Justin Nassiri, Founder & CEO of Executive Presence, shares how a few pivotal decisions reshaped his firm’s trajectory and revealed the full earning power of the Era 3 business model. By rethinking leadership, scrutinizing financials, and challenging old assumptions, he uncovered how much growth and profitability were being left untapped. Founders attending this session will gain a clear view of how to transition out of outdated paradigms, capture hidden value in their firms, and scale faster with less strain.
TRANSCRIPT
Greg Alexander: Hey everybody, this is Greg Alexander. You’re listening to the Pro Serv Podcast, brought to you by Collective 54. If you’re new to this show, it is dedicated to those that are in the expertise business. So if you market, sell, or deliver expertise for a living, this is for you. On this show, we aim to help you do three things. Make more money, make scaling easier, and make an exit achievable. And on today’s show, we’re gonna do a little bit of a case study with a Collective 54 member. And the reason why we’re doing that is we have been advocating for the documentation of the journey of the boutique. And we… we have a framework that we call the Era Framework. Era 1, Era 2, Era 3, and this is our way of describing the transition from kind of the legacy ProServe model, where everything was done by humans and manual, to the bleeding edge, where AI is enhancing productivity tremendously in our space. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today, and I have a great member with us. His name is Justin Nassiri, and he runs a marketing agency called Executive Presence. And he is in the middle of this journey right now, and he’s had some early wins and some struggles, and he was kind enough to come on this show and share that with us, so hopefully we can learn a lot from him. But, Justin, why don’t we do a proper intro, please?
Justin Nassiri: Yeah, I’m Justin. I live in Denver, Colorado. I started Executive Presence about three and a half years ago, and bootstrapped it to about $3.5 million in ARR in the last three and a half years. And a big part of my journey has been Collective 54, which I joined back in November of 2024, so almost a year ago. And, I think, and I’m sure we’ll get into this, but I think it’s just realizing I don’t need to reinvent a lot of the entrepreneurial journey. There’s a lot of reinvention I’m constantly doing within LinkedIn for what I do at Executive Presence. That’s where I want my innovation and cycles going, but everything else I want to beg, borrow, and steal to not waste time doing what others have already done better than me.
Greg Alexander: Yep, perfect. Okay, so I’m gonna start this story with a trip that you made to come see me at my ranch in Texas, where we spent some time together. And during that meeting, which I thoroughly enjoyed, you had a couple of aha moments. So, I would like for you to share a little bit about that story with members as a way to maybe inspire them to challenge old paradigms and develop new mental models.
Justin Nassiri: Yeah, man, that was, I mean, just such a highlight of my year and career. I’ll set the stage that, when I joined Collective 54, I knew there was an opportunity to go and spend a day with you. And as soon as I found out about that, that became on my bucket list of, like, I want to do that. I knew immediately from the office hours, which are, you know, every time I do an office hours with you, I feel like as soon as I’m done, I book the next one. I just want to, like, pack those in, and I thought, God, if this is what we can do in 30 minutes, what could we do in a day? And so, that was, like, a life goal. I did not think it would occur in this year, and you and I were texting and trading notes, and at one point, you know, you just said, you said, you know, just book the flight, don’t worry about the money. And that really was life-changing. It was something that would not have happened this year, and incredibly generous. And I’ve thought a lot about this trip because it’s had such a big impact on me, and a couple things come out. The first one has nothing to do with the sessions, which we’ll get to, but, like, just stoking in your space, and with you, and your wife, and spending time with you, that may have been the single most important thing of just seeing this role model of, like, oh, man, this is… this is… this could be me, right? You know, if things went well, this is a possibility. And I think it’s even more meaningful because, you know, I was in the military, I started out in submarines, and there was such a distinction. Like, with my captain, if I was gonna hang out with him, it was gonna be with all of the officers, and it would have had a lot of structure around it. It would have been a dinner, it would have been, like, it’s very, regimented. And it felt like, man, I had… I was waking up with bedhead, and sitting out with you, and having coffee, and having, you know, time with your wife late at night, and you late at night, and playing games. It was just, like, it was so intimate in a way that, it, yeah, I just think of it in terms of, like, just soaking in you guys, and that… that in and of itself was worth it. But… but I think that, you know, another thing that came out of it, and we spent… I mean, we did… I landed, I got there probably at 3, and, like, until 3 the next day, it was, like, it was kind of constant nonstop work in a good way, but one of the themes that came out of that is, you know, I wrote down, you said, you told me, you know what you need to do, just get it on paper. And what I found over the course of almost 24 hours as you were asking me questions. And I would think about it, but I’d have the answer, and you kind of instilled in me this confidence of, like, you know, you know what you need to do, you just gotta get it out of yourself. And so that was a big, big shift for me. But the biggest one was, realizing I needed to bring on a professional COO. And, I think the turning point there… I think you said something to me to the effect of, like, Justin, you’ve got a lot of volatility in your life right now. There’s a lot of big changes happening in your personal life. You cannot have volatility at work as well. You really need someone who’s going to be there day in, day out, keeping things running. You need someone reliable in that capacity. And that was a huge takeaway, and it led me to bring on a fractional COO, and it really plays into getting my thoughts on paper, because that was… That was the landing point of our time together, was getting it all out on paper. What is the game plan here? What is the vision? And then let me find that integrator to take that vision and bring it to life, which is, you know, one of the best things that came out of that weekend.
Greg Alexander: You know, I want to echo a few things that you said. So, my favorite thing in the world to do is to spend time with members, and it meant a lot to me that you would inconvenience yourself and get on a plane. I mean, I live in a small town an hour outside of San Antonio, it’s not like I’m in a major city, I mean, it’s hard to get there. And, and spent time with my wife, and he was so gracious to her. He even played with my dog, for heaven’s sakes, right? So, we had, we had a lot of fun. And I’m bringing this up, not, you know, beyond just the relationship building, which was hugely valuable, sometimes entrepreneurs… They’re so in the weeds in their business that just a change of venue. Just getting away from it all. It brings an open mind, it brings a sense of clarity. You know, we did a little prep before you showed up, so there was, like, this deadline that we were working backwards from. It was almost a forcing mechanism. You know, to get us to be thinking about some of these bigger items. So, that’s the lesson I would like other members to take away. However you do it, whether it’s an executive offsite with your team, or if you want to come to see me, or you want to go see somebody else, whatever. Every now and again, just, you know, hitting the eject button, getting out of your normal day-to-day environment, and getting to a place, I think, makes a lot of sense. The other thing I wanted to mention was, you know, we stumbled on the fact that you needed this stability in this COO, and because I got to know you, I got a sense for your style. And as a result of that, I was able to introduce you to Brian Albers, who’s also a member of Collective 54, and I was playing matchmaker there, because I know Brian, and I know you, and I just thought you two guys would work very well together. And I made that introduction. You called him right away, and you were like, wow, like, we really clicked. He called me and said, wow, we really clicked, right? And just think of the amount of time that you know, we saved it. It’s one thing to say, go hire a fractional COO, and it’s another one to say, well, how do I find him, and who? Like, that’s a… that could have took months, and it just… we got lucky there.
Justin Nassiri: And that, well, it’s not even luck, because, I mean, I haven’t even shared this with you, but this morning, I met with Sal Watts, who’s another member. She runs What’s What’s Next PR. We just hired her to help us build out a role and hire that person. That process… Brian was the first, but I think it’s happened 3 or 4 times now, where it is just tapping the Collective 54 community and saying, this is what I need, who do I work with? And I’ve done… because of, you know, I’ve done it a couple times now, it’s… it is so fast, it’s not having to shop around, it’s like, okay, this is the person, let me work with them, and cutting down that search time and cutting down the time lost if you use the wrong person, that has been really, really, monumentally valuable.
Greg Alexander: Okay, so we had the Texas visit, you got matched up with Brian. The other thing I wanted to talk to you about is you spent some time with our president, Jeff Klowman. And that was a very specific thing, and that was reviewing your P&L. And us… providing some advice on expenses. Yeah. Because a lot of boutiques are cash-strapped. You know, they have… they have all these things they want to invest in, because they’re investing for the future. I mean, they’re entrepreneurs, but there’s only so many dollars to go around. So, the allocation of dollars is so important, and from what I hear from Jeff, although I haven’t had a chance to speak to you about this yet, is, there was some kind of low-hanging pieces of fruit there as well. So, would you tell us a little bit about that?
Justin Nassiri: Yeah, and I want to plant the seed, too. I want to go back to Brian, because there’s a lot we can talk about, about what that has changed in the business, because that trip to Texas was really an inflection point for executive presence, and Brian has been a key role there. But yeah, I would actually say on Jeff, two things. So we have, you know, I, I think I was going to meet with you for office hours, and you were like, actually meet with Jeff instead. And to be honest, at the time, I was, like, a little bit deflected of, like, I’m not gonna get my Greg fix. And then Jeff and I, it’s almost like we had this side quest, where we have now been meeting, where, first on the finances, 100%, but it’s… it’s… it wasn’t just… what’s going on. It’s, give me access to your QuickBooks, let me look at things. So he came, having done the homework, and we got really tactical about things to get rid of to start decreasing our expenses. So immediately from that first session, walked away with tactical changes that saved me a lot of money. And then literally today, you know, I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but he sent me another email where he dug further into our finances with QuickBooks to give a V2, a version 2 look at where we’re at. So that, you know, that… it’s just so nice to have someone coming up alongside you to help. But it also started another discussion around AI, and chat GPT and the use of GPTs, and I started learning from him how Collective 54 is using GPTs, and that… that is one of the biggest changes in our company, is literally the GPTs we’ve set up for all of our clients that I’m training our team on, and that came out of that same conversation with Jeff. I had met with him and one of my directors to just go deep in, like, literally screen sharing and seeing how he’s using AI, and we have imported a lot of that into our systems.
Greg Alexander: Yeah. You know, it’s the power of community, right? So, in the case of meeting Brian, and I want to come back to that, because it sounds like there’s more to that, you know, that was meeting an integrator COO type. who had previously supported an entrepreneur with a company called Data Climber and Aaron Climber. They sold, that was one of Collective 54’s 50 exits, and then Brian decided, you know, post-deal, that’s what he wanted to do with his life, and he launched a new firm to do that over and over and over again. In Jeff’s case. The reason why I made that introduction, again, power, community pattern matching, is that you were under a lot of pressure. You know, you were… literally every month when you were closing the books, you were, like, sweating it. And I said, you know, there’s gotta be a way for this to be less stressful. I don’t know what that is, but I know the guy that might. And by him taking a look at your numbers, he was able to say… because remember, Collective 54 is a boutique itself. Like, so we’re drinking our own champagne here as we’re building this thing. So he was able to look at it and say, alright, Justin, I think we can save you some money in the following ways, and one of those ways was GPT use. Which he’s doing very aggressively, which reduces labor cost, which is the majority of your expenses on your P&Ls. So, I just wanted to make sure that we were pointing that out. So let’s go back to Brian. It sounds like you had more to discuss about that.
Justin Nassiri: Yeah, so we… it’s great timing that you and I are talking today, because from the time we’re recording this, 5 days from now, next week, we’re doing an all-hands meeting where we’re going to unveil a lot of new things for our company. And I want to say, first and foremost, that’s a big change for me, being the knee-jerk reaction guy. I’m the true visionary where I get an idea, and in the next 20 minutes, it’s going to be implemented. But if we rewind the clock back from when I visited you, you told me about Brian, we met… I think we started working together within 2 weeks. It was very fast.
Justin Nassiri: And within, I think, a week of Brian and I meeting, we did an offsite. We flew my leadership team out here to Denver, and we met, because we’re like, we know we’ve got a lot to do, let’s reset the board about the leadership team and getting everyone on board for what we’re gonna do. And that started off this 2-month journey of really figuring out all the pieces to include time tracking, so we know who our profitable clients are that we can get more of, how we know which activities are sucking our resources so we can invest in eliminating or automating or improving that. So that is a huge step forward, which, left to my own devices, that would have been at least a year away. We’re moving from a departmental structure that we’ve used for the whole life of the company into a pod structure that’s going to be much more nimble, much more effective. We moved towards a whole new leadership system. We’re now using L10s from EOS. We have a weekly cadence. The structure of that is just impeccable. That’s a change that he brought about. But then overall, just the whole professional COO execution. And, you know, another detail when he joined, cash flow was so unpredictable. That was the first thing I asked him about, which is, like, I need to know how we’re gonna stay afloat financially. And he immediately found… we had a fractional CFO that we got rid of. He found $27,000 in invoices that they had missed. So, immediately paid for him several times over. Cleaned up our cash flow, we now have a new bookkeeper, a really good glimpse of what’s going on, and this is the strongest financial position we’ve been in in years. And so just having cut expenses, increased our revenues, and cleaned things up is just, … is just, you know, crazy to overestimate. And then just getting the leadership team aligned, and then getting the team aligned this coming week. I’m just very excited about this next chapter.
Greg Alexander: You know, we… our three brand promises to members are very simple. Make more money, make scaling easier, and make an exit achievable. And what you just highlighted there was make scaling easier. Not that… It required any brilliance, but you’re very representative of the entrepreneur in professional services. I mean, you invented this thing called executive presence, and you’ve pioneered all these innovative ways for these executives to have personal brands on LinkedIn that is generating millions of dollars of revenue for them. But the operations of a firm, which is extremely well-worn territory. But you hadn’t done that before, a boutique professional services firm in this instance. So, like, spending time figuring that out is a pain in the ass. And you should be spending your time innovating what you do for clients, not the internal operations. So being able to plug into somebody like Brian and Jeff and other members in the community, like Cell, it sounds like, just to get all that stuff buttoned up, makes scaling easier, because it’s less stressful. This is extremely well-worn territory. So it’s a great use case, because I, you know, I want other members to follow suit. Alright, let’s peek into the future a little bit.
Justin Nassiri: Yeah. So, so where do you go from here? I think, I think one of the insights I gleaned from our time in Texas together was you kind of pulled the veil back on me, and I hadn’t… I had come from San Francisco, I’d come from a tech startup background, and my experience there was pleasure deferment. That was white knuckle. Pay yourself as little as possible, because I might get an exit that will, you know, have me life-changing outcome. And I think one of the insights I took away is, like, I don’t have to sacrifice the short term for a very uncertain and unknown future state. And… and I remember we talked about it, you kind of went… you asked me questions, we worked through this exercise to basically say, hey, if I was not doing executive presence, what could I realistically make? Which… now hearing it, at the time, it was like, wait, what? I could make that much money? It was kind of like, you know, made me feel insecure. And since then, I’m like, yeah, of course I could. And so now I have that as my guidepost, which is, I’m gonna make at least that much. We still have some writing of the ship to go, of paying down some debt, and kind of still reducing our expenses and getting things stabilized. But it is on the horizon, and I am 100% confident that that’s achievable. So I’d say that, like, personally, that’s a huge motivator for me to realize, like, yes, I think executive presence has a very bright future, and I think that I can make really good money along the way, which I know that’s gonna make me happier and more productive and much more effective, rather than eating ramen and trying to suffer through indefinitely. So that’s one thing on the horizon. I think another thing is you have got me thinking now about the model and how do we scale? And I think, you know, from Jeff as well, he had shared, you know, numbers to the equivalent of a single team member for you guys, handling now twice as many clients while maintaining the same standard of excellence. And that is my mantra, too. You know, if I’m being honest with my team. I don’t really want to hire anyone else. Not for a while. Like, you know, more headcount is more complexity, as you’ve taught me. It’s just more headache. But I feel like we’ve got this core team that we can empower through systems, and through automation, and through eliminating a lot of stuff that’s not necessary. We’ve got the team in place that we could easily double our revenue without having to impact the headcount, and delivering just as good of service. So I feel like that’s the vision that I walked away from Texas, and that’s literally on Tuesday when we meet with our team. That’s the vision we’re unveiling to them that I know is going to excite them. And yeah, I think that that’s really what my next year looks at, is improving our quality while also improving our efficiency.
Greg Alexander: Yeah. Well, congrats on getting to that point, because I can tell already. That you have peace of mind.
Greg Alexander: You’re less stressed out. I mean, being an entrepreneur is always stressful, but you were really stressed, you know. And it sounds like you’re less stressed now, which is great, because, you know, more people, more headache. More people, a bigger boat to float every month. So, if you can keep that boat afloat small while not sacrificing client satisfaction, employee satisfaction, etc, it’s just less stressful for the founder. And by grounding yourself in the alternative, which would be, if you weren’t an entrepreneur, you’d have a job with some company. And it’s pretty easy to figure out how much money you would make in that scenario, and you can say to yourself, okay, well, that would be the alternative. So if I’m gonna be an entrepreneur, and I’m gonna take the risk, it needs to be at least that and more to compensate me for the risk. And just having a goal like that, and having a benchmark or a milestone to hold yourself accountable to say, okay, so is this working or not? I mean, how do you know? I mean, being an entrepreneur is a decade-plus long journey. How do you know along the way? How do you hang in there, and stay in the seat, and continue to have faith in the business. You gotta have some grounding elements like that, which you now have, so… Congrats, man, I’m… you’ve made a ton of progress in a short amount of time. One thing I know about you, you go from idea to implementation in a nanosecond. I mean, it seems like just yesterday, we were having a steak, and here you are with all this progress already, so I’m really happy for you.
Justin Nassiri: Oh my God. Thank you. Yeah. And I wanna point out the flip side, though. I think one of the… one of the… benefits of me rubbing shoulders with you for 24 hours. I remember, you know, probably 18 hours in, you said to me, and I think about this all the time, but you said something, you said it kindly, but you’re like, oh, you’re a really impatient person, Justin. And it was a really astute observation, and so the flip side of the idea to implementation is, like, really slowing down, of being a little bit more patient and methodical, and I think having the piece of what that vision looks like allows me to relax into, okay, these are… this is the chess game we’re gonna play to get there, and I don’t have to act impulsively.
Greg Alexander: Yeah. Play the long game. I mean, you know, our point of view, it takes 15 years, cradle to grave. My own journey was 11 years, that was a little quicker than most. Some people take a little bit longer than that. But to hang in there for a decade requires patience. You know, you have to… you have to endure, you know, and sometimes your faith gets questioned. So when you have these grounding principles and you see progress. That’s what allows you to be patient. It’s one thing to know to be patient, it’s another thing to actually be able to do it. And what allows patience is progress, and you’re making the progress. So, congrats. I’ll save the rest of my questions for the member Q&A. Your story is extremely rich. It’s very, very similar to many members, so I’m anticipating our private, member Q&A on Friday to be a very, let’s just say, enthusiastic conversation.
Justin Nassiri: Well, thank you, Greg. I really cannot overstate the generosity as I’m proud of myself for not crying. I have no fear of crying on… online, but as I thought about talking with you about this, I would tear up frequently, because it was so generous of you, and so life-changing, not just for me, but for my team and my family, like, that… it meant so much, and what you are building is so essential that, I… yeah, thank you so much, Greg. Guilty.
Greg Alexander: Well, thank you for saying that. You know, you and your peers are my why. You know, I’ve already had success, you know, a few more dollars in the bank account doesn’t really do it for me, but being able to make an impact on people like you and hear those comments means the world to me, so thank you for sharing that. All right, well that concludes our show this week. Thank you for listeners, thank you for making the time to listen to this, and members, we look forward to the private member Q&A. And, until next episode, I wish you all the best of luck as you try to grow, scale, and someday exit your firms.
Note: This transcript was generated by Zoom.