Discovery Call - 60 or 90 mins between Dmitri Sunshine and Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit — Full Transcript
Date: March 16, 2026 | Duration: 90 min | Speakers: Christian LeFer, Jacquelyn Long, Dmitri Sunshine
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: This meeting is being recorded. Hey, Dimitri.
Dmitri Sunshine: Christian. How are you, brother?
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: I’m doing well. I apologize. The reason I didn’t send you the materials earlier and only sent them a few minutes ago is because Jackie and I were on a screen share earlier and we both. We agreed that we would move the call to tomorrow. And this was very early in the morning. Yeah, I thought she was doing it and she thought I was doing it, and I’ve been having terrible network issues. So I was like, okay, you do it. Well, it’s totally my fault because she thought I was doing it and I was. But then I was like, all right, I’ll let you do it. I’ll let you pick the time. So we may want to give you a chance to review those, but we. Can we do an intro. I’ll. I’ll defer to you. Jackie was wanting to have a little bit more time prior to meeting, but.
Dmitri Sunshine: Okay, so she’s still going to join us today?
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: Yes, she’ll be here any second. We just literally the reason. Yeah. And that was the other thing. This. We had another meeting, literally just ends seconds before this one started. And so I. We thought. Both thought that this thing was moving. And then I looked at the end of that meeting and I was like, wait a second, didn’t you. So if you want to take a minute and review, look at those theory, we can all mutually agree to get back together or whatever.
Dmitri Sunshine: Well, no, let’s. I mean, the thing is that there’s so much here to dig into already in terms of what we’ve talked about and understanding. I mean, I think the biggest thing for me, this would be really interesting once Jackie joins to get her side. Right. Because I got. I got an understanding from you.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: Oh, no, you don’t want her side. You just want my side.
Dmitri Sunshine: That’s what the guys always say. Yeah.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: Jackie. Dimitri.
Jacquelyn Long: Hi, Dimitri.
Dmitri Sunshine: Oh, hello. How are you?
Jacquelyn Long: I’m very good. How are you doing?
Dmitri Sunshine: I am actually excellent. This is a very exciting day. I work through the weekend and still have plenty of energy to start the week.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: Me too. Yeah, I literally slept at my office and I slept at my cousins right around the corner from the office. Because I was. I did so much with AI this weekend. I learned so much. I deployed. I got things done. Not just learning or starting something, but a lot, a lot of stuff.
Dmitri Sunshine: Okay. I’m excited to hear what you’ve been doing, but because we got Jackie here and let’s just come back to the. The goal of this meeting, the intention here is to figure out where you guys are currently at, like how we might be able to come in to help you. Like what’s the 8020 right now? Right. So what would really move the needle forward the most for you guys? So I mean Christian, you and I spent apparently 90 something minutes the other day. But Jackie, I was wondering if you wanted to introduce yourself and tell me about like your side of what do you like, what do you see as your challenges here? How would you love to see this, this working relationship? What are you most needing at this time for from your standpoint?
Jacquelyn Long: Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate it. So I think there’s two core parts of the business that potentially need support. One is the high ticket offer that I know Christian, you talked about and support there is going to be the implementation layer of how that offer is built out. And that offer will be built, built out with some AI technology or processes and systems that we’re not going to have time to build. So historically in this business I’ve been the one who’s built a lot of that backend stuff but that should not be where I’m spending a lot of my time anymore. I’m more of an operational visionary. We need some support to be able to take a lot of that and get it integrated. And so with that also comes a different layer of expertise which it looks like you have some, which is like the AI infrastructure but not just that, like also smart lens on customer experience and also a smart lens on like what an evergreen solution is going to look like, not just like what a cool agentic layer might look like right now. So like that’s the high ticket offer side of things because we’re going to kind of build that plane as we go. And so it would be very, very helpful for us to have some support there inside of the actual business of instant nonprofit. We also have a similar situation going on where Christian and I are building a lot of stuff but then we get stuck spending a lot of time having to implement a lot of stuff and, or train the team and so on and so for. And that is a gap that we’re certainly looking to fill because if we can have an idea and a strategy on something and give that to an integrator to help implement, but also train the team so that they can start implementing that would really make the company run a lot faster. And so there’s opportunity for that and connecting some disparate business systems together, there’s opportunity for that and potentially like a fulfillment 2.0 agentic layer on top of the automations that we currently have. There would be probably some database and probably some compliance and security stuff we’d want to make sure that we’d be paying attention to, which it looks like you have a lot of experience in. And that role in the company too, is kind of a hybrid operator role that we’ve discussed in the past. So it’s not just integration of technology, but it’s also team management and a head of ops situation so that Christian and I can get outside of some of the day to day. Because right now we’re embedded in some of that and it really stops us from being able to do the things that we know would grow the business. So I hope that makes kind of sense. On what. Where my head’s at.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah. Love it. Yeah. So you guys, you guys are aware of where you’re falling short right now? Yeah, yeah. And Kristen, do you want to add anything?
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: Well, I see sort of three roles and I just edited a little document that we kind of had to prepare for this, but I see sort of an immediate need or gap in. So I’m going out to investors right now, and I’m not super confident in how much money we need, what the basis is. Do we need a million? Do we need 2 million? Does AI change that? It’s too late to change. I can’t go change the deck, like on the spot right this second when, like David Meltzer expected the deck over the weekend. If I get it out by lunchtime today, west coast, hey, he’s going to be happy. Right? But it’s time to get to ship this thing. But I have questions, even doubting my own understanding of how and why to use a safe versus a straight equity play. As I sell high ticket, the need to raise money might be eased a little bit. Right. And. And there’s going to be some adjustments there. So. Yeah, so I see three areas like in the, in sort of investor piece and, and the, the equity capital piece and then sort of the iconic impact high ticket, building things for people, delivering them for people, just creating a framework to deliver for these customers. Kind of the build as we fly thing that you and I talked extensively about. And then C, which on this document is B, sort of this head of operations, you know, integrator
Dmitri Sunshine: role. Yeah. Okay, so let’s, let’s back up a little bit because I know you want to. You’ve been on this journey of raising for instant non profits. One of the things that I want to make sure that we cover is like what is. What do you feel like are the biggest Landmines that you might step on in the next. Because that’s really like the crux of Solanasis. Like we’re, we’re here to make sure that we can make sure you don’t end up stepping on a landmine that makes the whole process of raising money feel like moot. Because you’re like now we’re just in emergency repair mode. So I understand, like what do you feel like are the biggest fragilities in
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: the business right now for, for the fundraising piece?
Dmitri Sunshine: No, for just instant non profits. To survive. Like a hit. Right. If it gets a gut punch.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: Well, I mean the gut punch right now is that we have these broken funnels that isn’t.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: Like, so if I could put things in order this week of like order of priority and need to be solved this week at some level it would be provide. So we have this PBC CRO person, right. Seems well accomplished, willing to dive in and get things done for us and not bill us any more than he’s being paid to do the PPC and CRO, right. Even though this is an extra lift, other than paying his debt, who’s relatively cheap, right. 30 bucks an hour and he, he sort of, you know, manages the dev. He’s worked with this person before. So if I said, okay, there are three things that like must happen this week, must get a handle on what the trajectory is and push that trajectory forward to get the basic sales machine right. The, the sales funnels that we have all kinds of errors on right now and all kinds of problems fixed because we’re driving, not only are we wasting Google Ads, but it’s choking us out slowly and it’s, it’s undoubtedly harder to raise money if we’re slightly down from last year. We’re fighting to do the same number of non profits this year as last year. Like it’s just choking us. So that’s number one. And I think that could be like whiteboard a page vibe, code it, get some conversion improvement, you know, and then, and then develop a longer term strategy for, you know, split testing and sort of repairing that whole system so that it’s more robust and reliable. That’s number one. Number two is I, I’ve got to get out in the field right now for investors that would be going over the materials with somebody who has experience in that area because Jackie did an admirable job, but she’s got about zero experience in this. And so I need somebody to work with and bounce things off of and be like, here’s the story what questions do I need to be prepared for with when an investor comes back? Hey, what’s your go to market? Jackie helped with that. But it’s like I need to have somebody that I can go through the basic underpinnings of the deck and say what are the. What are the questions that are. They’re going to come back with and at least be begin to be prepared to be ready and make sure that my financial model matches my deck matches my executive summary. Yeah, that’s 2, 3 is the high ticket. And there’s something common about the high ticket and the investor piece and that is that I have this system that I told you about this, this pipeline, the sales pipeline that I at least need to be moderately functional to service both high ticket prospects and investor prospects so that I can go shovel 20 or 30 leads into each and then just work it. And that’s not a hard project. That’s like a couple of hours establishing what is the MVP and why and then building it out. Couple automations or a couple of, you know, basic, a basic protocol for each so that those can be underway and I can just. Then again, I can build as I fly and start raising the money, getting people to book meetings, getting the interest, going through my Rolodex and house, pushing people into my funnel, into my pipe sales pipeline.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah, yeah.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: If we did those three things, I mean, we’d achieve all of our goals this year. That. Those are the, those are the things on the critical path to reaching our goals this year.
Dmitri Sunshine: Okay, so Jackie, back to you. What would you like to add to that?
Jacquelyn Long: Nothing really.
Dmitri Sunshine: Okay.
Jacquelyn Long: At this point. Yeah, I mean, I agree with some of those and the other stuff, it would be down the road.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: Right.
Jacquelyn Long: Like, I’m pretty clear on what I need to accomplish, but Christian needs support so that stuff is relevant. But you know, the CRO stuff that he’s talking about is being worked on by our Google Ads guy. So we do have support there.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: Well, we don’t know what he’s doing. We don’t know what the plan is to not have the broken funnels. Maybe you know, they’re like fixing Java errors and stuff right now. And, and it just, the stuff’s coming up every day. I think we need to give them and that we have no idea what their plan is. He hasn’t said, here’s what I’m going to do this week, I’m going to do this next day, I’m going to do that. There’s no idea whether he’s designing, pushing his Deb to do anything. Like it’s very passive. We can’t afford passivity. So weird.
Dmitri Sunshine: Okay, so what’s with the dynamics here? Because this is such a critical part to your business right now that.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: Well, we, we just switched. He’s, he, he’s really just our ppc.
Dmitri Sunshine: Okay.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: Who also, who does add to checkout? He doesn’t just do ads like everybody else we’ve had with ads. He designs pages, he writes copy, he does split tests also. But while he was barely getting onboarded, we basically said, hey, guess what? We have a complete shit show. And we’re driving ads to funnels that have JavaScript errors, plug in updates that are breaking everything and aren’t people aren’t converting, right? So he’s just wrapping his, literally wrapping his head around all that stuff. But he’s also by personality, I can tell he’s just not somebody who goes, okay, here’s what we’re going to do. He says, oh well, I’ll have my dev look at it. We’ll fix what’s wrong right now. We can do the whole thing. And then he sort of was, he responded to what? So we had fun Analytics. We were working with a company called funnelytics which is well known for split testing and measurement and they have great tools and stuff, stuff to measure funnels performance. We wasted a lot of money with. We wasted. Jack, you’ll probably be right back. She’s been having some weird issues dropping off of these meetings. So Fun analytics said, well, WordPress is your problem. We have a lot of clients going through this. So many things that can be updated, that break plugins, themes, WordPress itself, and then it breaks the other thing. And this has been happening to us every quarter at least, so. So they suggested moving to migrating the entire site to webflow for something different, as I mentioned to you. And then I said, okay, sounds great. Went to Brandon, said this is what they’re recommending. And he’s like, well, we could do that too. But then as that conversation was evolving, I was like, wait a second, I need to question all assumptions, including that we need to migrate the entire site, right? And then I realized I was learning Vibe coding and I Vibe coded that page and I said, okay, we could probably just inject an HTML page into the mix if it’s well designed through the WordPress platform, but not have any WordPress on there. Just do an HTML push and at least for now, solve the problem of people not going from, you know, opt in to checkout or sales page ad, click to checkout.
Dmitri Sunshine: Gotcha okay, so majority of your clients you’re finding are you getting through these funnels, through adword funnels, and right now you’re having issues with them actually completing the checkout or just like where do you feel like they’re getting stuck?
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: I mean, I could give you the Microsoft Clarity report, but they’re getting Java errors, they’re getting button errors. We fixed a whole bunch of stuff lately, but we continually, every day, day we’re seeing more errors.
Dmitri Sunshine: And did you guys ever have any kind of CTO here that was setting up, you know, like SOPs and the automated testing?
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: No. And we had a guy that was with us for a long time that we aren’t working with any longer, but he was kind of like a fractional cto. He was like a full stack marketer, but love Andrew, but he’s kind of on the spectrum and a little difficult to work with. So we decided not to work with them anymore. And that’s part of the problem is we don’t have anybody technical on the team right now. And then we had an ads person that was only an ads person. Now our new ads guy is a full stack guy, but like I said, he doesn’t even know where the bathrooms are at instant nonprofit yet. Like he’s fresh. We don’t know him that well. He didn’t sign up for this. And I don’t think he’s the kind of guy that’s going to come to us with this real structured approach. But again, it’s so new. I, I, you know, we’re basically without a tech person, which has been a big vulnerability for us.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: And I don’t want to get too, too far into that one thing because if we just accept the premise, funnels too complicated make it hard for people to convert anyway and have errors. And if we just kind of accept that as a truth and I don’t mind if you poke holes in something, but that’s just a problem that we could spend hours right now on. It’s probably not a good, you know, use of time to get too far into other than those two situations exist and we don’t have a very clear path.
Dmitri Sunshine: Gotcha. Okay. So then brings me back to revenue and growth. Like what are you guys doing in revenue? What’s your year over year growth like right now?
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: Nothing. Zero flat. That’s the problem. That’s what I was mentioning to you. I’m trying to raise money and with a headwind of having an Absolutely flat 24 to 25 year through 25. Yeah, we did we spent six figures on this new brand colors funnels. Now the customer portal worked out really well. We deliver at scale on the back end and the same, same agency did that as did the front end but they bollocks up our front end entirely with over complicated multiple pages, no dynamic, you know even that one I thing I vibe coded dynamically produces the correct package for people. Whereas those guys had us dropping into four different pages, four different funnels and then they never even finished the job on those. So we’ve been kind of just. We didn’t even use the quiz funnel. We ended up going to a page where the person had to think a lot, watch a video and compare a bunch of confusing packages and that’s probably why we have no growth.
Dmitri Sunshine: And your competitors did grow or do you not have enough data points to know like how’s the.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: It’s hard to tell. They’re private companies and I don’t know that it matters as much to me because there’s been some acquisition and there’s some, there’s been some consolidation a little bit in the, in the niche.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: But we’re doing a half of 1%.
Dmitri Sunshine: Oh really?
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: Yeah. So it’s, it’s not a saturated market at all. And our reviews, I mean if you just look at our. That’s why it would be better maybe to do this call after you had a chance to look at this materials. There’s a lot that I gave you that answers what we’ve done, where we’re stuck, you know, what our revenues are, what the competitive landscape is. I have a detailed competitive analysis for example linked out of the investor materials.
Dmitri Sunshine: Okay. I mean I will definitely go through that after our call to have a better idea before I send you over any kind of proposals. So what do you think you’re leaving on the table right now? Because when we talked it sounded like you used the analogy I’m like a ob GYN who just delivers babies and that and I have no clue what happens to them.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: Yeah, I have data enhancement. I have several projects that will solve the problems of the company. We don’t have an operational layer to deliver those. For example, we need an agent. We need an agent voice person. We have to get Liz off of sales calls.
Dmitri Sunshine: Okay.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: She’s burnt out. She shouldn’t even be doing sales calls. And know we had a full time salesperson we let go about a year ago. It just wasn’t, it wasn’t a model that was working. It was hard to find somebody knowledgeable enough. And so now with hundreds and hundreds of sales calls. We have enough data to train a pretty qual. I think a pretty qualified AI agent.
Dmitri Sunshine: So you have all the data from those sales calls? They’ve all been transcribed.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: Tons, Tons. And I, I built out a whole, a whole pro. I have a project that is viable and ready to go which need somebody to help drive our team through implementation.
Dmitri Sunshine: Okay.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: I also have a project heat up for data enhancement to go back into our own database and look at all of the babies that we’ve birthed and see that they’re prime ministers, presidents, etc, some are dead, some are alive.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: And survey them and be like, what else do you need? How can we help you? Et cetera, et cetera. And also do reports and you know, like case studies and, and testimonials. I mean it’s crazy that we are not doing that again. The project’s built out, we don’t have anybody to implement it and we’re pretty thin on the team. But the idea is to get Liz free of sales calls. She’s the other domain expert besides me at the company.
Dmitri Sunshine: Okay.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: And free her up from sales calls. And she could do quite a bit of customer outreach, sales of higher ticket versus the $1,000 products. And then she can do webinars and help develop products and stuff. She’s very smart. She used to run a three and a half million dollar nonprofit that she built from 200K.
Dmitri Sunshine: Wow. Okay. How many full time staff do you have right now?
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: I can share. I’ll. I’ll send you our org chart. We have about eight half full time. I’m a half w, two half contractors.
Dmitri Sunshine: Okay. Okay. So back to this question of like what, what would really move the needle forward in the next 30, 60 and 90 days? Right. So right now you’ve got immediate issues with the website that are possibly preventing people from signing up. So you’re losing people on that. So getting that fixed, having automated testing actually in place to confirm that the website, everything’s working on a daily basis because if it goes down, you guys are losing. I don’t know how much you lose a day, but it’s definitely worthwhile to spend the time to have something that’s checking that everything’s working.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: We do have, I don’t know if it’s automated, but I did develop a project to do that based on Microsoft clarity, which records errors and etc. And so Catherine’s doing that I think every day.
Dmitri Sunshine: Okay. But she’s manually checking. So it’s not like you get like essentially, you know, text message of like
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: hey, it’s a zap away.
Dmitri Sunshine: Okay, got it. Jacqueline, is there anything you, you want to add?
Jacquelyn Long: I don’t think so. I don’t think so.
Dmitri Sunshine: Okay. I mean, what do you, what do you see as the biggest like opportunities that you haven’t been able to, to jump on right now in terms of like upsells and because you already have like 5,000 or let’s say, you know, 4,000 minus the ones that aren’t in business now, people that you could reach out to, like, what do you think you could be upselling or doing with that? Because that is a huge asset. Right. The existing people that came through.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: Yeah, I mean I have a whole array of, you know, I have an array of services. I mean certainly everybody should be in autopilot, which is taxes, annual report and wraparound support and basic training. Jackie’s developing with Liz. Know how to upgrade that and make that more valuable.
Jacquelyn Long: So yeah, I just, I’m gonna jump in on this part. I look at it like there’s three core areas to try to grow the business. One is formations, obviously. Right. And so if we can crack the code on ppc, which we’re hoping Brandon can do. Brandon’s, we’re still feeling him out, but he does have a reputation for cracking the code on some things. And so if he can do that and turn the Toyota company into at least a two to $3 million company, that’s fantastic. So that’s like number one. And that includes some of the site fixes. The second piece, I believe is the high ticket offers. And there’s two components to that. One is selling into our prospect now, which is someone who actually wants to start a non profit scale it, take it more seriously and all that. So there’s that program. I also believe that there’s partnerships. Those partnerships exist with family offices, advisories, wealth management. I was involved in conversations about that this weekend. So like I think there’s two aspects of that. So working both sides of that. The third is Autopilot. That’s our current recurring revenue product. That’s a compliance product. We need to improve the take rate on that, we need to improve the retention rate on that. We need to improve the cancellation and failed payment systems. We also have an opportunity to upgrade that and probably increase its price, which would also help. So those are the three areas that I think would be the core areas of focus to grow the business and to make up for some of the, you know, the revenue that we’ve had with this site crisis.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah. And what’s stopping you Right now, besides having like. So if you had a technical person that come in to do that, what would be the next barrier that you need across?
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: I mean if these.
Jacquelyn Long: I think there’s strategy development that’s required definitely like in the high ticket offer side of things, like what are the materials, what is the, you know, like what is the actual approach? So the strategy of it then there would be building some of those systems inside of there Autopilot again would just need a potential build, potential optimization inside of the, the current build that it has and just kind of tinkering with the systems that already exist. And I think the biggest obstacle is really time. Like a lot of meetings, a lot of team management, a lot of issues. I’m, you know, and then both of us have events and stuff that we go to, to network and to drum up business. I’m just coming back from south by Southwest. I have an entire day of meetings and I can’t go build the thing I need to build or execute on the thing I need to execute on because I’m stuck. And so that’s really. I think the biggest obstacle is time. And then Christian and I both being drug across every single topic. So we need to also separate and divide and conquer in a lot of stuff too. But we’re the ult decision makers on things. And so that’s, that’s a little bit of a block.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah. Kirsten, anything else?
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: No, I mean all of these things is again, it’s, it’s in the deck. We need a marketing, somebody to run marketing. We need an operator like a coo. We could use a sales and partnerships person after those things are in place. Right. We get the, we get the conveyor belt back up and running and grow it as it should be. And then we have an operational layer that helps us to just get these projects into a more ideal stream and process like sprints for projects and manage things better and just make sure, you know, we’re not the one. I mean, we’re PMing everything and just working directly with all of our staff, etc. And so we have a lot of the right ideas, but they don’t get implemented. And we’ve been actually trying to recruit an, you know, an operator for past several months. But the money that we were expecting to come in to cover that,
Dmitri Sunshine: you
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: know, has not materialized because of the issues with the site and the funnels. Right. So if we, again, I keep going back to just. If we unlock the things that we know our, the 90 days to a million basically plan all of this other stuff we have in some, you know, strategy docs and stuff, most many of which I’ve shared with you and would be able to, you know, we want to work in a process where we evaluate the next best, you know, we evaluate the options that we have, do a forest matrix and evaluate how long they would take to get to market and all that stuff, how many, how much resources, what makes the most sense and then, you know, get after it.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah. So it sounds like it’s kind of that, that sticky plateau feeling where it’s essentially, it’s like, okay, if I can. If we had the money to bring in the operator, then we could afford to bring in the operator, but we don’t because we can’t bring in the operator. Right. So it’s that paradox.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: Yeah, there’s definitely some, some chicken or egg elements to, you know, to all of this.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah, gotcha. Okay, so how much effort are you looking to put into iconic impact? Because that sounds like that, like if enough effort could be put into it. And this is where I guess you’re having to kind of split up your forces. Right. Split up your efforts to do both of these because you’re taking a multi pronged approach. Is that right?
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: Yeah, I mean the 90 days to a million is half one, half the other.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yep. Okay, gotcha. So you feel like instant nonprofit still has a big part of that, that aspect of the 90 days to a million.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: 90 days to a million is 500k in equity capital, 500k in high ticket. It does not contemplate growing. Instant non profit. Instant non profits. Growth must happen. But it’s nothing to do with 90 days to a million because we, you know, we’re incrementing our way up there. Even if we’re very successful with our new ads guy, very successful with a new funnel page, etc.
Dmitri Sunshine: Right.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: It’s going to take months to increment. And so even, I mean, massive growth would be 10amonth. Well, yeah, that’s you. 8,000 bucks a month. 10,000amonth in. In growth on an aggressive growth curve. Right. So we’re talking about. I could go sell, I can go sell five 30,000. So yeah, I don’t need much to do that. I just need to be able to get freed to go do that.
Dmitri Sunshine: Gotcha, Gotcha. Okay.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: You know, it’s not going to take the majority of my time. Literally, I know who I’m going to go after. I just need some help putting these, putting the pipeline in place, getting the leads in place. And then I will, you know, in, in a few hours make those calls and move those things forward.
Dmitri Sunshine: Gotcha. Okay, so. You’ve got some leads already for the, the impact, Sorry, like iconic impact is it’s already got one lead at least. And so you’re hoping that works out, that brings in the revenue. The other thing is, have you done, have you applied for SBA loans in the past? No.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: Okay, so I have a. We went through chapter 11 and 20 and I personally went through a chapter 7 and 22, which absolutely precludes from what my research shows me, some private, you know, debt capital doesn’t preclude with investor debt capital. It just includes with SBA, etc.
Dmitri Sunshine: Okay, gotcha. All right, so I mean, the problem with fundraising is I, I do believe it is a full time job. Right. Like, I’ve never successfully raised. I just found that it’s just so much effort goes into it. So it’s almost like, do you want to commit? Like, is that really the best use of your time? Unless you definitely.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: I will raise money, no problem. I only need to put 10, 10, 15 hours a week into fundraising and I will bring in half a million dollars in 60 to 90 days. I’m positive I raised 700 for this company at the outset and it was not hard. I got introduced to somebody, they introduced me to their friends and it was very fast.
Dmitri Sunshine: Okay.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: I did not go out and pitch. I don’t plan to go out to, you know, every dog and pony show. So I’m not trying to make it like it’s the easiest thing in the world. I just know that once I set my mind to it, put some prospects. It’s like I went to frequency, you know, you’re familiar with that group and some of the caliber of some of the people in it. I have 40 people from frequency that I’m going to do get to know you calls. At least five of them will probably be interested or have somebody interested. I already have two other leads in that group right now.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: So again, I want to make sure we’re, I don’t want, I’m not trying to rush it, but I want to make sure we’re using our time wisely because I want to find, we want to find out about your goals as well, you know, in, in what you’re doing because, you know, I definitely want to crawl, walk, run, but I also want to gauge, you know, your capacity in your background, which, you know, I shared some of that stuff with Jackie, but I think she wants to get to Know who you are a little bit as well and just find out if something, you know, were to, if, if we were to find something that works well and you know, some projects that we can get some value out of. You know, I’m not as interested in working with contractors as with people that are committed at some level to helping this company grow, exit, etc. And you know, I’m not opposed to creating incentives that make that very attractive. But.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah, and that’s also kind of look
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: at that side as well.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah, that’s, that’s ultimately what we, I want to do with this firm is be that partner. Right. That we are coming in and. Because if you just do like one off engagements, it’s, it’s weird. It’s kind of like one night stance. Right. It’s.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: Yeah. You don’t get to know each other and really develop. You know, the institutional knowledge is gone when that’s evaporate.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah. Now the thing with working with Amido is I have a very, let’s put this like I’ve seen a lot of go wrong in my career. Like the thing for me is making sure that before we’re really getting into, it’s like, okay, let’s address like the, the burning fires first, but before getting into like building a new, whole new building, let’s make sure that we actually have a proper foundation. Like the, you know, like you guys aren’t going to get tripped up because the staff offboarding process means people have logins to your stuff afterwards. Right. So you’ve got exposures. So that’s one of the biggest things is making sure that like before we get into building agents, before we get into these more exciting, sexy things, let’s make sure that we’ve got a strong foundation that you’re not going to get tripped up. So that takes some time depending on how well organized you guys have been. Like in terms of, you know, do you guys have your, all your SOPs lined out? Do you have the, you know, like say credentials management? Do you have the backups to the website? Right. Something went wrong to their hosting account.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: Yeah, totally. That’s why I mentioned like the 80, 20, 90, 10 thing to you that we need to solve these immediate problems and bring money in and look at some of that stuff. But we’re mostly covered on that stuff. We have, we’re in a very secure hosting environment. Automatic snapshots and backups. We have a lot of SOPs. That doesn’t mean we have zero logins. But again that’s just more of a Process that could be done in the background while we’re solving these. While we’re solving these immediate. Unlocking these immediate revenue issues, which I think could be done in a week
Dmitri Sunshine: maybe. I think it’s still. But yeah.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: Getting underway with investors and solving the immediate funnel problem is I’m doing it this week. It’s going to happen.
Dmitri Sunshine: Okay. Hello.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: I’m sorry, I just need to excuse myself for a second. This, the Department of Labor, it’s hard to get a hold of them. Okay, why don’t you guys continue?
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah. So, Jackie, I would love to hear your side of. Of this and I would love for you to. To ask me what. What is important for you to know about working together.
Jacquelyn Long: Yeah, I mean, what is your experience being like. Like a head of operations, if you will, inside of a business? Meaning not just tech implementation, but have you done. I’ve seen, you know, I think you’ve done obviously some project management, but you have you done like team development and run across an entire business implementing a variety of different projects and then making sure all that goes right?
Dmitri Sunshine: Yes. Yeah. So that’s actually the exciting thing for me. I would much rather be working much more on the operations side than the tech side. The tech is like, what some I have much more experience with. But the operations is something that. Yeah, that. That to me is like just something I can’t help. Right. It’s like the thing you like, wake up in the morning, like, oh, I gotta like record all this because there’s a bunch of things that I realize could be done better right. About like how to. It’s. I mean, it always comes back to 80, 20. Right. It’s like, what’s really gonna matter here? But also like, there’s just these little tweaks that you can make. Like, oh, okay, if we can do that really quick, that should pay off much more later.
Jacquelyn Long: So it’s also when I’m thinking about the like the direct hit or the. The right fit. I should say the direct hit. My brain is a little tired. I will not lie. It’s been a long couple of weeks with that event, but it’s been awesome. If I’m thinking about. And this is what I posted before, like, we gotta have an extension of me to me to a certain degree as well as Christian. So it’s someone who. But also fills the gap. So it’s like you would. I would want. And I’m going to say AI forward or tech forward, because what you just said reminds me of that. I don’t want someone to just do basic SOP optimization and stuff like that. Like that’s part of it and that’s pretty obvious. But I also want someone to have a lens of like, oh, you guys are working in ClickUp and Fathom and Slack. Why don’t you start automating your reporting in such a way? Or why don’t you start. Why doesn’t the team use the ClickUp super agents to figure out how to make sure that their pipelines and ClickUp move better and how could we potentially automate more accountability into the company? Because that’s really the next level of the business is syncing up. I believe the back end of fulfillment is the strongest part of the company. Literally it’s run thousands, 5,000 plus people. The profit margins are ridiculous and you could double revenues right now and not do anything, anything to it. And probably we just need to hire one or two people and it’s still going to work. So sure. Is there an opportunity to add stuff to it? Absolutely. But is that our number one priority? No, it’s not. Our number one priority lists inside a lead gen and driving volume to the very thing that’s the most stable part of the business. So like the operational I believe is like taking projects from both of us which are going to be in sales, marketing and customer experience and doing what my mentor Dan Martell calls like a 1080, 10. Right. You’re going to get 10% vision from me. You run it 80% the court, you come back for 10% edits. Done, done, done, done, done. We’re missing that little layer right there which causes us to have to do the whole thing which bogs us down because we can’t move fast enough. So when I think of like a head of operations, director of operations, whatever you want to call it, that mid layer, I need you to be able to run across the whole business and be able to take on big projects like that and literally project manage them to completion with a lens of experience of being inside of a business, looking for things we didn’t see and helping us optimize processes, SOPs, security, like you mentioned, compliance and things on the way. Yeah, that lens doesn’t exist currently. It’s kind of okay actually considering how small we are and like our team does the best we can, but it’s not as solid as I would like it because I would want you to come back to me and be like, oh yeah, that CX project you were talking about. I found out a way to connect this, this, this and this and then remove this and then we’d be more efficient here. That would be awesome.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah.
Jacquelyn Long: Does that make sense? Does that’s also like KPI reporting for departments across the whole lay of the land too. So it definitely has a managerial focus, performance driven focus for yourself and for the team, along with the projects themselves. Yeah, that would be my dream. Kind of higher.
Dmitri Sunshine: Great. Good. Okay. So totally on board with you out there. That is, that is exactly what I would love to focus on. Would love to build this firm around and especially be able to bring in. I’ve got people who can help with some of these other more menial things because I think nothing, not everything requires the kind of, you know, the big guns kind of.
Jacquelyn Long: Totally.
Dmitri Sunshine: So okay. With that said, what does that look like in terms of your ability to do these engagements? Because it sounds like there’s kind of a funding shortfall right now to bring in.
Jacquelyn Long: Yeah.
Dmitri Sunshine: To do this level, like full almost, you know, essentially like full time level work for several weeks.
Jacquelyn Long: Yeah, we’re not, we’re definitely not there yet. So we’re a little cart before the horse. Like we don’t have the funding to be able to do that. And we also, if we were going to move in that direction, we’d need to put a lot more strategy behind it. It’s not like you’d want to onboard into like, oh, just a bunch of disparate projects. There would have to be a real strategy with real performance metrics behind it so that it makes sense and so that there’s return on that because it’s a much larger investment. As you can see right now we have a lot of other projects that we’re doing, but quite frankly, once those get fixed, there’ll be some course correction on revenue and there’ll be some course correction on like we have campaigns and stuff. We’re running out. So like we’ll get through that. We always have. But this conversation to me is a little premature based off the fact that we don’t have, you know, for that specific role. We don’t have the funding for that yet. This conversation might not be premature if it was a softer project based relationship into what we might potentially need for iconic impact. Because that would be important. Like if I’m inside of coaching calls and Christian’s inside coaching calls and I come out of that call, I’m like, okay, we need to build this grant GPT thing or whatever because I have a feeling that product will turn into a bunch of tech apps. I just have a feeling because it’s. And a lot of the stuff we build for our own business, we’re going to be able to pay forward to our clients as well. So that’d be kind of cool. But we’re going to need a little bit of probably support there to understand what that looks like and then make good decisions on how to build it. So I appreciate your experience in thinking through what is the foundation and then also the compliance and data architecture behind it. So we’re not just like, we, let’s put an agent out there and then as you know, people are, people are having a real interesting time with that. You know, like there’s been some people that have had real breakdowns because of that. And we though that’s the last thing we need is some kind of PII going out and an agent running around somewhere doing something with it. I mean, I’ve heard some interesting stories, so we’d have to be smart about that. But my goal with that always is going to be like an evergreen layer. Like I’m always thinking long term and even agents. You know, I was in some conversations this past week with people who are doing incredible things with AI and tech, far beyond anything we’re talking about right now. And they’re like that stuff might be obsolete in the next year. And you’re like, great, what’s the technology going to be like then and how will I recover from that? You know, so we want to be smart about that. Go ahead, Christian.
Dmitri Sunshine: Very polite of you.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: There was just a lot there. So I wanted to let Demetri
Dmitri Sunshine: talk
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: about the, you know, project to more sustained engagement model.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah, yeah. Always date before you, you decide to marry. So yeah, I mean I would love to figure out what does that initial project look like? Like what’s the 8020 right now to come in and do limited engagement? I mean what I’m hearing is it’s the, this funnels, right. Fixing the site, making sure that that is working. I hear that you think you have a secure environment. I would love to see if that’s really true if you actually have backups. I mean, one of the things that I found out the hard way when, I mean not the hard way, but when I was running a software company was we didn’t actually have backups that could be restored. No one was checking that. I was just making it.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: We do, we’ve done it. We, we reverted. We’ve. We’ve got a part time tech guy out of Egypt and, and I mean he’s not really relevant to that comment, but we actually had to put a protocol in place because he reverted over somebody else’s work. Unfortunately, because of these errors, some errors that were showing up. But we know, I know for a fact we’ve got very, very good hosting with WP Engine. It’s a WordPress specific platform. We, we’ve, we’ve used it before to revert where necessary. And yeah, I don’t mind checking in on that stuff, but we probably have worse security problems that aren’t addressed that are not backups.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah, right.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: Like people having access who aren’t here anymore or something.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah, yeah. So going over that. Okay, but let’s go back to this. I just want to make sure we’re clear on like, what would you see as the number one priority right now? That like, if I could come in, help you with anything, but it’s only like a week long engagement, what would that be?
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: I would say it would be managing this funnel solution. This, this sales page solution.
Dmitri Sunshine: Right.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: We, like I said, Jackie, you had dropped off for a minute. You know, we talked, we talked Funnellytics. They’re like, oh, you need to get off WordPress. Well, like I can see that, I can agree with that. Then, you know, often you suggest something to someone and they’re like, oh yeah, that would work. That would be true. Right. That’s Brandon, our PPC guy who has this dev and he’s like, we could do the migration and it wouldn’t cost nearly what those guys are charging you. And then I was like, hold on, I’m not assuming that we need to migrate anything. We have a problem which is people click add, don’t convert. That’s one page or one set of pages. That is not the entire site. We do not need to be. I will. Yeah, it just gives me PTSD to even think about another tech migration. We’ve been through four shopping carts over the years. We’ve rebuilt our site a number of times, done with that. But I, I will spend 10 or 15, the 10 or 15 hours that I could spend actually getting in front of investors and actually putting 10 or 15 more people into my funnel for high ticket and I will close them with nothing. My expertise in fact, is selling vaporware and then building it. So if I have to go do this, I will go produce customers and they will wire me $50,000 with nothing but a proposal. I’ve done it without. I just, that’s just what I do.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah, right.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: Where needed. Then I build out and deliver so much they renew for another 50k. What I’m saying is if I am left to be the only techn, the Most technical person here, which is not very technical. And I’m the one to run that project, come up with the ideas, come up with the way the quiz funnel could work, could come up with the dynamic production of the proper pet, which I already did by Vibe coding it. And I have to drive that. That will be all of the time that I have outside of admin, outside of running the team, outside of absolute, you know, obligatory things. And it will evaporate my time to go get two, three more leads on each front in the pipeline, on a discovery call and much closer to closing.
Dmitri Sunshine: Gotcha. Okay. And you said you have a personal assistant that you’re. You’ve already onboarded, that you are onboarding. That’s kind of blocking.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: We are interviewing them. We have. We. We hired a company and that’s why when Jackie says we don’t have the money for this or anything, we seem to keep coming up with money. But we have been burned a lot lately. We on the operator recruitment thing, you know, sounded great. Then we started and they were just so off track. It was so awful. We canceled. Right. 40,000 engagement. Down the down the tubes.
Dmitri Sunshine: Other.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: Other things as well. Right. So I guess what I’m saying is we come up with the money that we need to. For the things we need to do. But we’re sick of getting burned and we’re trying to do a lot more internally now. But we still need somebody helping to QB this stuff because, you know, we could do twice as much as we’re doing right now if we had good pm. So we are in the process of recruiting an EA who will be like a junior, but an experience. One of the requirements is that this person has some PM experience. And we have ClickUp. We have Sprint boards, we have, you know, Kanban or, or you know, Scrum style Sprint boards. And we just need somebody riding hurt on that, making sure that we don’t end up like we are right now, where we have a whole lot of tasks that are expired, they. That are probably done. Right. So people, all we have to do is keep after our team and have some protocols that they have to keep up after their own cards. They have to take things off the table if they’re not going to be executed on or if there’s no longer a need for that card. If something gets done, it’s done. If we take a different approach, you know, these things need to get moved off the board and eliminated.
Dmitri Sunshine: And this is something that you guys carve out time to do as a team because what I found is generally people are terrible at managing their ClickUp boards. Right. Unless you carve out that time. Like we had to, we had to sit down as teams before and just like go through. It’s like is this done? What else is still left? I mean it’s, it’s kind of a pain in the ass and it feels like hurting kittens but it’s. Yeah, it’s like once a week kind of thing. That kind of. And this is where the sprints, I mean this is where like things can grow out of hand but if you have two week long sprint periods that makes the world of difference because that’s much more.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: Yep. We’ve been through agile training. We know a lot of the frameworks.
Dmitri Sunshine: We.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: That would just be another thing to do right now.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: And I’m literally already working around the clock to do these things that literally keep the business going. So there’s just who’s going to do that? Either Jackie and I are good at that or Liz, the team will listen to us and do what we need. But again, you know, again I don’t mind spending that. I don’t. It’s like I recognize the need to surface some of these things but I do want to make sure that this, I was hoping to keep this call closer to an hour and we could sit here and iterate idea all day but we’ve got burning things to do right now. Right now that I, I owe a deck that’s probably 20 minutes, 30 minutes from done. I have about 15 other things that are 20 or 30 minutes from done that are mission critical. And so all of those kinds of things you can imagine that not having an operational person and having every single person responsible for tons of projects that are time critical like Jackie doing the autopilot thing. Tax season is now Every day we don’t get that campaign out, we lose money. Plus we have a big bump going into tax season. Regardless of how many new non profits we get. We sell people that we sold last year and the year before and the year before that. We sell them continuity, we sell them re recurring products because they’re getting notices. If they are three years old and they haven’t filed taxes yet, they’re getting notices from the IRS that they’re going to be in trouble. Right. We can we tell them they’re going to be in trouble. Right. This is the season right now and both of us have been out on extended travel, extended big events where we’ve met incredible people that are want to partner with us and Want to bring us these six figure clients and install us into their businesses. And like I, those, those things have an expiration date. I met somebody with David Meltzer last week. Wants to. Yeah, I’m not sure what’s up with her thing, but again, I know we kind of booked for 90 minutes because that was the default on your calendar. But also Jackie was probably and understood. I thought we had rebooked it and I had just sort of volunteered her to be on that meeting. And so we were like, I was like, I just wanted to get it on there. I really want you to talk to Dimitri. I think he could be a solution for, you know, some things that we need to do right now and maybe for a longer term solution. He’s got the background, etc, shared a big dossier on you and we both thought that this was scheduled for tomorrow and you would be operating. You’d have a lot of these questions answered if we would have just rebooked for tomorrow and you had a chance to look at the materials I sent you. So I don’t want to answer questions that you could get answered by just reviewing those materials.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah, I would, but I actually really want to hear from you because I think that.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: Oh, sure.
Dmitri Sunshine: When you’re looking at it, it doesn’t give you the, the complete picture.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: No, no. But that would give you an informed position from which to answer, to ask questions. Right. Instead of. Yeah, yeah.
Dmitri Sunshine: By the way, the. For me, there’s a lot of reading between the lines when we’re meeting. So that’s really important to understand. That’s where I’m like, tell me more. Right. Like I want to understand because every little bit reveals more what’s, you know, what’s really happening here and the dynamics that I would be stepping into working with you guys now. Okay. So Christian, so what I’m hearing is right now the biggest thing is this kind of this, this burning house feeling of you’re struggling with the, the funnels, the website. And so coming in to help with that on a limited engagement basis is the way that you would like to start with.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: That would unlock the time to do the other things that will be the most productive.
Dmitri Sunshine: Okay, which, what will be next? I mean, I say start with this simple thing, but then just to prepare, what are you looking for as the next step after the website and the funnels are all set up and that’s all rolling along?
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: I think then it would be at least having a basic framework and model to contemplate delivering for these high ticket people. Because the more Aligned I am that I can deliver. The more the better I will be aligned to sell and close those packages. Those and I’ll have, you know, a better get. I mean if I’m going to go get a bunch of people in that funnel. I’ve interviewed another lady who doesn’t have non profit experience but has a very operational track, you know, effective operational track record. She is also very credible. So I could put her in front of high net worth people the way she shows up and everything. But I’ve been needing to. At least have somebody in place to be the POC because if Steve sends me 30 grand this week, I need to at least go, great, here are your next steps.
Dmitri Sunshine: I mean if you get that then we’re having a completely different meeting about how do I come in and because that opens you up to be able to have that full time engagement and start the essentially partnership at that point.
Jacquelyn Long: I don’t believe it does. I don’t believe like one sale opens up the door to a full time engagement. Like our finances need to get more consistently to a certain point before we be able to like stabilize and do something like that. That’s my perspective. We have a little bit of catching up to do because of the past like few weeks. So I would say, I mean if I’m looking at it like first of all there would need to be a distinction between Christian, what do you actually need with the marketing stuff? And that Brandon wouldn’t do. And then you know, Dimitri, do you have experience in marketing? Do you have experience with building strategic landing pages and stuff like that? If that’s what Christian’s saying is taking up his time, then we would need to have someone that’s got a marketing lens that can help take over some of that stuff. So that’s like a totally different project as far as I’m concerned.
Dmitri Sunshine: No, what I’m hearing is Christian needs someone to get, make sure the website and the landing. Like you guys aren’t losing people, right? So you have, you know, marketing people and operations people are two very different animals. Right. Like I don’t know if you can get more vastly different. So the, the, what I’m hearing is that you guys are losing on the, the funnels, on the being able to get them to convert. Is that right? Because of technical issues.
Jacquelyn Long: Yes.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: Constantly throwing in our funnels. Yes.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah. Okay. So fixing those is the number one aspect right now.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: And then, and I, I just want to say I don’t see that necessitating whoever runs that needing any marketing chops. This Is, is Brandon the guy? Does Brandon actually. Is, is he going to get. We have no idea, Jackie. If he’s going to get anything done. We, we have to. What are, what is the need? Who are our options? And is Brandon actually going to do it? And that just answering that alone would at least say, okay then Brandon, what’s your process? Who’s going to actually get on a whiteboard and go, here’s what this page is going to look like. Boom, boom, boom, boom. When can it be done? What are the factors that you need? You need to have people who go to click away, see it pop out, pop up. You need people who are not quite ready to have an option to either book, call or make sure they opt in. Right. You have to have these elements on this page that basically the 15 hours that I would do, I only need to spend one hour to say here’s the things that this page needs and deliver that to someone. Every other step of making sure that that gets done, gets done well is thoroughly tested, etc does not need to be a marketing person. It needs to be a who knows how to get projects done and has a technical eye and at least understands the basic requirements and can elicit them from me. That’s my take.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah. Okay. All right, so I know you want to keep this close to an hour, so I say let’s, let’s do this. I’m going to shoot over a proposal for that aspect, try to scope that out as best as possible as kind of our initial test run and then after that we could see about do doing some of these more sophisticated things. But it sounds like it’s kind of a chicken and egg problem. So I would be essentially waiting, let’s say if, if this initial engagement feels good, it would be waiting till you’ve got a little bit more, I guess, funding in place to be able to bring in. Is that correct? Of what I’m hearing?
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: I guess what I think Jackie’s saying if I’m. And tell me if I’m wrong, is that before any big long range commitment, we can’t make a big long range commitment because we have 30 grand of which we might be able to spare eight, seven, you know, two. Right. Because we can’t spend all of money that we need to deliver that package. Plus the company has some needs outside of this work. But I think to me it makes it very viable that there are more 30s where that came from, more tens, etc, that if we said, okay, that came in now we have Christian’s time freed up because we’re getting this page done and maybe getting the basic stuff done to start at least having the, the for one hour invested in iconic and impact would at least have. Hey, here are your next steps. You’re going to get an email from this email here you’re going to onboard. Liz is going to be your point of contact. She’s going to start your non profit. We don’t have to do anything for that person on the additional Items for the 30 grand outside of what we normally do. But done with a white glove, right? Liz. The person doesn’t get barraged with automated emails to fill out their profile. Liz takes the call. Liz treats them like a concierge person. Boom. We just bought ourselves weeks. We just need that one hour and somebody to go implement it and work with Liz and say here’s the process, here’s how we’re going to do this. Right? It’s like blocking and tackling and then we go out and do, you know, do the next thing.
Dmitri Sunshine: Got it.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: Is how I’m seeing it. Right. So some of this stuff is like get freed up here and then, and then also I think we could be, I think we could go out and sell a bunch of stuff into our own database. If we could get freed up and Jackie could get off meetings and do, you know, and get the autopilot thing out of the way and then we could go well, what are the offers that we could have a few, a few webinars and we could do some webinars this month that would expose people to some high ticket, you know, piecemeal high ticket stuff, right? 5,000. Sell a few of those. Right? We’ve done that before. Again, some of this stuff would after an initial wave of activity to get some time freed up then we would look at the options that we have that I can’t sit here and rattle off. There’s a million options that we could do. There’s probably five options that we would have that are very near term and easy to pull off and it would be like, well what should we do next? You know, Jackie’s off working after the autopilot campaign goes off. How Jackie’s working on. Okay, we have a quick meeting. Here are the two one to two thousand dollar upsells we can present in a series of two or three webinars. Okay, great Liz. Jackie helps build the campaign, gets Catherine support. Liz sets up the webinars. I show up and help sell this stuff. Boom. Right? And then pretty soon these things are just kind of producing the capital that we need for all of this stuff while I’m out closing some bigger deals and some investors.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah, okay. Love that. I love that you guys are really thinking AI Forward. And Jackie, I’m gonna credit you with coining that term. I don’t really hear AI forward that often these days actually. Okay.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: So
Dmitri Sunshine: by the way, can I ask one more question? What is your database? Like, is there a single source of truth that you guys are working from? Like, because I know you have WordPress, but is there a different backend that it’s integrating with?
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: All of our front end is in Go High Level, all of our opt ins, everything coming in today, and then everything on the back end. We have a separate instance of WordPress that has our customer portal that is hooked up to activecampaign. So after people become a customer, they cross the threshold. Everybody is in activecampaign basically because it has superior tagging and stuff. But let’s just say for all intents and purposes, all front end activity comes from one email address and that’s in Go High Level. Then they cross the threshold and they get serviced through another email. Right. Success app versus support ad. And that’s all living in ActiveCampaign and in the customer portal. And all of the customer data is absolutely an activecampaign.
Dmitri Sunshine: It. Got it. Okay. So Active Campaign is your essentially CRM.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: It’s really. Yeah, it’s the customer CRM. So after they onboard and they give us all the massive amount of information that we need to file their nonprofit, all their documents, all that is all Active campaign.
Dmitri Sunshine: Wow, interesting. Okay, so you’ve got Active Campaign and then what is the customer portal that you talked about?
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: Every single customer gets a login to the customer portal and it’s one stop shopping. It’s a seven step, highly contextualized series of steps where we give them a four step framework with which is here’s what we’re about to do for you, here’s what we just did for you, here’s what you can do for yourself now that we can’t do for you like open your bank account, run a board meeting, etc, and here are the resources to do all of those things as well as the deliverables in a cloud folder that is all accessible through one login. We built that custom with Buddy Boss and a couple of modifications and then delivered it in a live environment without one error last about a year ago.
Dmitri Sunshine: Okay, and when you said you guys are doing questionnaires or surveys, what are you doing?
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: We’re not doing any questionnaires. Or surveys. We need to do that.
Dmitri Sunshine: That.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: Okay, so we have all this customer data. We’ve never talked to those customers again other than the ones that subscribe for Autopilot. And all we do is deliver what they paid for. We have no idea who they are, how they’re doing. We, we could easily access public 990 databases through the IRS. We have a bot that actually I built a bot that can crawl four pages into the IRS website and extract all their 990 data. It’s incredible. That thing’s a million doll bot. Again, I could rattle off 20 things that are potential value here that we can’t get to because of these. So let me ask if I can, what the purpose is of digging further into some of these other things. Customer portal and stuff versus you know,
Dmitri Sunshine: I want, I want to understand better like what your entire setup is to understand what am I walking into? Yeah,
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: yeah. I mean some of that stuff I would just have to say we would have to have an initial engagement to even do any of that stuff. Right. But believe me, there are empires built in drive empires. There are projects and there. Anything you ask me there is going to be a detailed project. Detailed sets of data sets. Detailed. Unbelievably. Right. Deep detailed and then clickable. You can go down the rabbit hole for competitor analysis. For example, we have a summary, we have a deep re research report. Then we have individual silos on each of the competitors and we actually mystery shopped each of them. But again we, we got to, we got to draw this call to a close because I could. There’s so much there that I’m not sure any of that matters if we can’t get to it.
Dmitri Sunshine: Sure.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: But we built. What we have built is like a $10 million company, but we’re not doing two. Right. We’ve really built for scalability. I learned the hard way. So there’s so much there. Literally I could just tell you more and more and you would be more and more curious and I wouldn’t blame you because it’s pretty awesome. But again, none of that stuff is helpful. It doesn’t matter how big the mother load is if you can’t get the oil out from the little, you know, 60 foot hole in the ground that’s going to give you the fuel to go get the mother load.
Dmitri Sunshine: Gotcha. Okay, so last thing in your ideal world, this initial engagement, where would that stop? What’s the full scope of it? Is it just getting the. Making sure the funnels are all working and you’re not going to have any errors. If you change things, it’s still going to have automated testing. Like where. Where would you call the. The. The end to the scope?
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: I don’t know. I’ll let Jackie speak for that.
Jacquelyn Long: I mean no, I don’t have anything to offer. I mean that’s really your project. So like I, I’m not even super clear on what that exists and what it is going to do to be honest with you. So I can’t. I can’t provide really any feedback on that. Like this is a minor and I mean this is a one off project where we’re in. We’re just happen to be in the process of doing some different things in our funnels. Christian saying he needs project management help with it. I’m not super clear exactly what that’s going to look like or when it would start and end because I don’t know what’s going to happen with the. This project. So like I would say Christian, if that’s what you’re thinking then you would own that because I really don’t have any.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: I mean it would be.
Jacquelyn Long: I mean the way I see it is we have someone who’s doing some of that already. We have Catherine who’s managing some of that. So I don’t really fully understand the support layer in addition to that that you’re asking for.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: There’s nobody. Zero. People have said we’re going to design a page and it’s going to do this to drive our ads too.
Jacquelyn Long: Right.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: But they said we can gen. We can do this. And whatever. I. Nobody’s given me any. It’s been a week since we.
Jacquelyn Long: Brandon just onboarded.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: I know.
Jacquelyn Long: And hasn’t done the entire game there was to stabilize the ads, do some cleanup there, wait for the pages to get. Get like fixed. So we’re not like throwing stuff, you know, burning money on in the street. And then you are the one that decided to redesign some pages and you gave him some feed. You know, you gave him something to work on. But I would imagine in the future unless his services. We have it twisted somehow that he also comes to us with those types of things. So we might want to.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: But he hasn’t.
Jacquelyn Long: He has, but it’s been like a week. And there was been. There was no plan to do that because the last conversation we had with him was fixing the site, the technical errors and potentially considering moving the site to a new technology to stop that stuff from happening during that time frame. You then introduced a new workaround which could be great but that’s what happened. So I don’t believe that there was a gap in him not doing something there because it wasn’t even a of part of the plan. So I think you might just want to take that into consideration.
Dmitri Sunshine: Okay.
Jacquelyn Long: It’s my understanding that in the future they would also be doing that. So I just think you’d want to confirm that.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: And he has not tried to meet with us at all. I, I, I’m just repeating myself. There is no plan to build a page that converts better.
Jacquelyn Long: Okay. So, Christian, you own this project. You just, you let me know whatever you want to do.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: I’m just, but I’m saying we, Brandon doesn’t have anything to us that convinces either of us that he’s, that we’re going to see any results. We started another week. Since this is mission critical for the company, I’m wanting to lead something where we don’t have a proposal from Brandon. We don’t have a plan. We, so, so yeah, so this project would be coming up with a more conversion optimized page. Whoever does it. Whoever does it. And then making sure leads are being captured, metrics are being captured properly, things are tested and that we have some kind of rational way forward to, you know, if it’s a new page design. Right. Then you want to know how is it performing and are we split testing, you know, two different things against each other. Right. With video, without video, whatever it is, Brandon can do that. But if nobody is going to go, hey, Brandon, we need a plan. Do you have a plan? And if not, here’s one. And how do we get this done right? Again, I’m trying not to lead this project for 15 hours this week, which is what I would estimate it would take me at minimum.
Dmitri Sunshine: So then can I ask Jackie, from your standpoint, what would you consider a good, good test? Good first initial engagement. That’s very focused on utilizing my operational skills and technical skills here.
Jacquelyn Long: I would, I’m not quite sure, to be honest. I think Christian’s deeds come first and he’s the ultimate decision maker. So whatever he wants to do is what we’ll do eventually. Like, that’s just reality of it. So if he needs help and he’s saying that that’s priority. It doesn’t really matter what I think.
Dmitri Sunshine: So I still want to hear, I still want to hear.
Jacquelyn Long: So like that’s just something you probably need to get used to. Like if that’s his emergency, then that’s what he’s going to do. So there’s that. And then I would say the only other thing that would come to mind for me would be if we sell some of the high ticket offers support on potentially building out some of the processes, systems and definitely PMING that. That’s the thing that comes to mind for me. Me.
Dmitri Sunshine: Okay, so you’re talking about for iconic impact to have the whole flow that it would go through?
Jacquelyn Long: Yeah, yeah. Like we might need some port on the back end there for sure of like the systems, building the processes, all that type of stuff.
Dmitri Sunshine: Gotcha.
Jacquelyn Long: So yeah, that’s relevant for me personally and I’m not involved as much as the other one, so maybe I don’t understand the other thing as well as what Christian does. I just want to make sure we’re not overlapping skill sets because that’s not fun for anybody. So that’s why I ask questions about those things.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah. And thank you. Thank you for doing that. Okay guys, I think I have a pretty good idea now, but I think there will be a little bit back and forth once I hand over proposals. So let’s, let’s leave it at here and essentially would love to hand that over to you the next day. Have you figure out what, what feels comfortable for you and how you guys want to move forward. How quickly.
Jacquelyn Long: Dimitri, do you have any projects or like, any like references or examples of anything that you’ve done that’s similar to some of the work that we’ve, that we’re talking about right now?
Dmitri Sunshine: A little bit, a little bit of overlap. It’s been a little while. I was CEO at Cohere Network, which is a co living community, like meant to be this worldwide kind of hub for digital nomads. So came in as the COO at kind of early days and they were, they were really struggling and so yeah, just implemented a lot of these basic practices in place. What I find and what I found there specifically too was it really does take a lot of hand holding. Right. Like literally like you. I mean you have to meet with the team, you have to like make sure everyone’s going through this. Things like SOPs are great, but no one really follows them. Like you still have to have them, but no one’s going to follow them unless you actually hold their hands to them. So that’s been my experience and that’s kind of where I operate from. It’s just like, okay, like you really have to be hands on the whole time. Don’t expect people to just. First of all, don’t expect people to read much. That was the other big takeaway. So yeah, so there’s And a lot of this, I mean, also comes from my experience running a software company. We’re doing enterprise software for child welfare management. That company’s still running. My ex wife is still. Still at it with it. And. Yeah, so okay, that answers your question or if you want more. But I mean, this is early days of this new firm, so that is, you know, something to take consideration.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: Right. Cool.
Jacquelyn Long: All right, well, thanks for sharing.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah. And then Christian just walked away to do something, but. And Jackie, are you here in Denver?
Jacquelyn Long: No, I live in Austin.
Dmitri Sunshine: Oh, you’re in Austin. Awesome. Okay, so south by Southwest is like not to be missed.
Jacquelyn Long: Well, I mean, it was okay. It was my first one and I would just say next year I probably wouldn’t do a badge just because the most valuable stuff that I was involved in didn’t even require that. And so it was okay. It was spread across the city this year because the convention center was torn down. And so that was little challenging. But you know, if you know the right people and you get into the right places can be very, very powerful. I met Tim Ferriss yesterday and that’s was killer. He’s been a mentor of mine from millions of other people for quite some time. So that was very cool to meet him for sure. He was receiving a lifetime achievement award for podcasting and some other stuff, and we found out about that. So I was able to get into that event and then I mentioned some of that other stuff. But yeah, next year I’d probably go about it differently, but there certainly are world class folks who descend upon Austin during that week and if you can figure out where you want to be that’s relevant to you, then it can be very cool. Yeah, but definitely around a lot of. A lot of iconic, like, really great entrepreneurs doing stuff that you’re just like, geez, this is freaking nothing compared to what other people are doing. So it’s fun to be around that mindset because it’s huge. And then I was around some impact entrepreneurs that are not nonprofits that have tied an impact metric into their businesses that. That’s insane. I mean, they’re really like, really blowing it up. It was incredibly cool to learn more about that too. So.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah, awesome.
Jacquelyn Long: Yeah.
Dmitri Sunshine: Okay. You’re making me have FOMO that I didn’t end up going. I was on the fence about it
Jacquelyn Long: and yeah, I don’t know. It. It was. It was an it. It was good. But you got to definitely have a plan, that’s for sure. I have a friend in town from London. She’s Been with me going, so we’ve been doing our thing, and it’s pretty cool, but, man, it’s a lot. Like, you got to be managing a lot. I’ve had a lot of dinners. A lot of private dinners. I’ve had. I just have had a lot. And then I’m also, like, tour guiding, but I’m also. I’ve been in Austin for, like, five months.
Dmitri Sunshine: Oh, okay.
Jacquelyn Long: Like, the newest person, but I’m leading the troops all over the place. I’m like, sweet.
Dmitri Sunshine: Oh, yeah.
Jacquelyn Long: So. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Dmitri Sunshine: Well, Christian, anything else before we say goodbye for today? No.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: You know, part of the reason for this meeting was to have Jackie meet you and be able to, you know, get to know you a little bit, ask some questions, and then know, obviously, I have a number of priorities that I wanted to cover. I think, like, we did that. Yeah.
Dmitri Sunshine: Okay. Sweet. Okay, so I’ll be. So the ball’s in my court. I’m gonna get you guys a proposal for this initial engagement focused on what. What you think needs to happen right now,
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: and.
Dmitri Sunshine: And then we can go from there. I’ll try to include a couple different offers for, like, ways that we could proceed forward. But just please keep in mind that, like, for me, if I’m investing my time and energy working with a another company, I want to make sure that we are not glossing over major issues that are like, actually just essentially like, you’re waiting to step on a landmine. So that’s the crux of the work I want to do so that we’re setting you up to have that, like, you know, robustness.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: Yeah, absolutely.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah. All right, you guys. Well, it’s been a pleasure. It’s good to find.
Jacquelyn Long: Thanks to. Nice to meet you.
Dmitri Sunshine: Yeah. All right, you guys.
Jacquelyn Long: Well, see you later.
Dmitri Sunshine: Okay, guys.
Christian LeFer | InstantNonprofit: Thank you. Take care. All right.