Bootstrapping Your Way to Millions: How a Law School Dropout Builds Profitable Companies Using Virtual Assistants with Ravi Abuvala: An EOFire Classic from 2021

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Marketing Against the Grain. Today, we're pulling a timeless EOFire episode from the archives, so the giveaway may not be active, and we'll be breaking down bootstrapping your way to millions, how a law school dropout builds profitable companies using virtual assistants. To drop these value bombs, I have brought Ravi into EOFire Studios. Ravi is the founder of Scaling with Systems, a business accelerator that works to bootstrap and scale their clients' businesses, leveraging elimination, automation, and fully trained overseas assistants.

0:41In the past 14 months, he has scaled two seven-figure businesses with less than$1 ,000 of his own capital and four commissioned-based employees. And today, Fire Nation, we'll talk about asking yourself, if something happens to you, can your business continue to run, figure out how to be profitable from day one, and so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Ravi and our sponsors. Business Made Simple, hosted by Donald Miller, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Business Made Simple takes the mystery out of growing your business with episodes like how to get out of your day-to-day operations without crashing your business.

1:19Listen to Business Made Simple wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know that most leaders waste up to 70 % of their time on tasks they shouldn't be doing in the first place? It's time to delegate those routine tasks to a belay VA. Learn how to make the most of your time and maximize your results today. Text FIRE, that's F-I-R-E, to 55123 to download your free guide to a productive work week. Ravi, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something interesting about yourself that most people don't know. What is going on, Fire Nation? Thank you guys for lending me your ears. I've been listening to this podcast for quite a while now, and it's a little surreal experience to be on this end of it.

2:03So this morning, I'm thinking, right, because like I said, I've listened to this for a very long time. And I'm like, I know John's going to ask me something that a lot of people don't know. And like any online digital marketer, you know, my life's an open book. And so I was like, what? So I'm going to share with you guys something that literally one person in this entire world knows. And it's funny that I'm bringing it out on this podcast here. But about a year ago in July of 2019, I had this weird itch and I ended up actually selling all of my stuff in Florida in about a week, including my car.

2:34I just junked it. And I moved to Spain and I lived in Spain for about 45 days. And I was just hopping coastal city to coastal city, working on businesses, working with my clients. And while I was in a coastal city in Spain, I'm not going to say what so people don't look up what I'm about to tell you. But while I was in a coastal city in Spain, I don't drink. I drink a few times a year. And I was out at this pretty cool jazz club. And it was like 2, 3 in the morning, which is in Spain when they're just getting started, really. And a brawl breaks out right where I'm at at the bar. I'm literally ordering like a soda at the bar.

3:08And just a brawl breaks out right next to me. And it ends up that I try to break the brawl up. The police come. They come up to me. I speak decent Spanish because I've lived abroad for a while, but not good enough to get me out of this situation. I actually end up spending the next three and a half hours in a drunk tank in a small jail cell in a coastal city in Spain. And it took him a while to even – I had to find my passport and show him all that stuff. And I finally got out of it. And, yeah, the only other person that knows is someone that met me the next day and they wondered why I look so awful.

3:43But my parents don't know. Nobody knows that story. So yeah, I'm a convict in Spain. Okay, well, listen, there's only a couple of listeners. So Fire Nation, keep it to yourselves here. Like, you know, not a big deal, Ravi. So I want to start off on a little bit of a somber note, because as I shared, Fire Nation, during the introduction, we're going to be talking about bootstrapping your way to millions. But many of us have dealt with someone in our lives that we love who has dealt with some form of this. but your dad, Ravi, had stage four cancer. So talk to us about that and how that situation caused you to throw it all away.

4:23Yeah, awesome question. So whole life was gonna be a lawyer and that was the goal was law school was the number one priority. And in order to be a lawyer, you have to take what's known as a law school admission test. And you have to really score highly on it if you wanna go to a great law school, which I did. And so I took a year off after graduating from college and I was about to start studying for the soft school admission test. And about three days after I graduated, I got a call from my dad who lived in Atlanta, Georgia. I was in Florida at the time. And he told me in the news he was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer.

4:55And like John says, you know, everyone here has experienced cancer in some way or the other, but it's like when it's yourself or someone as close as your dad, it's a whole different experience and kind of threw me for a loop. And so I ended up packing all my stuff up, moving up to Atlanta, Georgia. And for the next year, I would do wake up at 4 a.m., work out until 5. Then from 5 to 8, I would be studying for this law school admission test. Then about 8 to 5, I would be doing chemo and radiation with my dad every single day, Monday through Friday. And then when I got home at about 6 o 'clock, I'd be studying until 11 midnight every single night back again on the law school admission test.

5:31So it was quite the surreal experience. I'm really, really blessed to say my dad's been about two years in remission. So I just actually visited him in Savannah, Georgia two days ago. I was just seeing him. But what it really did open up for me was how fragile life was. I was kind of going down a route that I think somebody else wanted me to go down. And I read a really awesome book called The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F***. And I was just like, okay, I'm doing this for all the wrong reasons. And I just decided, you know what, I took the law school admission test because I spent 18 years preparing for it.

6:06I actually scored in the top 10 % of test takers in the United States. I got into my dream schools, top schools in the nation. And then I said, you know what, I'm going to go work at this Italian restaurant down the road and try to figure out this entrepreneurship thing. Well, I love that you did that because I actually took a one step further than you, which was one step too far. And I actually went to law school. I spent a semester there and hated it from about the second week in. But you know, everybody hated it. So I just figured, hey, this is just what everybody does. They just hate law school.

6:33I mean, that's kind of part of the process, especially the first year. But man, I had to look in the mirror one day and say, did I literally set myself up for success doing the right thing, getting a scholarship, an army scholarship in college, and then spending eight years as an officer just to spend the rest of my life doing something I hate? Absolutely not. So I had to pull the plug and it was not easy. But for me, it all comes back to the sunk cost fallacy, Fire Nation. So many people are doing what they do today because of the decisions they made yesterday. Every day is a new day to take a new decision and start a new path if you want that new path.

7:07And you, Ravi, have been able to do a new path and you actually went from making$300 a month, I don't know if that was at the Italian restaurant or doing something else, to making now over$300 ,000 a month. I mean, you're rivaling a lot of my income reports. So brother, what had to change? Yeah, I love it. Yeah, I know. By the way, I absolutely love that you guys have the income reports on the website. I will tell you, that is one of the coolest things. As someone who analyzes websites like for a living. One of the coolest things I've seen yet. I absolutely love that. I appreciate it. Yeah. And also just to add on to the last point you had too, I think one of my favorite quotes is just because you spend a lot of time making a mistake doesn't mean you should continue making it.

7:45And that was exactly what went through my mind when I was like, you know what? Yeah, I'm still relatively young, right? I don't want to keep on playing that fiddle. So yeah. So essentially the biggest thing that had to change for me was, first of all, I needed to figure out a profession or a job where I wasn't trading my time for money. So obviously you make enough money that you know that you don't trade your time for money. You have digital products, you have affiliate partnerships, ads, whatever it is. And I knew that if I was going to be a lawyer, even if I was going to become the top 1 % of lawyers in the United States and I was making a few million dollars a year, I'd still be trading my time for money.

8:17And I just knew Robert Kiyosaki, all these other guys, just like, that's not how you kind of do it. So I pretty much Googled online how to make money online. I stumbled across digital marketing as a whole and kind of started going down that journey. And about the first eight months, I had no money,$3 ,000 totally. And then I started learning about lead generation and systems and processes and virtual assistants and like having someone doing 300 to 500 pieces of outreach for me every single day. And as soon as that started happening, my calendar started filling and I realized I was just the biggest thing that changed on answer question was I was focusing on the wrong things in my business.

8:53I was spending the first eight months trying to be the best Facebook advertiser in the world, the best website creator, social media, but I had no real world experience. And I think 40 years ago, you could have had the best of something and people would have noticed who you are. But I would argue that in today's noise driven world where you're hit with thousands of brands every single day, it's not only that you need to have an incredible backend product, but you need to have consistent new leads, consistent people seeing who you are, attention around your name, your brand, your company in order to actually start closing deals and then to be able to service those people.

9:27And so that's what I did. I started focusing more on what we talk about setting appointments and taking appointments. And in about two and a half years, I haven't had an empty calendar for myself or my sales guys since then. And that was the biggest change for our company was not just focusing on delivering that incredible product, but delivering it and letting as many people know what we're doing as possible. Fire Nation, I hope that you're really taking in what Ravi's saying. I mean, all of these nice quotes and all of the processes and all these systems that he was able to apply to make these changes.

9:56I mean, that's how you get to where you want to be in life. And Ravi, you've been able to actually build a machine. And this machine turns strangers into high ticket clients in 7.5 days. And I love how specific you are with that. Like if it was like seven to nine days, they'd be like, oh, you know, tell me more. But like the fact that it's 7.5 days, I'm really curious. So talk to us about that process. Yeah, I'm a marketer at heart now. So I know that those specific keywords are drawing you out here. Yeah. So for everyone listening to this, but I didn't make that number up, right? So we actually track our sales cycle inside of our company and a lot of our clients' companies.

10:31And we're able to convert five-figure clients for our company in about seven and a half days from the day that we do the piece of outreach to the day that they pay us is about seven and a half days on average. And the way that we've kind of set that up is just like what I was saying a second ago. Everyone should imagine, like if you can have a machine in your business, right, to the point that you're fully removed from it, because that's what a machine is, your whole life will change. So imagine this, on the front end of the machine is your traffic source, right? You're going to have me being on a podcast with John or me doing outreach, sending email, Facebook messages, LinkedIn messages, whatever that is.

11:04Or it could be Facebook ads. It could be YouTube ads. It could be me speaking on stage. It could be a billboard, a plane that's flying with my name on it, whatever it is. My All of those traffic sources I'm driving to pretty much one central location, whether it's a blog post, it is a video sales letter, it's a webinar, it is my actual physical location of my business, whatever it is. I want to offer these people something in order for their information. And then you kind of push them gently along this machine, this sales funnel here, and you use both automation and delegation to make it happen.

11:34So you have – whenever someone hits on your website, you have retargeting ads that show testimonials and client results. Like we have hundreds and hundreds of client testimonials from people that have made money with us. And those are all ads and people hit our website. Or we do email marketing campaigns whenever they give us their email, showing them the success that we've had and showing them these pieces of content in order to nurture them more and more. And then we also have sales reps. I have virtual assistants that will pick up the phone call and say, hey, John, I saw you downloaded our free course on how to scale your company to the millions, but you didn't book a time with us.

12:02What do you think of the free course? And then we're going to get you to move over to the booked appointment calendar. And so if you're able to have consistent traffic lead generation coming in, you have an awesome piece of content that people are coming to. And then you have these little automation retargeting and virtual assistants pushing them along the funnel. Then when people finally get on the phone with you at the end of that, they've had probably eight to ten hours of content that they've consumed of years by that point. And now they're not asking your sales guys, who are you and what you do?

12:29They're asking, is this specifically going to help where I am in my business? And they're usually going to pull out their credit card by the end of that call. I love that follow up. I mean, Fire Nation, the dollars, the cents, the revenue, it's in the follow-up. I mean, sometimes people seem that little nudge, you know, and plus they know that you're for real as well. And when they actually see something online, they're like, okay, like maybe it's going into this massive funnel. But when somebody actually calls them and says, hey, we want to actually talk to you. Like, I know that we said this like in our copy, but we actually mean it.

12:55We're proving it now by calling you. Like, let's get you booked. Like, let's make this happen. That is where the follow-up is so critical. And one thing that I love about today's online world is the ability to build lifestyle freedom. I mean, I just love that visualization of you bopping down the Spanish coast and just kind of like, you know, going to jazz clubs by night, working at cafes by day. How have you leveraged overseas virtual assistants that is now running 90 plus percent of your company? Talk about that. The first ever virtual assistant I got, her name is Mel Jane. She's going to listen to that's 100 % shout out to you, Mel James.

13:31She's based out of the Philippines. And I'm not going to go really deep into the Filipino culture, why it really works for a lot of US space companies or first world countries, whatever it is. But there's a lot of reasons why we love the Philippines. I have a 30 ,000 square foot training center in the Philippines that we actually train virtual assistants for our clients that join our program. So they're getting kind of a done for you virtual assistant. But the reason that VAs work so well and they give you this freedom is because, you know, most people whenever, you know, they're listening to these podcasts, right?

14:03Or they're joining coaching programs or they're joining another service, whatever it is, like they don't need more knowledge, right? They just need more action. And I think a virtual assistant is really great because it gives you the ability to take action, but someone else is doing it for you. And then because of the currency conversion right there, it actually doesn't cost you but a few an hour to have somebody do that for you. And so we've really pushed the boundaries as far as what's humanly possible for virtual assistants. So for my company, our clients' companies, our VAs are doing payroll, they're doing bookkeeping, they're doing appointment setting, they're doing appointment confirmation, they're doing lead nurturing, like I said a second ago.

14:38They're doing Facebook ads, YouTube ads, Google ads, click funnels. I mean, these are all things that 10 years ago, you'd have to pay a Harvard graduate tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars for and you're getting for a few thousand dollars a year, which is an incredible amount of money for them. And then on top of it, you know, I was in Columbia last year, once again, really spur of the moment trip. And I actually, my mom's going to listen to this. She's going to laugh. I forgot it was my mom's birthday. And I totally blanked on that. And I ended up at, I was going paragliding and I ended up messaging my virtual assistant, Melody.

15:11I said, hey, I need you to find a bike or a bike for my mom on Facebook marketplace and get it delivered over to her for her birthday. And that's exactly what my virtual assistant did. She got in contact with my sister, figured out a bike that was the best color and that my mom would like, ended up negotiating a price and delivery, and then delivered it to my mom while I was like paragliding over the mountains in Columbia. So it's incredible. I think delegation in general is really, really great for a person to do. But I think a lot of people are afraid to do that. And also the cost associated with like paying someone 40, 50, 60, 70,$80 ,000 a year.

15:43I think virtual assistants give you the ability to really do almost delegate anything you want, but at the same time, do it for a lot lower cost point. Lots of great value bombs here, Fire Nation, as well as ways to make sure you never forget your mother's birthday. I mean, I will say one thing, my VAs know my parents' birthdays and they will make sure that I will never forget that because it's important stuff. And we have a lot of great things coming up, Fire Nation, as soon as we get back from thanking our sponsors. I remember back in 2013 when entrepreneurs on fire was scaling fast. And in those early days of our business, we sometimes found ourselves struggling to keep up because we couldn't find software solutions that were easy to use and that would grow with us.

16:23Wasting time worrying about software that's complicated, a pain to use, and that doesn't do what you need it to do is not fun or productive. So what do we wish we knew back then that we know now? That a powerful all-in-one CRM platform that will accelerate your business growth is a HubSpot CRM. Unlike a lot of solutions we were using back in 2013, HubSpot's CRM grows with your business. Whether you have an MVP or you just IPO'd, HubSpot CRM is built for scale because your tech stack should work for you, not against you. And with over 1 ,300 flexible apps and integrations, you can customize HubSpot's CRM to the way you do business.

17:03Get started for free at HubSpot.com. That's HubSpot.com. Did you know that most leaders waste up to 70 % of their time on tasks they shouldn't be doing in the first place? You know, like managing routine details, scheduling meetings, replying to emails, and processing reports. If this sounds familiar, then I have the solution for you. It's time to delegate those routine tasks to a belay VA. It's time to take back your time and spend your days casting vision, growing revenue and scaling your business instead. Belay has been helping entrepreneurs scale and succeed for over a decade through fractional, highly vetted US-based virtual assistants, bookkeepers and social media managers.

17:42It's time to give away the administrative tasks so you can start accomplishing more and juggling less with Belay. And to help you get started, Belay is offering Fire Nation, their resource, your personal guide to a productive work week for free. Learn how to make the most of your time and maximize your results today. just text FIRE that's F-I-R-E to 55123 to download your free guide to a productive work week so Ravi we're back and we already talked about a few things that you can be delegating to your virtual assistants give us a couple other things and maybe some specific examples that you've done successfully as far as delegating within your company you know some of those first key things we can take off of our plate but also follow up with what do we never never, never delegate?

18:30Awesome, awesome question. So the first thing for about 90 % of our clients, the number one priority whenever they join, they start working with scaling with systems is we try to get them the lead generation taken off their plate. Because it's a thing that requires, I think I would argue is the most important aspect of a company, yet it's the thing that falls by the wayside, right? Because if you really think about lead generation, a lot of the times it's either you trying to figure out paid advertising, or it's you trying to do cold calls or cold emails or cold messages, which if anybody knows anything about that, an overwhelming majority of the time, meaning 90 % or more, people are either not responding or telling you to go somewhere where the sun doesn't shine.

19:06And so it's very easy for your brain, the way it's wired, to be like, oh, well, that stuff is bad. That stuff is hurtful. I'm not going to do it. And so then you just focus on how to make your website a little bit more pretty or what kind of colors your logo should be or whatever it is, because you're not going to do the scary stuff. And so So about eight or nine times out of 10, the first thing we do is we say, hey, who's your target market? What do they look like? Where can we find them? So a lot of the times we're looking for places online. I think LinkedIn is a great resource or other areas where you can find quality aspects.

19:36So I ran a lead generation company for real estate agents. We would go on Zillow and search. You could actually search transaction volume, people that are doing transactions, and cross-reference it with high average customer ratings. And then we'd find people that were doing hundreds of transactions a year that were also rated really highly. So that means they really had a great business. And then on top of it, you could see people that were already paying Zillow in order to have their ads run by Zillow. And Zillow, I'm not going to trash talk anybody here, but they cost a lot of money. And so what we could do is have our virtual sense, hey, find those people on these websites, then Google their name, then find their email address, then send this crafted email that I've already written for you.

20:14We write them for our clients and say, hey, here's who we are. Here's what we do. Here's a bunch of testimonials. Here's a bunch of case studies. Would you like to speak or book a time? And when you can do that where you're finding quality emails or quality LinkedIn profiles and then you have a really, really strong message and then you're doing that follow up that we had kind of talked about a second ago in the machine, then you're really converting at almost like a 10 % conversion rate to an appointment. So imagine you send 100 messages out and you get 10 people to book an appointment with you or become a lead with you.

20:43And then you start sending hundreds and hundreds and thousands and thousands and you start building up your sales team and your lead generation guys. And so the first thing we always say is to delegate out the lead generation because let's say you delegated out the back end fulfillment. Let's say it's like running Facebook ads or it's doing administrative work or whatever it is. Well, if you don't have new sales coming in, then that position is kind of redundant, right? It doesn't matter even if they're the best, you know, fulfiller in the world, even if they're the best person at Facebook ads in the world.

21:10If you don't have people trying to pay you or run these Facebook ads or to pay you to do this one thing, that it doesn't matter. So the thing that I tell people they should never, ever, ever, ever delegate no matter what, although obviously there's edge cases here, is sales a lot of the time and to a virtual assistant. Because I know people that will, oh, I'm going to delegate everything out, including my sales process. And although we do have our VAs running sales for us, I would argue that sales is the absolute last thing as an entrepreneur, as a business owner in a service-based business or a high-ticket business or SaaS.

21:44It's one of the last things you should delegate out because no one's going to sell your product as good as you do. And if you can have the rest of your company delegated out to where lead generation is happening without you, lead fulfillment is happening without you, and then you just wake up in the morning and from 8 o 'clock in the morning until 6, 7 at night, you're just on sales calls, then you're going to really refine that process. you're going to really create kind of a ramping Bible. You can teach other sales guys to onboard and you're going to have the highest conversion rate possible.

22:08And I think that's when a lot of the kind of the magic happens. Fire Nation value bombs are being dropped. And we need to talk about something because Ravi, you may be bursting some people's bubbles right now. And I think that's a good thing because so many people in this world think, oh, I'm just going to go raise some money to fund my business and life will be good. I'll pay myself a salary from all this money that I'm going to raise. and then I'll sell my company for billions. Why is startup capital for a business a myth and how does it ruin lives? It's so interesting, right? So we've worked with Fortune 500 companies.