In this episode of The Constraint Call™, Ravi diagnoses the growth ceiling for Juan Carlos Baranich, the founder of Goldbar Staffing, a done-for-you executive assistant placement and management company serving high-earning real estate agents, those making $250K a year or more.
The business did $150K in February and was tracking toward $200K at the time of the call, putting it on a roughly $2.4M annualized run rate.
Juan came in believing his primary constraint was a 30-to-45-day onboarding turnaround time for getting EAs trained and placed with clients, which had forced him to halt sales multiple times and created a growing waitlist he couldn’t service.
Ravi diagnosed the real problem as a missing systematization layer: without a data-driven, bucket-based training framework triggered by what each client actually said on the sales call, every onboarding was functionally custom, which made it slow and unscalable by design.
Ravi’s first recommendation was to run the last 20 to 50 sales calls through AI and identify the three to five most common EA task categories, then build standardized training tracks around those buckets so onboarding could feel personalized while running on a repeatable system.
He suggested having a Claude bot automatically analyze each new sales call and trigger the matching training track for the assigned EA before the client interview, eliminating the guesswork currently happening after payment.
For certification, Ravi outlined a weekly proctored Zoom model where EAs join a group session, get pulled in one at a time for a live three-minute skill demonstration, and are passed or failed immediately inside the applicant tracking system by a single expert proctor.
He recommended purchasing sandbox accounts for the most common real estate CRMs so EAs could practice and be tested on real tools rather than trying to simulate it.
On the client retention side, he recommended automating a founder-sent qualitative check-in via Slack after the first interview and after the first few days, then routing those responses through a JotForm bot that converts qualitative feedback into a trackable NPS score.
For ads, he identified that the meta pixel was firing on every booking regardless of lead quality, which was training the algorithm toward unqualified traffic, and suggested routing applicants into tiered calendars and only firing the pixel on tier one and tier two leads so Meta would optimize toward the ICP over time.
The core lesson of the episode was that scaling fulfillment is a data problem, not a customization problem: the sales call already contains everything you need to build a fast, systematic onboarding, and most companies just never look at it.
Transcript
RAVI ABUVALA: Welcome to the Constraint Call episode number two. Juan, why don’t you explain to everybody in two to three sentences what your business does, what you’re doing monthly right now, and what do you think your primary constraint is?
JUAN CARLOS BARANICH: My name is Juan Carlos Baranich. I’m the founder of Goldbar Staffing and I currently staff real estate professionals with highly trained remote executive assistants. We go into their business, we identify their SOPs and then we hire, train and manage their assistants to go straight into their business and solve their bottlenecks. Right now, as of February, we did $150K. We’re on track to do $200K this month.
RAVI ABUVALA: Excellent. And what do you think is your primary constraint in the company?
JUAN CARLOS BARANICH: Two constraints. We started running ads for the very first time in February and the number of qualified leads that are actually showing up is very small in comparison to total appointments booked. It’s our first time ever running ads. Up until this point we’ve been 95% referral based, which is awesome, but I do want to have some sort of paid mechanism to help us scale. And the second one is our turnaround time when it comes to actually hiring, onboarding and training that VA to go into that person’s business. The longer the turnaround time, the less transformation the customer is experiencing as soon as they give us their money. So we’re trying to get that down as fast as possible. For us right now, it’s a training constraint.
RAVI ABUVALA: Cool. We can definitely talk about both of them and where to start. My question is: what’s the bigger constraint? If we doubled ad spend tomorrow, even if you were unprofitable, would you be able to service those customers? Or do we need to talk about training first before we go over to ad spend?
JUAN CARLOS BARANICH: I would say we talk about training. Customers are not an issue and I’m in the process of locking in several massive joint ventures that clients will never become an issue again. However, how can I scale it in a way where quality doesn’t drop and customers are happy?
RAVI ABUVALA: Cool. Let’s start there. Talk to me a little bit about the turnaround time right now. If you guys are tracking it, where are you at and what would be the KPI?
JUAN CARLOS BARANICH: The KPI is from the time that they give us their first payment to cover the staffing fee, the hiring, the managing, the training, the ramp up. We’re seeing that from start to finish it’s taking us about 30 to 45 days to finally implement that person into their business. Our end goal is to start doing this in as little as 21 days. If we could get someone over to them that’s fully ramped up and trained on their systems within three weeks, that is a home run. Right now we’re doing about double.
RAVI ABUVALA: Okay. Just to be clear, one of the things I like to do is make sure the constraint we’re focusing on is the constraint. Are you solving this because people are saying they wish they could get their EA faster? Or is it just that you’re trying to make the process smoother?
JUAN CARLOS BARANICH: We had to stop sales the last three months. We brought on 10 clients two months ago, 15 clients the month before, and every single month we had to either double our pricing or completely halt sales, because we would just get stuck with 30 people on a waitlist pending to receive their actual VA and fulfillment was completely clogged up. So it’s not even a matter of people requesting it. It’s just I can’t get to 30, 40, 50 sales a month until this problem gets fixed.
RAVI ABUVALA: Got it. We’ll talk about the doubling pricing because that’s pretty awesome if that’s sustaining. Walk me through it a little. What’s your current way of sourcing these EAs and then give me at a high level what’s the process from: I just became a client of yours, you need to get me a VA in the next 21 days. Where do you source them from? How do you train them? Keep it high level.
JUAN CARLOS BARANICH: We’ve been sourcing off Facebook and Meta ads, primarily Instagram and Facebook, into about five different countries. We use a lot of South America, the Philippines, Egypt. We have our targeting down to a science. We have a screening team, an interview team, and then someone that goes ahead and certifies the VA when it comes to training. When it comes to applications, we’re getting anywhere between 100 to 150 a day. We’re screening through about 100 to 200 applications daily. We’re getting them down to the 1%. Once they go through the final interview and get certified, that’s when the bottleneck starts of us not having actually trained them on that agent’s systems. We’ve been able to templatize and systemize about 85% of the entire real estate training that these people need to have. The issue is every agent has a different tech stack. Every agent has different delegation needs. Every agent is focusing on a different part of their business, whether it’s admin, marketing or sales. We kind of have to customize that VA for that person and it’s a very tough thing to do in a group setting. That seems to be the constraint and the bottleneck. I don’t know if I should change what I’m selling or adapt and create something different, but that is where everything is getting clogged up.
RAVI ABUVALA: I always say that the easiest way to make fulfillment easier is to narrow down on sales and marketing, but you’re doing incredibly well. So before I jump there, a few clarifying questions. 100 to 150 apps a day and you get it down to the 1%. What percentage of apps actually turn into people you’re potentially going to place?
JUAN CARLOS BARANICH: 1% make it to our waitlist. It’s actually like 1.12%. Very close to that.
RAVI ABUVALA: And waitlist means they’re in the pipeline to start training when you do get a real estate agent that wants them?
JUAN CARLOS BARANICH: What we were doing before is we were building up this waitlist and they were just waiting around. Then once we had a real estate agent that was ready for them and they interview and match, we started training them. What we did differently now is we’re saying: you guys are going to start the training from day one. We’re not going to pay you for it, but it’s going to help you increase your life skills. They go into the waitlist, they start that preliminary training on School, they go through all the modules, complete quizzes, do everything they have to do. Then once the client wants to interview them, they’re at a whole different level of skills and expertise. However, we still have to train them on the specific side. That’s where it starts getting bogged out.
RAVI ABUVALA: That makes a lot of sense and I think you know this, but we used to have a VA placement company and that was exactly what we did. We started training them in a Facebook group, before School or anything like that, getting them to the point that whenever they had that first interview, they were already 80% of the way there, and then we would do the specifics after that. That actually also increased the percentage of people that we had ready and accepted. So it sounds like you’re already doing that, which is great. Let’s go through the specific side. How much variation is there between agents? And what is the expectation you’re setting in marketing and sales with these real estate agents as far as what these EAs can do for them?
JUAN CARLOS BARANICH: Really good question. When we started out, about 16 months ago, we were offering a VA for every single skill. Here’s your admin VA, here’s your marketing VA, here’s your sales VA. Terrible idea because everyone just picks whatever their immediate constraint is. Then once that constraint is solved, they no longer need that person and they want to get rid of them. It ended up being a mess. We got it down to admin, marketing and sales. On the sales side, they would treat us like an agency. They would think: if I’m not getting this amount of booked appointments, you’re not closing this amount of sales, then we want to cancel. They were treating the VA not more like a human being that could protect their time and help them, but more as an ROI. So we completely got rid of any ISAs, completely got rid of anything for outbound calling. Now it is just strictly one role: an executive assistant. Clear near admin. They can manage emails, calendar, work within a CRM, help with marketing. We’re also starting to teach them how to use Claude and OpenAI to make them AI operators. The end goal is for them to have one role, one person, systemize the entire process. The training is very systematic across the board, but we still want to put that little cherry on the cake and customize it for them specifically. We implemented a system specialist that sits down with the client, extracts what they’re doing day to day, helps them build out their SOPs, and then we’re taking those SOPs and handing them off to their assistant. We just don’t know if all of this is possible within a two-week turnaround.
RAVI ABUVALA: Whenever you close the agent on the front end on the sales call, they’re saying they’re specifically bogged down by one main thing. Is there any thought about that when it comes to the first things you’re training the EA on in order for them to start working with the client?
JUAN CARLOS BARANICH: You just gave me a great idea. I should just have the VA rewatch the sales call.
RAVI ABUVALA: I’ll give you an even better idea than that. Instead of rewatching the sales call, have every sales call on Fathom. It’s free. So then what you can do is have a bot that can review the sales call. There could be a VA training bot that identifies the key needs. You can even infuse it into the scripts. So if I’m hearing you correctly, Bob, you’d really love to get your emails checked every single day, you’d like to respond on your social media comments, and you need to be connected with three loan officers a day right now. It sounds like the three loan officers a day is the thing that’s eating the most of your time or that’s going to make you the most money as quickly as possible. So if I can get you an EA in the next two weeks that’s going to take that off your plate, and then we’ll train them on the other things from there, does that sound like a good return on investment?
I think what this would allow you to do is instead of getting a fully packaged EA that has everything the client wants right from the start, if we could get the one thing that they want, train them on that one thing, get them in place. And then one of the things we used to do for our VA placement company is we would charge people a monthly fee included in their renewals for maintenance or retraining for those VAs, where we would have them on three group coaching calls a week with our VA team, essentially keeping them sharp and answering their questions. We baked that into our monthly recurring package so that people would continue to pay us money because it technically was a consumer product.
JUAN CARLOS BARANICH: We bundle it up, but the group coaching is something we’re only doing once a week. Do you recommend breaking up the group coaching into doing it daily, setting up a different topic, a different curriculum, a different division? How do we do it in a group setting?
RAVI ABUVALA: I like that. Before we go down that rabbit hole, let me close the loop here. My recommendation would be: first, review the last 20 to 50 sales calls using AI. Look at it and see what I call grouping up. What are the three to five buckets where people are saying I need this the most inside of the EA or admin tasks? It’s going to give you something like 80% asking for this, 20% asking for that. Then I would bake that into the sales script. So you’re saying: Bob, you’re saying you need a lot of help reaching out to loan officers. We call that the outreach skill or the connector skill. That’s something we’re going to train your EA on first so that they can be delivered to you within two weeks. And then we have these other three skills which they’ll be trained on over time. But our goal is to buy you back that time as quickly as possible, before your second payment comes up, so you’re already seeing an ROI.
The secret with that is you need to lead them a little bit in the conversation. We actually do this in our sales script and it works incredibly well. We let the prospect say their own words for what their bottleneck is or where they want to buy time back. Then we say: yeah, that usually shows up as this. And then we package it in the specific words that we know we can solve based on the playbooks we have. For example, somebody might say the real big problem is that our closers aren’t closing as well as I’m closing. And we might say: yeah, that typically shows up in longer sales cycles and in a lower close rate when it’s somebody else. And we have a playbook for that.
I would do the same thing if I was you. Figure out in the sales script what the buckets are that you want these people trained on. Then based on what they’re saying, you reset it back to them in that bucket, get them to agree, and that triggers that onboarding flow and automation. You could even systemize it from there inside of whatever applicant tracking system you’re using. And what we would also do is a pre-interview with the EA before connecting them to the client. Hey, here’s Juan, here’s what he wants, he wants a connector skill.
JUAN CARLOS BARANICH: We call it the prep call. And what you’re describing around the connector, we call that the delegation zones and we break it up into four different zones so we can have them focus on one. The biggest aha here is taking the initial sales call, having a Claude bot transcribe the entire thing and having it develop a custom one-on-one training for that person to follow. That’s a no-brainer.
RAVI ABUVALA: The only caveat is I want to be careful with the custom one-on-one training because that’s going to make it a little bit unscalable. That’s why the first thing I said was to analyze those last 20 or 50 sales calls. I would really try to figure out: what are 80% of the people? They probably fall in these four buckets. So we might have to say no to the other 20% of people, or we can reshift their frame and bring them into this 80%. Then those four buckets are these four things here. And instead of it being a custom training, it is kind of custom, but it’s really pre-packaged. For us it would be: your call rate’s low, so we need to work on your sales process. Or you’re not getting booked calls, so we need to implement an ad strategy. It’s not necessarily custom because we’re doing the same thing for dozens of people every single month, but for the person it feels custom. Does that make sense?
JUAN CARLOS BARANICH: 100%. Really good.
RAVI ABUVALA: Then you could decide what’s the minimum viable product for this. You guys are doing really well so you might have some of this already. But we would essentially associate a test, a certification for each skill that would let us know that person was ready to be reintroduced to the client. So you could have your four certifications underneath your overall certification, for the connector skill or the delegation zone or whatever else it is, and test them on that. They come in and you know for a fact this person understands this skill. You do the pre-call with them, you put them on the call with the client. And at that point it’s just about managing client expectations: we’re going to get this one down, they’re going to start today, and what we’re really going to do is keep them in this coaching structure, which is going to allow them to do those two other things you said on the sales call.
JUAN CARLOS BARANICH: For the certification and the assessment, we’ve tried using different tech stacks like Test Gorilla and custom-built things. It was a nightmare. It was making it very multiple choice and short answer, when the reality is we have to test if they’re capable of handling emails, if they have attention to detail, if they can handle a CRM. What do you recommend to actually create that certification? If we could just verify that they know how to do something, how do you put that all together?
RAVI ABUVALA: There’s probably something you could do with AI today where you could create a custom GPT that could take somebody through a testing process and grade them on a scale of one to ten. I wouldn’t necessarily use a My GPT because then you couldn’t figure out the results. Let me think about what you would do.
JUAN CARLOS BARANICH: I think you could custom code a GPT to just be a test, and at the end output a result. They go through it for an hour, type stuff in, submit screenshots. What you’re saying is actually workable.
RAVI ABUVALA: But if it’s a My GPT, I don’t know how you’re going to get the answer. Every My GPT is confidential to that person’s ChatGPT account. Even with custom GPTs, I give custom GPTs to our clients all the time and I can never see what they’re conversing with. If I was you, I would want to know what the test results were so they weren’t just passing themselves. Almost like a JotForm. Let me put a pin in that and think about what could be a solution. I feel like today you could definitely figure out something hyper scalable using AI that would allow you to verify. But I feel like there are going to be a few levels of it. There should be an autonomous verification where they complete all the course materials and then do a final test. And then there could be a manual verification where you have another VA who’s skilled in that thing, the expert in that area, who’s doing the one-on-one testing.
One of the main reasons we started the pre-call thing was that people were passing with flying colors and then we’d get on the call and be like: how did you pass this test? You don’t even understand what this is. So if we could do a manual test, either in a group setting, which would be the ideal scenario, here’s actually an interesting idea. What if every week you have a connector skill test every Tuesday at 12 PM EST. You have one proctor, which is your VA who’s the master at connector skills. Everybody joins the Zoom room at 12 o’clock. They keep everybody in the waiting room. They let one person in. They have a three-minute timer and that person has to demonstrate the skill in three minutes. Then they say pass or fail inside your applicant tracking system. Let that person out. If they fail, they get an email saying: unfortunately you failed, you can try again, here’s what to work on. If they pass, here are the next steps. That way you’re not wasting any of your team’s time by having 50 scheduled sessions in a day. You’re ripping through them every three minutes.
JUAN CARLOS BARANICH: Then Monday would be like the delegation block. I love that. And I like the idea of sharing screens because then we can actually see what they’re doing and their thought process. I think that’s genuinely really good.
RAVI ABUVALA: Another good idea around that is we used to buy sandbox accounts for all the typical software: GoHighLevel, Close, HubSpot. We’d just pay for the monthly, and honestly for some of them I negotiated a free account because I was sending people over to them. You create these sandbox accounts so everybody can log in and play around, because these are typically people making only a couple of dollars an hour. They might not be able to afford a $50 a month CRM. And then on the testing day, they’re in the sandbox account and they actually show you what they’re doing. Going back to reading the data from the last 30 to 50 sales calls, you would essentially identify the number one tasks and the number one software these agents are using. And then, in my opinion, where this ends up taking you is you get a little bit more specific about which tasks you’re willing to train on and which software you’ll work with. Because there are a couple million agents, you could technically only specify the top three or five softwares that have 70% of the market. You might have to turn away that 30% that uses other tools, and you can have that in the application upfront. That way the VA can be skilled on all three of those software. Whichever one the client comes in wanting, the VA can be a master at it.
JUAN CARLOS BARANICH: Perfect.
RAVI ABUVALA: Instead of trying to segment under the connector skill, like this is for this software and that is for that software, or saying we have to know all the software so now you’ve got 10 softwares to try to learn. If you chunk it up it will really increase the efficiency of the whole thing. And I doubt, based on your numbers, you would lose a whole lot of opportunity.
JUAN CARLOS BARANICH: Our churn is insanely low because once we integrate the person and we’re consistently training and managing them, they’re not going anywhere else. It’s just getting them from payment to transformation as soon as possible. These are amazing suggestions.
RAVI ABUVALA: I appreciate that. I want to go a little bit deeper and then we’ll do the coaching thing you talked about. What do you guys do as far as getting feedback from clients after they get the VA, or from the VA themselves?
JUAN CARLOS BARANICH: Our account managers reach out to clients at least twice a month to get feedback on how the assistant is doing. The issue with that is 95% of the time the assistant is doing great, but the reality is it doesn’t matter how well the assistant is doing. The only thing they care about is how is the output in their life different as a result of having this person. This person could be on top of emails and calendar, but we’re starting to realize they’re associating their assistant with: I have tasks being done, but is my revenue going up? Is my profit going up? So we’re trying to find a way where we could turn the account managers into consultants. Instead of them just checking on the assistant, how can we start training the client? Because a lot of these clients, as well as they’re doing making one, three, four or five million a year, a lot of them know nothing about management, integration, systems, running a company. That’s kind of what we’re leaning toward for the future. Right now we’re doing the typical testimonial at 30 days, reviews at 30 days, a performance call once a month.
RAVI ABUVALA: Are your AMs at the level of being consultants or would you have to hire for that?
JUAN CARLOS BARANICH: No. That’s the conversation we’re starting to have now. Listen, you guys are amazing at managing the VA and making sure the client is happy, but how can you actually start guiding the client to that next level in their business?
RAVI ABUVALA: Talk to me about the typical avatar on the agent side. What are these agents doing revenue-wise on average?
JUAN CARLOS BARANICH: There are 1.6 million realtors in the United States. Our TAM is around 25,000. I’m working with the 1% of the 1%. If they make less than $250,000 a year, we cancel the call.
RAVI ABUVALA: Got it. And what are the price points you guys are selling and what is the length?
JUAN CARLOS BARANICH: The price point is $30,000 a year.
RAVI ABUVALA: And that includes all the labor. Cool.
JUAN CARLOS BARANICH: Everything, all in. It includes us managing the person, paying the person. It’s full service. There are a lot of competitors that just do the placement fee one time, but that entire model breaks down because you’re staffing a great VA with someone that has no idea how to be a leader or a manager. So we kind of have to do it all for them. We are probably the most expensive option on the market right now. And if anyone starts approaching our price range, I’ll probably just keep increasing it. My goal is not to appeal to the masses. It’s to literally work with the top and luxury.
RAVI ABUVALA: I think there would be a huge value add if you were to run group coaching calls one to two times a week. But let me pull back. What I was going to say when I started that whole thread was, this worked really well for us: setting up some kind of automation or system once they complete their first interview with you and once they finish the first one to three days with their VA. You reach out via Slack automation once they get placed with a VA and you do a qualitative question. Hey Bob, it’s Juan here, I’m the founder, I wanted to reach out personally. I saw that you just hired this person a couple of days ago. How’s everything going? We like this more than the NPS score because we work with hiring clients like you do and they almost never fill out a one-to-ten rating. But if you have the founder reaching out, we have about an 85 to 90% response rate. Then the automation fires when they respond back, and we have a VA copy that into what we call our quality quant bot, which is a JotForm that takes qualitative input and gives you a quantitative NPS output. That way you get the best of both worlds. Qualitative feedback, which is the only way people really want to give feedback, voice notes, text, whatever. And then you can put it into something you can track over time with the quantitative number assigned to that person’s card. Most clients will break down right at the first interview, or a couple days in they haven’t shown up for work, something’s going on. So if you can do both of those, I think your churn will improve even more.
As far as the strategy side, I would probably try to bake in a monthly or bi-weekly strategy call with these real estate agents where when you finish the last one, you’re booking the next one. This is where either you, your director of ops, or somebody else gets on that call, sees how the VA is doing, but also does a little bit of consulting and strategy with them to decrease churn even more and help them get a higher return on their investment. Like: oh, you’re not even using your VA for this. You definitely need to use them for that. If you’re doing it bi-weekly or monthly, almost everybody can show up to it.
The final piece I’ll say: I would consider, since you’re doing a 12-month thing, an annual event where you invite all these real estate agents in person to speak, where you and a couple of other real estate experts teach on stage for even just one day, three sessions, two hours each. I feel like that could massively increase the perceived value of what you’re offering. It would also decrease your churn even further because anybody that comes to our events almost never leaves.
JUAN CARLOS BARANICH: We’ve been doing this for three years and it’s literally how we built the entire thing. And I only invite the top team leaders in the country to speak. From a branding perspective, that’s actually really good advice. We’re executing on it as soon as possible.
RAVI ABUVALA: Okay, so that’s already included in the $30,000?
JUAN CARLOS BARANICH: The tickets we sell for are $99. We don’t even try to make money off the event itself, but all of our clients get priority to come first and we really target our ICP. I haven’t even thought about doing a private workshop, but that could actually be a good idea just for clients.
RAVI ABUVALA: I would consider one of two things. Either all clients automatically get a VIP upgrade. So lanyards, VIP around the neck, boom, immediately increased perceived value. The first two rows of every event are reserved for VIP for current clients. You schedule two or three of them Grant Cardone style to come up on stage and talk about how much they love working with you. I think that would be awesome and would increase conversions at the event itself. The second thing is the private workshop. If you like events, that’s another great option. But for me, I like events, but I don’t like events more than two times a year. I wouldn’t build my business around it, but if you like it, go for it.
JUAN CARLOS BARANICH: No one likes them. It’s a full-time business in itself.
RAVI ABUVALA: Exactly. The whole sales team is selling tickets instead of selling the front end thing. You’re like: my God, I’m working this hard for almost no money.
JUAN CARLOS BARANICH: Correct. This is completely invaluable. It’s very simple things, but when you combine them all together, it’s a completely different onboarding and training experience.
RAVI ABUVALA: I think that’s everything I have on the fulfillment side. I wanted to talk about ads for a couple of minutes here. Do you have any questions on the fulfillment other than that?
JUAN CARLOS BARANICH: No, if I put that stuff in place, I think I should be good to open up all the ads.
RAVI ABUVALA: And how are you tracking the KPIs for the applicant tracking system?
JUAN CARLOS BARANICH: We’re using GoHighLevel. We custom coded the pipelines. We have every lead coming in, how many get screened, how many get to the group interview. We have the entire thing in place. That’s actually going pretty well. For us it’s been a matter of getting better screeners in place and doing longer forms for qualified applicants. Candidate sourcing I’d rate an eight plus. The training and onboarding right now is like a C, which is what needs to get fixed. For ads, we’re complete beginners. We just started last month. We spent $2,245. I just got this from my media buyer about 10 minutes ago. She booked 25 appointments off it. That’s $100 per booked call.
RAVI ABUVALA: $2,245. And how many booked calls?
JUAN CARLOS BARANICH: 25 appointments, 12 showed, 7 qualified. Meaning 5 were not financially there. We closed one at $3,000. That’s our initial staffing fee. Our lifetime value right now is $13,000. So we have a really high retention. So it worked. And of the seven, four of them are interested and probably signing up in the next two months. We’ve noticed our biggest issue when it comes to conversion is for referrals we have a 50% conversion rate, super easy close. For cold traffic, they always have to think about it for two to six weeks. Most of them end up purchasing, but there’s this thinking phase they just have to go through. So we want to cut that short. And the biggest thing is the qualification. We’re super cool with canceling calls, but how do we start targeting more of our ICP versus just bringing in anyone that wants an assistant?
RAVI ABUVALA: Quick clarity question. $13K LTV, but you have a $30K annual package. How does that math work out?
JUAN CARLOS BARANICH: It’s $2,500 a month. We do month to month. We don’t charge $30K upfront.
RAVI ABUVALA: I see. So the average person stays for about four or five months?
JUAN CARLOS BARANICH: About six months right now. We used to charge $1,500, so we’ve been consistently increasing the monthly.
RAVI ABUVALA: Got it. So $2,245 in ad spend, 25 calls, 12 shows, 7 qualified, 1 close at $3,000. And that person is going to eventually equal $13,000. So it’s $3,000 first month to include the staffing and then $2,500 recurring from there. Great news is you’re at least breaking even on cash and you have roughly a 4X revenue ROAS. Do you want me to pull up your ads library? Let me walk through it.
JUAN CARLOS BARANICH: Yeah, absolutely.
RAVI ABUVALA: What’s it under? Goldbar? Goldbar Staffing? Okay, let me share my screen.
So here are a few thoughts. I’m going to rip through them and obviously you can send this to your media person. I try not to change things if they are working, so I would consider testing these. Number one: I would love for the primary text here to get to the main points way faster. I would rather start with “Agents making $250K plus a year, we’ll buy you back 14 hours of your time” or something like that. So immediately in the first line you’re stating the offer. I would love to see some specific numbers. For example, our average client saves about 18 hours a month working with our trained agents, or our average client increases their GCI by this percentage because they’re able to buy back so much of their time. You might not have the GCI number, but you might have the hours saved number. The problem right now is this is intangible. To make things have a shorter sales cycle, it needs to feel like: I’m going to do this and you’re buying me back 20 hours within the next 30 days.
JUAN CARLOS BARANICH: We actually developed software to track how many hours they’re actually saving because, as you mentioned, it’s intangible. But everyone has an hourly rate. If your hourly rate is $1,000 an hour, it would be the equivalent of $300K a month if I could get you back 75 hours a month. So we are tracking this.
RAVI ABUVALA: So I would start with: real estate agents doing over $250K a year, we will save you at least 30 hours a month, or you don’t pay. Something like that. I don’t know if you have a guarantee, but if you do, that works well.
JUAN CARLOS BARANICH: We used to do that. We just don’t know how to structure the guarantee in a way where it’s correct, because 30 hours, anyone could come back and misfire it. But we like the offer.
RAVI ABUVALA: Yeah. So you can always take these in chunks. If this is working without a guarantee, I would do some of these other changes first and don’t add the guarantee yet. But one way to implement urgency is to add the guarantee later. I would consider a two-step approach. Step one is making it tangible: our average agent saves 20 hours a month. Step two would be structuring the guarantee: we guarantee you’ll save 20 hours a month or you don’t pay. And it’s very simple. In the sales call you’re clear on what the guarantee includes. In the proposal you’re clear on what the guarantee covers. In reality, we had a guarantee for almost three years. It was probably less than 5% of people that actually qualified for it. Maybe 10% asked for it, we would deny 5% of them and try to fix the situation, and the 5% we did refund, the increase in close rate and show rate from having the guarantee far offset that 5%.
So add some numbers to make it more tangible. Number two: I love this website, great branding. I would be curious if you could duplicate it and make one version that was a sales funnel page instead of a home page. This is good, but I can hop around to different pages and go to your Facebook group and everything else. If you’re getting $100 booked calls here, I would bet you could probably lower that by 30 to 50% just by making only one CTA on the entire page: book the free discovery call.
JUAN CARLOS BARANICH: Perfect.
RAVI ABUVALA: The next thing I would consider: change the CTA from “book free discovery call” to “see if you qualify.” By saying book free discovery call you will get more bookings, but you’ll get less intent. You want to add some intent. And I would seriously consider putting the application directly on the actual page right below the video sales letter. What this will do is give you a higher throughput because they’re not having to click, wait for Calendly to load, find a time, and so on. Way less friction. All the buttons on the page just lead right back up to the VSL or to the application.
JUAN CARLOS BARANICH: It looks like my team already modeled it off yours actually. Let me share my screen. Can you see this?
RAVI ABUVALA: Yes. “20 hours a week,” already way better. Okay. Nice. Click “schedule a call” here. Okay, way better. So that’s great. Yes, so here I would model a little bit more off mine. Instead of the individual cards I would put them all on one page so you’ll have lower friction. Number one. Number two: by having this application on this page, I would start routing the applicants to either the disqualification page where you send them to your YouTube channel, or you put them on what we call tier one or tier two calendars. There are really three pages they can be directed to. One is DQ: you send them to a free course or your YouTube channel. Two is tier two: these people are pretty qualified but maybe their urgency isn’t there or they’re right at the $250K mark. You can put that with your slightly less experienced sales reps, or you make it so that in your calendar block you have, for easy numbers, 10 slots in a day, with three tier two slots and seven tier one slots. You’re leaving opportunity for the best people to always book within 48 hours where the tier two might have to wait two or three days. And the final piece of this whole funnel is: you can put the pixel to only fire on tier one and maybe tier two leads, but not fire on the disqualification ones. Because right now the way you have it, you’re firing that pixel on Meta every time somebody books a call regardless of whether you cancel the call or not. And the meta pixel is what’s going to optimize your campaign over time. The targeting doesn’t matter at all after a certain point. It’s literally just the pixel. Meta says: great, we got results, let me get more people that are getting this result. So you want to tell Meta which people you want. Especially for you, which is literally the 1% of your marketplace. You don’t want the 99% of people that don’t have any money. And right now you’re firing for all of those people. You said five out of 25 were actually qualified. You really just want to do those five people. I bet you if you look at those 25 calls, 12 shows, and you look at the people that are automatically DQed, bake that into the application. That way those people don’t even make it to the calendar. Now you might have $2,500 in spend, you might have 30 or 35 calls because of the efficiency improvements, and instead of 12 shows you might have 25 or 28 shows because you’re only letting people book who have a statistically higher chance of showing. And you’ll have a higher close rate and maybe a little more urgency because you’re attracting people the data shows are going to close faster.
JUAN CARLOS BARANICH: So basically just taking all the data from everything we’re currently doing and revamping everything using that. Amazing.
RAVI ABUVALA: Essentially: who are the people that show up and close fast, what are the characteristics those people have, and then asking those application questions. The important thing is: if somebody does close in three to four weeks, we don’t want to not take those calls, because that’s how you get a higher return on ad spend. But you want to try to optimize the calls you’re taking today for the people with a statistically higher chance of closing.
JUAN CARLOS BARANICH: Perfect. I like that a lot.
RAVI ABUVALA: We won’t have enough time this call, maybe we’ll do a follow-up for increasing show rates and close rates. But the other thing I would be curious about: the reason why deals are taking so long to close at a $30,000 level are typically one of two things. One, they’re not consuming enough content before the call. Or two, your team is not doing a good enough job tying down how much money they’re losing every single week or month that they let this problem persist. So one of the things I’d recommend: early on in the sales process you should be essentially saying, what’s the thing you want to get most of your time taken off immediately? You can even make this a multiple choice or open-ended question in the application. Then on the call you say: okay, you said right now you’re spending way too much time connecting with loan officers. How much time do you think that is? 25 hours. Okay. So 25 hours a week connecting with loan officers. That’s 100 hours a month. And what would you say right now is your hourly rate, like if I was going to pay you for an hour of your time?
JUAN CARLOS BARANICH: We literally have a calculator. We can just calculate it live for them and show them the big fat number.
RAVI ABUVALA: Exactly. Then you’re going to say: based on this, you’re essentially losing about $30,000 a month in commissions every month you don’t get this solved. And the secret is you always say: does that sound directionally correct? You need them to buy into that number. That’s the biggest difference of whether that works later on or not. They say yes, or they might adjust it. And if you want the real secret sauce, then you say: okay, great. That means over a year you’re losing $360,000 in commissions because you’re not hiring this person sooner. And then when you get down to the end and they have any kind of objection about why they can’t move forward, your salesperson now has that tie-down number they can come back to.
JUAN CARLOS BARANICH: We tried running a quick ad to a calculate-your-hourly-rate tool. I don’t think people comprehended what that was, but incorporating that into the sales pitch would be a really good idea.
RAVI ABUVALA: I wouldn’t even worry. The first version of your VSL funnel, you guys are doing well. Don’t change anything there. Don’t do lead magnets. More gas to that VSL funnel. If you do that calculation live with them, simple numbers, simple math, even if your sales rep screen shares and circles that number so they can see it, then we tie back to it and get their buy-in. Yes, those numbers make sense. And then we get them to say: okay, Juan, we can wait another two months, but you understand that’s about $60,000 you’re leaving on the table right now, right? I’m not saying it’s going to work every time, but it gives them the pain and the urgency to move a little sooner.
JUAN CARLOS BARANICH: Amazing. This is spot on.
RAVI ABUVALA: Juan, I appreciate your time. Thanks for hopping on the call.
JUAN CARLOS BARANICH: Thank you so much for this. As far as the recording goes, how do I get access to that?
RAVI ABUVALA: I will send it over to you and this will also go on my YouTube channel in the next probably five to seven days.
JUAN CARLOS BARANICH: Cool. And then I’ll be reaching out in the future.
RAVI ABUVALA: Cool, thanks a lot. See you guys.
JUAN CARLOS BARANICH: Thanks, God bless you all.