you're delivering for, makes a big difference. We are, we're in, we're in a favorable position there where we don't have to compete with all the spam because our spam's really good spam. In that, we can name-drop some of the biggest firms in the country and say, "Look, we're doing this for them, we're doing this for them, we're doing this for them. These are the results. We know the numbers don't look realistic, but they're happening. If you get on the phone with us, we'll show you behind the veil." And that gets the bigger firms really interested in us. If you can think of it, we've probably, we probably hit their inbox, and they probably opened it, and we're probably gonna be doing that for the next six months until they say hello. When it comes to the non-personal injury side of it, we're still running Facebook ads to a simple landing page. That landing page, asks for their contact information and their size and their revenue and whether or not they're spending money and what that budget is right now on advertising. That goes directly to my SDR, who, also happens to be my brother.

Josh Nelson: And- Sales development rep, guys, for those of you that don't know.

Austin Irabor: Yeah, s-sales development rep. He basically qualifies them, vets them, lets them know, "Hey, we're not salesy. This is not a salesy organization. We only want the right fit here, and if it's not the right fit, maybe we can, send you over to a colleague that might work a little bit better for you." And, we do a qualification conversation where we try to understand what success looks like to them. We actually do that on both sides of the business, PI and non-PI. It's what does success look like for you? Where do you wanna be six months from now, 12 months from now? That's intel. We use that intel for the next call, which right now I'm involved in, which I'm trying to get myself out of on the non-personal injury side. But would be, "Okay, so you said that these were your goals. I'm not gonna sell you anything. I'm just gonna show you what we do, who we do it for, and if you see yourself in that, let's talk." And I– we go over a presentation deck that displays everything really beautifully. And then we m- transition over to a demo of High Level. Then we transition over again to a spreadsheet that plugs in projections for that client. I got this Directly from Josh Koenigsberg, so he gets all the credit here. Shout out again to Josh Koenigsberg, where we say, "Okay, this is what you wanted. You, you said you wanted to add twelve cases a month. You're gonna, you want, you want each case to represent, let's say, five thousand dollars minimum lifetime value. That's, sev- that's, seventy-two cases a year, right? That seventy-two cases a year, you're gonna have to spend ten percent of the target revenue to achieve it. Do you understand this? Yes. Okay, let's move over." Okay, so here's what our current cost per lead is across the roster for your practice area. Your close rate is, you say your close rate is forty percent. I know that's a lie. We're gonna bring that down about fifteen, twenty percent, so that we can stay conservative and underpromise and overdeliver for you. We're gonna plug in that budget, and then everything else kinda auto-populates, cascades down, and they can understand what the potential ROI is going to be. I then go back to high level, and I show them, "So I know that I told you that for every five dollars you spend here, you're gonna see a twenty and a five come back, or, thirty dollars come back. Now, let me show you here. You see this client? Here's their pipeline. Here's how much they've closed. Here's how little they've lost. Do you understand now? This is actually a real thing. Do you see yourself as an operational lookalike to this firm that I'm showing you?" And if the answer is yes, they've already sold themselves. Now we get to decide if we want them or if we do not.

Josh Nelson: Love it. Love it. So, so good. So when it comes to the, and lots of great insights there and kinda sales process and how you're positioning this. Thanks for sharing, guys. Yes, in the comments if that was valuable, just to think about psychologically how he positions this and positions the ROI. But it sounds like the main strategies today are cold outreach with a case study lead, like, "Hey, we just got this client this result. Would you like us to show you how we did it?" And, and Facebook ads, right? Running Facebook ads, to like some type of VSL-type strategy. Is that, is that fair to say?

Austin Irabor: That is exactly correct. I wish I could be as succinct as you when it comes to it.

Josh Nelson: No, man. I'm just, I'm just recapping. That, that's amazing. Do you, do you do any type of positioning work? So, you know, at this point, like anything with webinars or interviews or, you know, content production?

Austin Irabor: Yeah. So that is actually in the works. That is something that I've always been in the shadows delivering results, but now that we've got unicorn-level stuff, it's time to get out of that and, show that off. And so as of literally right now, we're, I've hired a new junior marketing associate from RepStack. Shout out to RepStack for, having great people. And we are building the case study funnel, and the webinar funnel. So I will be doing monthly webinars, and doing a lot of teaching, a lot of operational, know- know-how and quote-unquote "secrets" of, you know, multimillion-dollar law firms that happen to be my clients. And, I'm gonna be doing videos, having those videos cut up, placed all around the internet. Once you've kinda reached one of my assets, I won't be able to get away from you. You won't be able to get away from me. I'm gonna be the Josh Nelson of my industry very soon.

Josh Nelson: Love it. So, so, you know, from thirty K to three hundred K predominantly direct response advertising. Yep. Yep. Cold outreach. That's correct. You're still doing the sales calls. Yep. That's phenomenal, man. Really, really cool to hear. Really cool to see. I can't wait to see like kinda how the next piece of this from a positioning perspective even continues to take things further and faster. When it, when it comes to retention now, we've talked about how you're getting clients and kinda what the niche is and how you position yourself. These are high-ticket, high-competitive clients. Like tell us some of the things you're doing in order to retain the clients and to keep the retention rates, at bay.

Austin Irabor: Yeah, sure. So the first and third Monday of every month, I have an executive assistant who, has a Trello board, which we got from Seven Figure Agency, with all of the different clients. We have a, we use a simple green light, yellow light, red light system. So she goes in, she looks at their high level. She says, "Hello, Josh. Just checking in. It looks like we generated these many leads on this, on this kind of cost." and then she will tell them, "You generated this much in revenue based upon what you inputted here." If they're not really using it, then we just tell them, "You spent this much, and you generated these many leads. How are things going? How many did you sign? Do you have any sticking points? Is there anything we can help you with?" Et cetera. Just showing that you care really keeps them around. And a lot of the time they're just like, "Hey, I'm, I'm super happy. I'm cool." we're, we're, we're in a position, we're in the favorable position where, if you deliver good results on the front end and you care throughout, you're already very different from like ninety percent of the agencies that are out there who are just trying to get a couple dollars and keep you under a contract for a long time and, and things of that nature. So, when clients do have problems or sticking points or there's a technological screw-up on this end, which can happen, or a campaign gets paused on accident, they've been super cool with that. They've been okay with it. They say, "Hey, you know what? You don't need to refund me. Just double down, you know, next month. It's fine." and that comes down to, I think, the relationship that I build with my clients. And, the reason that I don't have a success manager just yet is because I really want somebody to convey that value, to my clients, and that it's, it's not about us, it's about them, and that we're here for them, and w- that we're here to serve them. So yeah, retention has just kind of taken care of itself in that we imply that this is working by saying, "Hey, we did this much for this much, and, you're, you're, you're closing and you're, you're seeing a good ROI, but is there anything else we can help you with?" And the answer is usually, "Nope. I'm solid. Thanks." So good.

Josh Nelson: And so is that, is that something you do live with the client on Zoom? Is it something where you send a video recap? Like what's the typical scenario there? Just s- just to kind of fill in that gap.

Austin Irabor: Yeah, it's actually a simple email. And so what we do is in the email, there is a link to my calendar. It's my check-in calendar. So, we call it, you know, the priority calendar, but it's really just, you know, part of my Calendly. But if they do have a sticking point or an issue, they can just get on that, tell me what the issue is, and then we can send down a, a fix for that. It doesn't get used that often, but it just seems to matter to them that we checked in every couple of weeks. One thing that did come out of it is that we learned that the client– Like, we learned how the clients are winning and that sometimes winning does create new problems, right? And so, another value add that we have for the clients is what I call, net- the net fly sales framework. Mm. And so I'll give you an example here. We have a client in, Tacoma, Washington, like the Seattle area. They do immigration and divorce. And, you know, we did the presentation. They saw themselves in it. They wanted to do it. They signed up, great. And one month in, they get so many leads, they get so much going into the pipeline, they're like, "Yeah, the problem is it's a lot." ten days later, they come back, and they say, "Hey, this is, this is salesperson. Salesperson has been hired to handle the lead flow, based on, you know, the conversation that we had in the check-in. And if you could bring him into the high-level situation and train him up using the net fly sales framework, we would really appreciate that." And, now they're, you know, they're s- still pumping away, but now they have a person that replaced the person that originally signed up.

Josh Nelson: Love it. Su-super cool. So it's, it's an email. "Hey, here's the results. You need it– If you need any context, if you wanna schedule in." They don't feel like they have to hop on. There's no hard pressure. Yeah. But they know the results are there, and they know that they've got access to you when needed. – Yeah. Here-… And now I think that's awesome. Yeah. Here are your results. Here's a link if you wanna talk about it or if there's an issue with the, lead quality. Otherwise, we'll leave you alone.

Austin Irabor: I would say that the lawyer niche is really particular about their time. Yeah. And so, they can be pretty flaky even when they don't mean to be.

Josh Nelson: Right. I think, I think that's an important distinction, like understanding your vertical, understanding the value of the time of the client that you're actually dealing with day to day, and recognizing some of them would prefer a recap email, some of them a recap video. It doesn't always have to be this, you know, "Hey, we're gonna meet for thirty minutes, and you have to be there, otherwise you're not a good client." 'Cause sometimes the happiest clients don't wanna meet, right?

Austin Irabor: And as long as they're- Right…

Josh Nelson: Informed and they know that you care and they know that you're delivering the results. Yeah. I've got clients that I haven't heard from in five years. Yep. I got a couple of those. Yeah. So, something I wanna drill down on, is you've got the lead generation going with paid search. You've got that dialed in. You've got the automations with High Level where you're moving them in the pipeline, helping them actually convert the opportunities. What percentage of the clients actually, like, use High Level and are interfacing in the pipeline versus, "Hey, just generate the leads, and we're gonna do it in our own system"?

Austin Irabor: Yeah. I'd say probably like one in five or one in six clients are actually using High Level. Okay. The reason for that is, again, the industry already has so many different software providers and stuff like that that have descended upon it. There are some pretty popular, CRMs out there, Clio, Lexicata, Praxi- Practice Panther- Yep… We Docket, Litify, which is a version of Salesforce itself. So it's, it's pretty common for, them to have something. Now, what we do is we just, we implement redundancy. I wanna know what's going on myself personally. So even if you never use GoHighLevel, I would just like to know that we're generating leads, that we're generating value. And when you do mention, a client type or a client or a, a source, we can go back, we can have a conversation about it, and I can say, "Oh, well, did you mean Jane Smith over here, or what are you talking about?" Like, "Yeah, Jane Smith. How do you know that?" Like, "Well, we're using my software instead of yours. I don't need to be plugged in." but through Zapier, we can literally… A-another selling point is, "Hey, if you guys already have something implemented, we can drop all of our leads into your CRM attributed to us, automatically. We can, for redundancy sake, create a Google spreadsheet that we share with you. For more redundancy sake, drop an email to a lead bucket, like your intake bucket, if you have it. We can do it all in real-time automatically. And even if your CRM is custom-built, which some law firms do have, we can drop it in there through a, through an API." So good.

Josh Nelson: So do you drop all inbound calls that you generate and web forms onto the pipeline as an inquiry then?

Austin Irabor: Yes. Yes, we do. Okay. We use a tracking number for that and, yeah, High Level's actually really useful for that sort of thing. Hundred percent. Yeah.

Josh Nelson: And then for the, for the f- one in five, the m- lion's share, and that's the same for us, right?

Austin Irabor: Like we run- Yeah…

Josh Nelson: We run the system in the perfect world. They've got their dispatcher in there moving things- Yeah… Around. It's not a perfect world, right? They don't do it. Do you have someone on your team listening and kinda like, "Hey, this one actually they scheduled," right? And move it forward, or you just kinda leave it to their discretion? I'm just curious.

Austin Irabor: No. We leave it to their discretion. It's probably too much work, right now for us to- Get on top of all that… Get into all that. There'd be a lot of calls to listen to- Yeah… And a lot of pipeline management. However, that does bring us back to the conversation about how AI can help this industry and how it's going to help us, which is it'll, it will allow, a machine to listen to everything at scale. So something that would take a human being hours and hours to do, the machine is just constantly doing it. So not only will we know whether things are being, scheduled and stuff like that, we'll know whether or not that receptionist is having a bad day- Mm… Which do totally happen. So that's the ki- and that is the kind of stuff that kills ROI, that at the end of the day, us as, us as a-agency owners, we get held responsible for.

Josh Nelson: Right. So, that goes back to influencing not just the KPI or not just the cost per lead, KPI pillar, but the contact rate pillar and the close rate pillar. Yeah, no doubt. I know a lot of what you're doing with AI is proprietary, and you're like, this is something you're innovating on your end. So does it actually kinda like take the inbound calls that would come through t- like Twilio and then transcribe them, and that's how it's then like using that? Or like, can, what, like, what can you share without spilling the beans? I don't wanna ask you to share anything you don't wanna.

Austin Irabor: Yeah, correct. Yeah, I mean, that's actually how that software, that's how it has to work right now. So, so actually the most efficient way to do it also. So it listens to the call. It, it depends on the, I guess the carrier or the VoIP provider for the law firm, right? So if they're using Vonage, Twilio, if they're using a dialer system like, PhoneBurner or Aloware or something that is harnessing those, each of those different providers have different codecs. So you have to go in and you have to create listening for each kind of provider. Just kind of a, it's just like a little technical nerdy, preface to that. But what it does is it's, listening, then transcribing, then it's analyzing it as text. It's much easier right now for bots and AIs to analyze text than it is to analyze, vocals. Voice, yeah. Yeah. And what it's also doing is it's, you know, it's pulling out key moments. Or what we're doing is we're training it over like a three-month period to understand what a key moment is, right? Because it doesn't know, it's just, it's stupid at the beginning. But you're training and saying, "This is a key moment. This is an inflection point. This is a sale. This is a deal breaker," et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And once it kinda learns that from that sample group, it can then distribute… It, it's learned, now it can be a teacher, and now it can say, "Okay, do this, do that, because I know what these moment– I know what that moment is. I recognize that moment, and here's how to handle that moment. I recognize that you're talking more than you're listening, and if you talk about at a sixty-two percent rate and you listen at that thirty-eight percent rate, it's gonna be, you're more likely to have a sale than if you do all the talking," et cetera.

Josh Nelson: Love it. Love it. And I love the kinda the thought process around trying to figure this out and solve it while it's on the cutting edge. I think it's- Yeah… Gonna give you a very compelling story to tell the prospects. Be like, "Hey, look, not only are we generating leads and leveraging automation, but we're also, you know, have this innovative thing that we're doing where we can look across our entire client base and listen to the calls and figure out what the best scripting is and the best answers to these questions, and we can do it all- Yeah… Through AI." I think it's gonna be a compelling story that's also gonna drive oversized results for the clients.

Austin Irabor: Absolutely. I would say right now is the best time to dabble in this and try to understand it and get involved in it. Because if you have something proprietary to your agency right now, you have such a massive head start. Ninety-nine percent of these agencies are going to wait for somebody to create a product that they can then bootstrap onto what they're doing. If you do the work of trying to understand it, partnering up with people that are way smarter than you and can help you with that, you're going to have a head start in terms of your AI doing a better job than somebody else's AI potentially. Because it has, it's, it's a head start, and it's within your own ecosystem. You've trained it specifically for you. It, it could be a game changer for you if you get involved in technologies that are emerging as they're emerging, I believe.

Josh Nelson: So good. Type boom in the comments if you're watching this and it's like, okay, yes, this is a next level thought and something to really, dive into. On the topic of AI, like when you think about your agency for clients as well as outside, how are you leveraging AI in your, in your agency right now?

Austin Irabor: Yeah. So right now, right now, the, the easiest thing that we can do is use, GPT. We're not using the Jarvis tools and stuff like that, but we are using GPT to create, what's, what's the word? Like, like bullet lists and things like that. And then I have a human writer take that bullet list of, you know, ten things to know or do or whatever, and, they actually have to create something all by themselves based upon what the, what the AI has, what's the word? Summarized. Mm-hmm. So summarized, so we can actually take like other content from another site, or we can, create a listicle, or we can, you know, take a Brian Dean like skyscraper method, you know, approach, where it's like we wanna have the biggest skyscraper, you know, on that page. We want the, we want the biggest piece of content. We can use GPT to load up on ideas where, instead of having like writer's block and all this other stuff or, trying to plagiarize or whatever, we're just like, "All right. Give us the ideas. Give us a summary like I'm five years old. Okay, now let's implement a human being, and let's go ahead and elaborate on it, pull some research into it, and then apply that." And so I have, a, on the, on the company side, I have an SEO manager and a content creator. They work together. The content creator works, basically answers to the SEO manager. And so he says, "This is what I need." Content starts with, GPT, and then she kinda creates a, an outline or a workflow. She says, "Is this gonna be good?" He says, "Yes." Then she manually creates it, and then that gets uploaded, and that's actually how we have our content. If you go to my website, I don't do any writing. She does all of it, and then he, you know, does all the linking and all that other stuff. So.

Josh Nelson: So good. Great stuff. So, you know, we've talked about kinda how you land clients. We've talked about the program. We've talked about how you've innovated and how you're continuing to innovate. We've talked about what you do to retain and kinda what the client communication flow looks like. Operationally, going from thirty to three hundred thousand plus in MRR, with a team of twelve, like what's your team structure look like, and how do you, how do you manage the operation for scale?

Austin Irabor: Sure. Well, luckily for me, it's been a revenue scale and not a logistical client scale, right? Right. 'cause I've been able to take existing clients and raise their budgets. But we do have like two halves of the b- of the business. So it's kinda redundant, but, on the client side, we have, we have an IT person, who does a lot of like custom development for the clients, which is actually a huge value add that we didn't talk about. But, you know, taking two pieces of software like say, a dialer system and their CRM and making them interact with each other is another value add that makes you very sticky because you basically own the IP and it's your Zapier account and stuff like that. Mm. But, we have an IT guy, we have a SEO/Google business page person, we have a PPC person whose job is to go in and create new ideas and, you know, experiments, and he basically creates a spreadsheet of all these new ideas, competitors. He does competitive intel. He says, "What if we did this? What if we did that?" And, we have, the luxury of, having Instapage, which is a fantastic landing page software, which allows us to experiment and personalize. And so, he's kind of in charge of that. We also have a phone concierge, something that I didn't talk about. So, we dial all of our clients', leads for them on the personal injury side. We leave actually the B2C stuff alone, but we focus on the personal injury where, all of our clients' leads get pushed into our dialers bucket, and then we have a person that does concierge work, – Mm… About eight or nine hours a day. He's just calling down leads for our clients. Now, in league with the IT guy, what we can, create for the client, if they have the patience for it and if they have the desire for it, is some… I guess we could call it like, dynamic follow-up, if you will, or dynamic concierge work, where, every day we get a spreadsheet or a readout from the client of the statuses of their existing leads. So let's say yesterday you got a hundred leads and forty of them you're still chasing, forty of them you rejected, twenty of them you signed, or we'll– I'll just use that as an example. So if every day that's updating, then we should update our dialer system to make it more efficient. We don't wanna call people that you've already eliminated. So what we can do is just go ahead and upload that back into the dialer, and so now we're doubling the effort on the le- on the, on the leads that were left over from the period before, so that your team can move forward on today's work, and we can look backward on yesterday's work and try to help you follow up. Does that make sense? Mm-hmm. Yeah. So, tho-those four people, and then up, I guess you could say above them or aligned with me is the executive assistant. So her job is really a runner across all the departments to get people what they need. So that's the client side. On the, on the organizational side or on the business side, I have my new junior marketing assistant who answers to, my marketing manager and my SDR, eventually. And then above them will be a director of sales who will only answer to me. So what's gonna happen is sales is gonna be in charge of… It's, it's kind of a different model than most companies, but, sales is gonna be above marketing in the org chart.

Josh Nelson: So we want- Mm.

Austin Irabor: I want marketing to deliver what the sales team- Serve the sales team to make sure you're, you're driving the sales activity they need. Yeah. I want them aligned vertically on the org chart. I don't want them fighting with each other about, "The leads are good." "No, but the sales are bad," and all this other stuff. It's like, "This is the kind of lead that we're looking for. Can we get it? What do we, what do we need to do to get this kind of lead? What kind of resources, et cetera?" I have a operational budget. I have like an actual, you know, credit card that, is tied to the business that, you know, I put enough money on it so that, you know, it doesn't get out of control. But if somebody needs to do something, they have the flexibility to do it, excuse me, within certain parameters. And then there's, in the middle of that, obviously there is a bookkeeper, and then there's room for a controller, and then above all of that would be me. So yeah, eventually I would like for a COO to be involved, and then I'm just above the COO. The COO can handle all the daily stuff and I can- Yeah.

Josh Nelson: Right. You could just do Austin, right?

Austin Irabor: Yeah. I can keep doing, my thinking.

Josh Nelson: Yeah. Love it, man. Powerful, powerful stuff. Some great insights here. Congratulations on your growth. And really loved your thought process and how intentional you are with all of the different areas of the business in terms of how you're serving the clients and delivering results and kinda scaling your team and your operations. Guys, if you have a question, we've probably got a couple of minutes left before we wrap up. If you have a question, drop it in the comments right now. As we, as we look to wrap up, if you had one piece of wisdom for that agency owner that's, you know, where they're at and they're looking to get to the next level, maybe they're at 30K or 50K, they're just trying to figure out how to break through- Mm-hmm… What wisdom would you share?

Austin Irabor: You need to ask yourself the right questions to like, to really get to the next level, you need to start asking yourself the right questions. You're not doing this for money, so why are you doing this? What you're gonna find is that money is the bypro- product of all the work that you're doing. But you know, a lot of us, we're doing this because we wanna matter i-in our industry. We, we wanna make an impact on something. I think we all have an innate, desire to make an impact on everybody else. I mean, it's what you're doing. Nobody asked you to go out and build some bigger agency and do this great work that you're doing. But you're driven, man. You could've stopped a long time ago, you know? If it was about money, you could've stopped a long time ago. If it was about money, I could rest on my laurels right now and say, "Yeah, we're good. I'm gonna lean back. I'm gonna sell it," whatever. I wanna be the man. I wanna be, I wanna be the best that ever did it. I wanna be the Kobe Bryant. I wanna be the Michael Jordan of it. And then when I write that final book, it's It's a, it's a holy grail type of book, you know? It's the kind of book that you keep clean. So that's my reason for doing it. I also, you know, I want my family to have certain, privileges that, you know, I didn't grow up with and things like that. I've got a kid, so that's cool. So really ask yourself why you're doing this. That is going to motivate a lot of everything else. Everything that I'm talking about comes down to me answering those questions, and only you can answer those questions. Why are you doing this? Why does it matter? Why do you wanna matter to this industry? What are you willing to do in exchange? Are you willing to pay that cost? If you're willing to pay that cost in advance, forget about it. It's– I won't say it's easy, but it is simple. It's a very simple situation. You do it and you get rewarded.

Josh Nelson: So good, man. What a powerful insight. What a powerful way to close this interview. Austin, cannot wait to see what you accomplish in the next 12 months. Congratulations on what you've accomplished so far. Congratulations on being the fastest growing agency in the Seven Figure Agency this past year. Guys, be sure to find Austin on Facebook, tag him, thank him, share some love for his abundance mentality coming on and sharing what he's doing, what's working, how he's done all of this. We will put a pin in it there. Austin, any last words as we, as we wrap up?

Austin Irabor: Third and final shout out to Josh Koningsberg. Why not? For good measure. Yeah. And, thank you- Josh Koningsberg, man, like has, you know, really shared, and he's got a story to share.

Josh Nelson: Yeah, absolutely. So I'm glad you've, you've mentioned him a bunch of times.

Austin Irabor: Sh- Josh- Yeah. -we appreciate you, man. Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you also, man. You've, you've done fantastic work. Shout out to Josh Koningsberg, Jacob Teewiner, everybody else I'm, I'm going to forget. Josh Nelson, Yesenia Nelson, everybody. You guys have been fantastic. And, yeah, thank you for putting this together, man. You are the catalyst to so much growth, and you've helped so many people accomplish so much. To be a small part of that on this podcast, it's, it's an honor, man. It's, it's a great thing, so.

Josh Nelson: Good stuff. Well, thank you guys for listening. Be sure to post your follow-up comments in the, in the chat here. We will be watching for the comments, and we'll do our best to answer them. Be sure to tune in for future interviews just like this by going to sevenfigureagency.com/podcast. Add us on your favorite podcasting platform, whether it's iTunes or Stitcher or whatever platform you love best. That's it for today. Austin, thanks again, and we'll see you guys later.

Austin Irabor: Thank you. Have a good one, guys.