Ep436: Ali Awad – Accept Low-Risk Payment Methods Only

Andrew Stotz 00:01
Hello fellow risk takers and welcome to my worst investment ever stories of loss to keep you winning. In our community. We know that to win in investing, you must take risk but to win big, you've got to reduce it to join our community, go to my worst investment ever.com and received the following five free benefits. First, you get the risk reduction checklist I created from the lessons I've learned from all of my guests. Second, you get my weekly email to help you increase your investment return. Third, you get a 25% discount on all a Stotz Academy courses. Fourth, you get access to our Facebook community to get to know guests and fellow listeners. And finally, you get my curated list of my favorite 10 episodes fellow risk takers. This is your worst podcast host Andrew Stotz from a Stotz Academy, and I'm here with featured guests, Ali Awad, Ali, are you ready to rock? Let's go baby. You're more than ready. And for the listeners out there, for the listeners out there. He's got this great t shirt for the viewers, they can probably see it. But the T shirt said that dad joke loading. I'm sure we're gonna hear more about that. But let me introduce you to Ali. Ali awhonn, also known as the CEO, lawyer. In fact, you can find him on social media at CEO lawyer that the Add sign and then CEO lawyer, and he's a successful lawyer and entrepreneur with his own multimillion dollar law firm and media company where he teaches lawyers, doctors and other professionals how to brand themselves digitally and generate clients through social media. They take a minute and fill in for the tidbits about your life.

Ali Awad 01:53
Andrew, thank you so much for having me. My name is Ali Awad, and I help injured people make a lot of money. That started as a joke, but now it's trademarked, and we advertise the hell out of it. So I am a personal injury lawyer, I'm that guy that's on, you know, every advertisement, you know, you see the buses, you see the billboards and the radios. That's what I do. I do car accident cases. And it's kind of crazy how I ended up doing this because I always thought I'd be a doctor or an engineer, like my dad, or you know anything else. But my specialty is personal injury law. And my kind of claim to fame is in 2018, where I spent 50 $500, boosting ads from my phone, and generating $3.2 million in revenue for my law firm. And because of that, the CEO, lawyer brand has kind of just evolved and become almost a digital persona that embodies digital lawyer. And so when you think of a lawyer on social media, you should think of CEO lawyer would love you guys to check out my page. And by the end of this episode, I promise I'm going to earn that follow. And I'm going to earn that support.

Andrew Stotz 03:02
You know, I've been outside of the US for so long now almost 30 years, I don't even know is that type of business, a state only business or is it statewide? How does that work?

Ali Awad 03:14
So you can operate in all 50 states, as long as you're a licensed attorney, you can settle cases without having to be licensed in that specific state. But if you have to file a lawsuit, then you could ad hoc in and basically make an exception to the rule where you handle that case in litigation for that specific client. So as long as you're licensed in one state, you can handle cases all over the country. But most lawyers stick to their specific state, their specific jurisdiction, sometimes their own, just their town. But I go nationwide.

Andrew Stotz 03:47
Before we go on to the story, I have to grab a prop here. And the prop is this thing I have in my hand, which is called a Mark Zuckerberg donation device for people like me, because I go into the iPhone, and I go into the Facebook ads app. And I come up with some what I think is a creative and interesting idea. And then I boost that in some way or another. And I get nothing like most people. And I'm just curious if you could give us like one tip from your experience, maybe one little story or something that tells us like it can be done, you can get it at some point and make it work. Sure. So

Ali Awad 04:31
just to give you an idea about the size of my operation right now, you know, in 2021 we spent a quarter million to a half a million dollars a month in digital ads, generating a couple million dollars a month in revenue. And this is not like me managing ad spend, right there's there's all these social media guys that say yeah, you know, we've had on $20 million in ad spend, know it when you spend $20 million out of your own money versus spending 29 Someone else's money. That's a very big difference. So don't talk to me about managing admin unless it's coming out of your pocket. So we spent a ton of money. And here's, I'll tell you what most people make a mistake with. And without even seeing your ads, I'll tell you, your videos probably don't have the fall. So, in order to have

Andrew Stotz 05:21
an Hold on, you got to slow down. Ladies and gentlemen, grab your pen, grab a piece of paper. If you're in your car, stop, pull over and listen. Alright, I got my

Ali Awad 05:29
Yeah, I'm about to drop some bombs. And even though I'm Arab, please understand that that's a metaphor. Here is having show. Yes, sir, here is how you can convert your video ads and make them client generating machines. First, understand this. If it looks like an ad, and it smells like an ad, it's probably a piece of shit. Um, people don't go on social media to be advertised to. They go on social media to be entertained first and educated second, how do you do that? within the first three seconds, you must, you absolutely must do whatever you can to grab that person's attention. You are competing against the cutest puppies and kittens against fitness experts against multi million and billion dollar conglomerates and you expect someone to sit there and watch your really crappy ad with your big, ugly, stupid face. They're not going to do that. Unless you do this, here are a couple of tips that I've used over the years that are extremely effective when you're trying to grab people's attention. And I call it the hook. The first three seconds of the video must have a hook. Why not 30. Ladies and gentlemen, three, three, the first three seconds. Generally, here's the thing. If someone stays on your video for more than three seconds, the likelihood of Facebook showing that video to more people drastically increases. So you have to grab their attention within the first three seconds. If they stay for more than three seconds, then you can probably get them through half of the video. If you get them through half of the video, Facebook will reward you by showing that video to more people for less money. So you are stealing money from your pockets from your family, from your children if you have them. If your videos are boring, so you have to have a proper hook. Here's how you do it. Use your hands, grab people's attention, literally grab their attention on video and say, Hey, stop what you're doing right now and watch this video. If you do that, on your advertisement, people will stop because guess what, that's a pattern interrupt, and they're not used to it. So use your hands. Stop what you're doing right now and watch this video. And so by getting that hook, now you've got their curiosity, and now you need to keep their attention. So in the hook, I like to start with grabbing their attention. Sometimes I like to have a prop. So if you're in a flashy business, throw some cash at the screen, you know, do the ostentatious thing. Just hold the craziest thing ever. You can literally have a big fat kitten in your arms. And I promise you it's going to get people to stop and watch what's going on here. And I'm a personal injury lawyer like it makes absolutely no sense for me to be doing these ostentatious things. But I promise you it will work it has worked for me and it will work for you. grab their attention in the first three seconds next. Don't go straight into selling do not introduce your name in the first three seconds. Go straight into the story because here's the problem with a lot of your ads and I'm not talking about you personally Andrew I'm talking about

Andrew Stotz 08:48
no no's you are advertising no no you are okay Those are my my ads

Ali Awad 08:54
if your ad starts with Hi I'm Ali Awad with Ali Oh law PC and I specialize in fighting for my clients injured in car accidents and truck accidents fighting for maximum compensation. Dude, someone's already scrolled through seven other videos by the time you've gotten through your intro. And you're losing so much money by giving them your name, your location what you do go straight to the value. We have attention deficit disorder big time, you know, and if you can't get their attention within the first few seconds, you've lost it you've lost your money. It's like literally just if you want to introduce your name, do me a favor just take 20 bucks out of your pocket just flush it down the toilet it's a better use of your ad spend Yeah, maybe you'll enjoy it more than just throw giving it to Uncle sucks

Andrew Stotz 09:41
that you might that may be my hook. I'm gonna pay them to do a quick video me flushing money down the toilet and then they go What the heck's that?

Ali Awad 09:48
I promise I promise you that ad will kill. It's gonna crush. So intro first, second, go straight into the story. And third, do it in either Point to Point points are three points, you have to identify a problem in your story. You have to give them the solution in two or three easy steps. And finally, the conclusion is your intro.

Andrew Stotz 10:16
Alright, my gosh, ladies and gentlemen, that's a masterclass. In fact, it's time I've taken a lot of notes. But I'm just about to ask you the question. First of all, I want to thank you, that's a lot of value, and it kind of is smack in the face that wakes you up to think, Okay, I know what I was doing wrong. Now, let me ask you, you've got a story coming up, I'm going to ask you to tell it. But I'd like to ask you to give us a hook. That will get us into the story before it starts and get us thinking, hmm, how is this story going to end? So just to put it to the test, just give us a quick hook. And then I'll ask you the question.

Ali Awad 10:57
When I was 11 years old, my dad got pulled over by the police. And it was a scariest moment of my life. That's because my dad was not a US citizen. And all six of his children, myself included, were not wearing seatbelts. Hmm. Right, I'll give you that. And then we'll go into the rest of the story later,

Andrew Stotz 11:18
well, then that's a great way to say now it's time to share your worst investment ever. And since no one goes into their worst investment, thinking it will be. Tell us a bit about the circumstances leading up to it. And then tell us your story about your dad and seat belts and getting pulled over and all that. Take it away, Ali.

Ali Awad 11:36
So at the age of 19, I had about 14 years of experience as an entrepreneur, I started selling pictures of Dragonball Z characters. When I was in elementary school at the age of five, my dad was one of few people that had a color printer at home because he was an engineer. And what I would do is, I would go online, and I would type in Dragonball Z in Yahoo, because no one used or heard of Google at the time, we typed in a Yahoo, Dragonball Z character. And there will be new characters that would populate on the images almost every single day. That's how early the internet was in the 90s. And what I would do is I would print those off, and I would cut the URL off the bottom of the page. So no one knew my source. And I did that because I felt like if I gave the URL, someone might be able to reverse engineer my entire business model. And I just couldn't afford to do that. So I would sell these pictures to students at you know, H 567, in elementary school. And that's how I started my first hospital and my first business. By the age of 19, I had gone through probably five different companies. And I decided, as I graduated high school, I wanted to start a wholesale Car Audio company, what I was doing was buying car audio from major distributors and selling them online. Or I would find auction websites that were still in their infancy where there were not a lot of users. And I would go in and identify very hot electronic items and sell them on other websites. I was buying from a website called ubud.com. And I would sell on eBay, I was buying from some of the biggest Car Audio manufacturers and distributors, from, you know, Las Vegas to California all the way to Miami, and anywhere in between. and I would sell them again on eBay, because I knew how to build an auction page, buy it now page, I had a full fledged online store by Middle School. So by 19, I decided I want to take this to the next level, I would have a wholesale Car Audio company and decided that instead of selling online, I want to sell wholesale to other retailers in my general area within a 30 mile radius of my hometown of Dalton, Georgia, because I thought I would rather be the man and I would rather go and get cash because I love cash. You know, you can't take a direct deposit and shake it in your face. You know, I want that cash money, baby. So needless to say, I started this company AMD wholesalers a lot master distributors. And I started taking some car audio and driving around to all of the different car audio shops. And I quickly realized that most retailers are not going to buy from a 19 year old kid that has a bunch of car audio shoved in the trunk of their mom's car. And so that was a wake up call. But I didn't let it deter me. I just kept going. I kept hustling. And eventually I worked my way up to landing a major account in New Orleans, which was about, I don't know, four or 500 miles away from where I was located. I found these retailers out there. They were Arab Palestinian just like me, Muslims, so I thought hey, you know, we can vibe we know we're from the same hood. And I said these are great customers. So the very first thing They placed about a 15 or $18,000 order with me. I went and drove all the way to New Orleans, with my dad and my brother. And we were so excited. You know, we got to know the family, I was like, hey, this first major deal, let's go and get this money. And we delivered it. And while I was there, I remember standing in the retail store. And as an example of how great my product was, I helped them sell the product that I was giving to them wholesale to a retail customer for like 20 times more than I was charging them. I remember it was a pair of elf audio door speakers, I sold it to the customer for $1,000. And their wholesale price was $50. And from that moment on, they were like, Dude, this is the stuff, this is what we want. So they paid me for the order. I drove home happy with a bunch of cash. And I was feeling good. Now on their second order was for $25,000. Same thing, load up the big old trailer with car audio. This time I went by myself, said Look, I know my way over there, I'm just going to go over there, drop off the car, audio come back. And this time, they gave me a stack of checks. They said, Hey, we're gonna give you this post dated checks. And we just want you to deposit them two or three weeks out, and just kind of give us a little bit of time, but we'll pay you No worries. So if you don't want y'all are good for it. You know, we have a good relationship. Let's do it. I guess you can kind of tell which direction this went. The first check I deposited was for like 60 $400. It bounced. Amen. Ring Ring ring. What's going on? Oh, yeah, man. Sorry, we had to shut that account down. You know, it wasn't you know, there were some fraudulent activity in there. You know, I'm going to send you some new checks. Okay, well, what am I going to do with all these other checks? Yeah, just just don't worry about them. I'll send you some new checks. Okay, throw those away? Yeah. What are you going to send them to me? Um, yeah, man, just, you know, we had to shut that account down. So I'll just give you some other checks. And then, okay, fine. I waited a week. Okay, man, no checks yet, what's going on? Hey, man, you know, we actually got that account opened back up. So if you can go ahead and deposit that $2,000 check the next one in the series, you know, it should be good. I'll put a little bit more money in the account so we can get up to speed. Thank you so much for being patient. This dragged on and on and on for several weeks. At some point, I gave him a call and call them out on it said, Hey, man, dude, I feel like you're trying to rip me off. And I think I'm just gonna go over there and get my stuff back, cuz you're not gonna pay me anything. He said, Sure. Why don't you come over here, and I'll put a bullet in your head. So at the age of 19, I lost $25,000, which was a lot of money at that time. And I learned, number one, don't accept payment in the form of check when there's a potential of it being bounced. That also applies to credit card transactions for people that dispute them. It also applies for people that send you an AC h instead of an actual wire, it applies to literally any circumstance where you're not getting cold, hard cash, or a direct wire that is irreversible. So I knew from that moment on, I never wanted to risk my life for a little bit of money. And I definitely definitely didn't want to work and not get paid. So I decided the wholesale business was not for me, I decided to regress and go back into the retail business. And during that time, I kept selling online, opened up another car audio shop in Kennesaw where I went to college about a year later, and just kept hustling and working until I saved up enough money and decided to go to law school. So that was my worst investment ever. And it was partly because I was blinded by the cash. I thought that a $25,000 is a lot of money, you know, but when something is too good to be true, it is. Yep. And if someone is randomly calling you when they could have called any distributor, or any other provider and gotten the same exact service, okay, for maybe even a little bit cheaper, what makes you so special? Why would they go out of their way to pay you more money or treat you any differently? And so it's because you're a sucker. That's why. And so I learned that the hard way, and I'll tell you this, I used to say that, you know, that was the last time that I you know, ever lose $25,000 But to be honest, you know, last month I lost like $200,000 and you know, it's just all part of the game, but the difference is that I can absorb that loss out of it. And it's it's calculated risk. So it's, it's, it's a side effect to growth, so I'm okay with it. But that was my worst investment ever, which happened to result in becoming my best lesson ever.

Andrew Stotz 19:47
So let's go through what lessons did you learn?

Ali Awad 19:51
You know, the, like I said, the first lesson is, don't accept payment if it can balance. Yep, any sort of payment that can balance just just don't accept it. Don't be in a high risk. business, especially if you want to build a solid foundation. Yep. Second is, I want a business that can scale without my involvement. I want to be the one that's making the sales all the time. And that's why the core audio business didn't really work well for me, because what I'm really what I'm really an expert at, is wheels and tires. So I learned a lot about car audio. I know all these different model numbers are literally like, ingrained in my head. But I learned every bolt pattern of every single vehicle for every wheel that exists in America. So any vehicle that comes into my shop, I could tell you, what's the bolt pattern, the offset the maximum wheel size that you put on there, what tire size you need, and I've memorized all of it. And that was just very useless knowledge because no one else could duplicate it, you know? So I wanted a business that I could McDonald eyes and scale. And what I what I didn't realize was, as I became obsessed with scaling, I was actually skilling, I was improving my skills, I was learning how to try new types of businesses, retail, wholesale online, I was speaking three different languages grew up speaking Spanish at home, with my friends, English at school and Arabic with my family. So I was doing, I was utilizing all these skills and polishing my skills of salesmanship, and persuasion. And that's what is really my competitive advantage in today's day and age. So some people try to skip steps. They look at a business, they say, Oh, well, that guy's making a lot of money. And they're blinded by the amount of money that person makes. That was the mistake that I was making. I was jumping from one business to the next I had seven different companies before I became an attorney. And none of them were really that successful. But I've learned so much. I literally bought an apartment complex using credit cards while I was in law school. And when you have that kind of experience, that was going to be my second worst investment ever. But you ask for the worst. So you know, when you learn these things, you learn how to leverage credit, you learn how to sell you learn how to power online, you learn how to utilize social media, you learn how to hire people, you learn how not to get ripped off, eventually, all of those skills culminate, and you'll find something that's going to take all of your experiences, and manifest themselves into the best position possible. And some people wait until they're 40 or 50, to be able to do that, because I really lived as an adolescent and in my 20s, and travelled the world and tried so many different businesses. I became a millionaire at 28. But guess what, I was still living with a roommate spending $300 a month in rent. I was skilling, I was learning the skill of delayed gratification, you know, so you see all these important skills that are out there, but you haven't taken the time and invested in yourself, to allow yourself to grow and position yourself to succeed. So the skills, the skills, it's all about the skills, man. So you got enough skills, they are transferable anywhere.

Andrew Stotz 23:07
So scaling up, actually, you use skilling up, that's a great way of saying it. So maybe I'll summarize one, let my take away. It made me think about a story. Ollie, when I was young, I was 17, I bought my first motorcycle. And I had, I had basically been working for cash. And at a restaurant and every day I would come home and I would take like the 20 bucks or 50 bucks that I made. I was a pizza delivery guy. And every day I would stack it on to the other cash I had at home. And I would move it to a different location every day. You know, like thinking, I'm going to outsmart someone that's going to break into the house and find my cash. And when I found 500 bucks, you know, when I finally accumulated $500 in cash, ladies and gentlemen, this is the old days when we didn't buy things on credit, we saved up for them. And I saved up my 500 bucks. And I went and bought this Suzuki 550 whatever it was secondhand and didn't really know how to drive a motorcycle much. I just ridden a little bit. I took it out. And I drove it home. And I had a great time with that. And then time came to sell it in a couple of years. So later whenever it was a guy in my hometown, Tim Hutchinson bought this boaters motorcycle for me. And he gave me a check. And I went to the bank and I said no, I'm not taking that check, unless you come down to the bank with me. And then when we get to the bank, I'm going to give me the check. I'm going to give it to them, they're going to cash it I'm going to get the cash in my hand. And when I do, I'll sign the title over to you. So this was my you know, I was just I was terrified. I mean, I'm just a young guy and I don't have much money. I can't mess around with losing, you know, the 500 bucks or whatever it was that we were doing that and I think as I recall is 750 bucks anyways, so done deal. I got the cash. I sign over the title. We both go home happy. A day later I get a call from the bank. said, Bring the cash back. What? What, what, what you already paid me the cash. They said, No, they stopped payment on the check, and you need to bring the cash back. I had to go back to the bank, give them back to 750 bucks. And they said there's a rule that they could stop payment within three days. And I'd have to bring the cash back. Whether they were lying to me or not, I have no idea. But I trusted the bank. And I just did what they said. And then I went back to get the motorcycle and the title and he refused to give it to me. I had to take him to court. And then eventually the court, the court agreed that, you know, I had been ripped off and they had to and then I learned the next lesson is just collecting on a court order is a whole nother thing. So I learned a lot of lessons from it. But it does remind me of the importance of cash. And if you think you think not, and I know what you're talking about, I got everything covered. No, no, you need to cover everything, everything, everything, maybe even start with a small amount of transaction and tests your idea of how you're getting paid. But you just really bring up the importance of cash and getting paid, because any great business is not going to be great. If you can't get paid for it. Anything you would add to that.

Ali Awad 26:10
Well, I'm a personal injury lawyer. And last time I checked state farms checks don't bounce, you know. So when I get these, you know, we like I said, we settle a couple of million dollars a month now. And so when these checks come in, it's something that I can rely on, you know, if you're in a business, where your accounts receivable are your accounts receivables are unreliable or unpredictable, it's very hard to scale those types of businesses, you're always relying on that next check to hit that next payment to come through. And, look, we're in an age now where people don't do cash, people just don't really carry as much cash. Well, what you can do is instead of accepting credit card payments and a high risk industry and using someone like stripe or PayPal, connect your actual bank account, to your website for payments. And instead of accepting credit cards, make people pay with a direct deposit. So grab their bank account info if you're in the e commerce business or something because there's people can always dispute transactions, right? But do whatever you can to make sure that when you get paid that money is not going anywhere. Some businesses have a set amount of transactions that get disputed. And maybe sometimes you need to factor that into your costs, you know, hey, yep, this, we're in a very high risk industry 20% of the transactions get disputed. So I'm going to factor that into my overhead. So whatever business you're in, make sure that if you're doing the work that you actually get paid, and there's a very high likelihood of you getting paid.

Andrew Stotz 27:43
Alright, last question, what's your number one goal for the next 12 months?

Ali Awad 27:48
Next 12 months, I'm currently at about 31 or 32 employees, I'd like to be at 100. I'm currently spending a little over a quarter million a month and ads, I'd like to get to a million a month. I you know, I told myself I'd start five new businesses this year, I think I already did. But I really want to focus on diversification. Because now that I have a kid, you know, my kid just turned a month old yesterday, my first baby may be Adam. I'm putting a price tag on my peace of mind and diversification more than just my active income. So I've become obsessed with building a system where it doesn't require my time or my involvement. And so in the next 12 months, I need to have at least one completely new business that can generate consistently, seven figures in profit annually. And I want to try to set it up in 90 days. And I actually started a new law firm literally today.

Andrew Stotz 28:57
And here, I'll give you a challenge. Yeah, I did not set it up to sell it and start by valuing it right from the beginning and absolute value and the sale?

Ali Awad 29:09
Well, absolutely, because I've been studying it a little bit, we had this discussion offline. And in terms of valuation of companies, I understand that if you have a residual payment or some sort of residual income on the you know, from a particular client, that drastically increases the valuation of the company. And so I'm building a new business that I believe can have some sort of recurring payment method or residual payment model. And I do intend to sell it within about three years. And it's just going to be a cash cow. And I'm going to see if I can utilize everything that I've learned over the past five years of running this law firm, but digitizing it, scaling it systematizing it and selling it and I already have the number in mind, I need to get at least $100 million out of it net. So all I got to do is just reverse engineer it and go from there.

Andrew Stotz 29:57
Well, listeners There you have it another story of loss to keep you winning. My measly little number one goal for the next 12 months is to help you my listeners to reduce risk in your life and increase return. To achieve this, I've created our community at my worst investment ever.com. And I look forward to seeing you all there. As we conclude, Ali, I want to thank you again for coming on the show. And on behalf of a Stotz Academy, I hereby award you alumni status returning your worst investment ever into your best teaching moment. Do you have any parting words for the audience, and I suggest you may want to close that hook about that story about being in that car without a seatbelt. We do that.

Ali Awad 30:46
When I was 11 years old, my dad got pulled over by the police. And it was a scariest moment in my life. That's because my dad was not a US citizen. And all six of his children, myself included, were not wearing seatbelts. Now, I realized that that fear stayed with me throughout the rest of my life. Fear every time I heard blue lights, fear every time I hear police sirens, and especially the fear of seeing a man in euro form, or even worse, a judge in a row. Now, I figured out how to use that fear as my primary motivator to help others in times of injustice. My name is Ali Awad, and I am the CEO lawyer. While some people and some lawyers choose to fight, I have no choice but to fight. I'm a fighter. I'm a winner. And I promise you, if you hire me to handle your personal injury case, you will succeed and you will walk away with a lot of money. You call a wad. You went a lot. 833 Leo od. That's my story. That's my hook. Thank you guys so much. Feel free to check me out on social media at CEO lawyer. And Andrew, thank you so much for having me. Man. This has been a blast has been a true pleasure and honor meeting with you today. And I hope we can do it again soon.

Andrew Stotz 32:11
And that's a wrap on another great story to help us create, grow and protect our well fellow risk takers. This is your worst podcast host Andrew Stotz, with the best CEO, lawyer, audio one and I'll see you on the upside.