How Gustavo Built PowerISA: A 120-Client Remote Appointment Setting Business for US real estate agents  

From Microsoft Engineer to Real Estate, Then to Creating PowerISA 

Gustavo worked as a software engineer at Microsoft in Seattle. In 2013, when CEO Steve Ballmer stepped down and Satya Nadella was about to come in, Gustavo saw what was coming.

"Whenever you change leadership, it's going to be like a year of reorganization," he says. His team got obliterated. Everyone moved to different projects. He made a calculation: if he left for a year, he wouldn't miss anything. The dust needed to settle anyway.

His backup plan was simple: if the new venture didn't work, he'd just go back to Microsoft once the reorganization finished.

But he never went back.

How Real Estate Became the Foundation

Gustavo didn't plan to get into real estate. His wife started as an agent in 2008. In 2010, he joined her team part-time—real estate agent nights and weekends, Microsoft engineer Monday through Friday.

In 2013, he took a six-month sabbatical from Microsoft to help his wife build her team. She needed help. That sabbatical became permanent.

Then life happened. Family circumstances pushed them to move back to Mexico, where Gustavo grew up on the California border.

He tried running the real estate team remotely from Mexico. It didn't work. Real estate in the U.S. is a relationship business—very person-to-person. Running that from another country was nearly impossible.

But one thing did work: a remote calling team.

The Moment Four People Handed Him $10,000

Gustavo started a small calling team in Mexico to make phone calls for his wife's real estate business. It worked well enough that colleagues in his brokerage noticed.

There were 200 agents in his brokerage at the time. He taught a class about what he was building—a remote calling team in Mexico that would call leads and set appointments for real estate agents.

The response shocked him.

"Immediately four people gave me $10,000. No questions asked."

One of those four was an old-school agent who wanted to physically hand Gustavo a check. When Gustavo said he'd pick it up later or have his assistant get it, the agent left an angry voicemail: "Hey, I've got my money here. I don't want you to leave without taking my check."

"I'd never had someone violently want to give me money," Gustavo says. "In real estate, we're always chasing the business. We're always trying to get leads to convert. This was the first time people were coming to me."

That was 2015. PowerISA was born.

What PowerISA Actually Does

PowerISA is a virtual assistant agency that provides inside sales agents (ISAs) specifically for the real estate industry. Other terms for the same role include SDR (sales development representative), BDR (business development representative), appointment setter, or caller.

The business model is straightforward. Real estate agents or teams pay PowerISA an hourly rate. PowerISA hires, trains, and manages calling agents based in Mexico and other Latin American countries. Those agents call leads, qualify prospects, and set appointments for the real estate agents. PowerISA is transparent about pricing: they tell clients exactly what they pay the virtual assistant and what they charge as a management fee.

Gustavo emphasizes that the company only works in real estate in the U.S. and Canada. No other industries. No other countries. This focused approach shapes everything about how PowerISA operates and competes.

The Numbers: 10 Years of Growth

PowerISA's growth trajectory tells the story of a business finding product-market fit and scaling methodically.

In the first year from 2015-2016, Gustavo started with the four clients and scaled to 20-25 clients within that first year. He notes that the first 10 clients are the hardest for any agency to acquire. Once you've proven the model works and have case studies, growth becomes easier.

Today in 2025, PowerISA has 120 active clients. Gustavo maintains about 20 staff members on his own payroll, but those 20 people manage 120 additional people who are employed by the clients and paid by the clients. It's important to make this distinction: PowerISA doesn't employ 140 people directly. Instead, they manage 120 people for clients.

Over the entire 10-year history, PowerISA has worked with approximately 3,000 real estate agents. This number puts things in perspective: there are 1.5 million real estate agents in the U.S., so 3,000 represents less than one-half of one percent of the market. Even looking at just the top 10% of agents by resources, PowerISA has barely reached 2% penetration. The market opportunity remains massive and largely untapped.

Gustavo has followed Alex Hormozi’s material and attended his events, where Hormozi describes the $1–3 million revenue range as “the swamp” – the hardest phase to grow out of because the founder is still the bottleneck for many processes.

How 120 Clients Get Managed by 20 People

Understanding PowerISA's organizational structure reveals how Gustavo has built scalability into the company without needing to manage everyone directly.

Gustavo has exactly two direct reports. One is a general manager who functions as the operations lead and manages most of the people and fulfillment activities. The other is a sales leader responsible for client acquisition. Below these two people are teams of 5-15 people, each with their own metrics and clear responsibilities.

The training cadence is critical to maintaining quality across the organization. Gustavo meets with his leadership team once per week. Those leaders, however, meet with their teams at least once per day for training, feedback, and course correction. This daily cadence allows PowerISA to maintain consistent quality and quickly adapt when issues emerge.

Gustavo's current responsibilities focus on what he considers most important. He handles marketing and business development, manages the overall finances, sets company direction, and manages his two direct reports. He no longer does sales calls—his sales leader handles that. He no longer manages operations or fulfillment—his general manager owns that. What remains undelegated is marketing and acquisition.

His philosophy is simple but powerful: "The sales team makes the promise. The fulfillment team keeps the promise. I manage the people who make promises and the people who keep promises." This clarity about roles means everyone understands the workflow and their part in it.

The Remote Setup: 100% Virtual Since 2020

PowerISA operated from a physical call center in Mexico before the pandemic. COVID changed that entirely. Everyone went remote in 2020, and they never came back to the office.

The company started going remote with certain staff members in 2018, then moved completely virtual during the pandemic. When the crisis passed, Gustavo realized they could operate effectively without physical offices. They've stayed fully remote ever since.

Today, PowerISA has a small physical office mainly for legal reasons. Everyone works from home. Gustavo works from his home office in Mexico. Managers work from their homes. Team members work from theirs.

To maintain quality and prevent the kind of fraud that sometimes occurs in the virtual assistant space, PowerISA uses time trackers, screen monitors, and records all calls and activity. Gustavo explains the fraud issue candidly: "In the virtual assistant space, there's this thing called overworking. People have three different remote jobs at the same time. They try to make sure no one knows about each other. We protect our clients against that."

The monitoring might seem harsh, but Gustavo is clear: if someone isn't comfortable with this level of oversight, PowerISA isn't the right place for them to work.

What Clients Actually Get: Call Volume and Conversion Rates

When real estate agents ask about PowerISA's agents, one of their first questions is always the same: how many calls can they expect? The answer depends entirely on the type of leads being called and the strategy employed.

Gustavo says his agents place between 200 to 2,000 calls per day. This wide range reflects the reality that some leads require more care and qualification than others. A cold neighborhood list where you're just calling random people requires a different approach than calling pre-qualified leads from a real estate portal. The strategy changes, the call handling changes, and therefore the call volume changes.

The conversion rates that matter for real estate agents vary dramatically depending on lead source. If you're calling 100 random people from a neighborhood list—people you don't know, whose intent you don't know, who may not even be homeowners—you might get 2-4 potential sellers over the next 12 months. That's actually a decent outcome for such cold leads.

If those 100 leads come from Zillow's Premier Portal, which costs $600 to $10,000 per lead or even higher in competitive markets, the expectations change entirely. These are high-intent leads from people actively browsing real estate on the dominant U.S. real estate portal. For 100 such leads, you're looking for 16-25 closed transactions within 12 months. The difference in quality is enormous.

Facebook ads represent yet another category. A Facebook lead is someone who saw an ad, showed some interest, but isn't necessarily in the market to buy or sell. For 100 Facebook leads, agents typically expect 1-2 transactions in a good scenario, with 5-6 transactions in an exceptional scenario. The intent level is low compared to portal leads.

What remains consistent across all these lead sources is the process itself. Every lead needs to be called, qualified, connected with, nurtured, and followed up with. 

Churn: The Reality of Real Estate Lead Generation

The real estate industry has a churn problem that most people outside the industry don't understand.

Industry standard churn rates range from 15-30% per month. Not per year—per month. This reflects the high volatility in real estate: when markets slow, agents stop spending. When they get busy with existing clients, they pause new lead generation. When they don't see results, they abandon providers.

PowerISA experienced the same high churn when they started—20-30% monthly churn. The challenge was relentless. Getting clients was hard, but keeping them was harder because so many would leave.

Over the years, PowerISA improved their retention significantly through two mechanisms. First, they simply got better at the actual service. They learned how to train agents better, handle objections more effectively, and generate higher quality appointments. Second, and perhaps more importantly, they got better at selecting clients. Not every real estate agent is ready to work with an appointment setter. Some don't have the sales skills to close deals. Some don't have enough leads to warrant the investment. Some aren't serious about growth.

"A disproportionate part of churn is working with the wrong client," Gustavo explains. "Taking on clients just to take them on, and they're not ready. You can't help them. That's been a big part of churn."

There's also the seasonal reality of real estate. Winter months in the U.S. naturally slow the real estate market. In snowy regions, people don't buy and sell homes. That's just seasonal reality. Agents' activity drops. They reduce spending. "If you're not careful, you go out of business by the end of the year. Your expenses exceed your income in a few months. That's just part of experience."

Understanding these dynamics allows PowerISA to set expectations appropriately and select clients who can sustain through seasonal ups and downs.

Competition: Two Types of Competitors

Gustavo divides his competitive landscape into two distinct categories, and understanding the difference shapes his entire strategy.

The first type includes large overseas agencies, predominantly from the Philippines and India. These companies employ 1,000 to 3,000+ people and mostly serve corporate customers who need hundreds or thousands of outsourced workers. Customers like large tech companies, financial institutions, or massive call centers. These firms don't typically work with individual real estate agents or small teams because the deal size is too small. They charge the lowest rates in the market—their margins are razor-thin because they try to be everything for everyone across industries.

PowerISA avoids direct competition with these giants by niching down entirely. Individual agents and small teams are exactly who PowerISA targets. The large agencies ignore this market because it doesn't move the needle for them.

The second type of competition comes from local players. Some are former employees of PowerISA who left to start their own agencies. Some are new competitors from Mexico, Colombia, and other Latin American countries who saw the PowerISA model and replicated it. These competitors typically operate with 5-10 people, come and go frequently, and represent real competition because they understand the market.

Gustavo's perspective on this second category has evolved. "I used to get upset about it," he admits. "But now I try to have an abundance mindset." His calculation: 1.5 million real estate agents exist in the U.S. PowerISA doesn't need all of them to be successful. They just need their niche. The market is large enough that multiple competitors can thrive. This mindset prevents him from becoming obsessed with competitive sabotage or market share at all costs.

He also refuses to limit training or delegation because people might leave and start competitors. "A lot of businesses stay small because they can't risk delegating important activities to other people. You're not ever going to delegate anything to anyone if you're afraid they'll leave. That limits your growth significantly."

There used to be a third category of competitors: U.S.-based appointment setting agencies. These companies went out of business during COVID. Labor costs in the U.S. rose so dramatically that they couldn't compete with offshore models. Now they're essentially gone.

Why PowerISA Charges the Most (And That's Fine)

When Gustavo compares PowerISA's pricing against competitors, the numbers are clear: "We charge the most. At least for the people that we benchmark, we charge the most. I have no problem with that."

The justification for premium pricing lies in domain expertise. If PowerISA tried to become a general virtual assistant company serving every industry—accounting firms, e-commerce businesses, service providers, real estate, legal services, healthcare—they'd have to compete directly with 30,000-person call centers from the Philippines. They would lose that competition. They'd lose their domain expertise advantage. Margins would become razor-thin.

By staying exclusively in real estate, PowerISA maintains deep knowledge of how the industry works, what objection patterns emerge, how agents close deals, what technology they use, what regulatory requirements exist. This expertise justifies higher pricing. Better training. Better results. Better appointments.

"The more niched down you are, the more domain knowledge you have, the more you can charge," Gustavo explains. PowerISA's clients understand that they're paying a premium because they're getting specialized service from people who actually understand real estate, not generalists.

Scaling Challenges: The $1-3M "Swamp"

Gustavo follows Alex Hormozi's business content and has attended his events focused on business owners in the $1-3 million revenue range. Hormozi calls this range "the swamp"—the hardest phase to grow out of. Why? Because the founder is still the bottleneck for many critical processes.

At smaller scales, you can do everything yourself. At larger scales, you can hire specialized experts and department heads. But in the $1-3M range, you're too big to do everything yourself, but not big enough to afford specialized expertise in every area. That's the trap.

PowerISA's biggest constraint right now is scaling with paid advertising. The company has grown to 120 clients purely through organic growth—content on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, plus word-of-mouth referrals. That works great until it doesn't. Organic reach plateaus. Word-of-mouth can only take you so far.

Paid advertising represents a much more scalable way to acquire customers. But it's complicated and expensive. Gustavo tried running ads himself multiple times. Each time, he wasted money. "I try to do it on my own for the longest time. I just waste a lot of money."

This year, he hired U.S.-based media buyers—not agencies, but individual professionals who specialize in running ads. These consultants understand paid advertising intimately. Gustavo understands the real estate industry and PowerISA's services intimately. Together, they're finally making progress. "Without that, I would have given up again. For the fourth time already."

The results aren't fully ROI positive yet, but the conversion rates are improving. That's what matters. Paid ads work like an investment: you spend money upfront expecting returns later. "You have to spend a lot of money with ads. It's a good way to scale, right? In the future, it's 100%. It's like the best way."

For 2025, Gustavo has made paid advertising a strategic priority. "We have to figure this out. We have to add this as a lead source because we've given up on it so many times."

The Mistakes That Almost Killed the Business

Every successful entrepreneur has stories about near-death experiences. Gustavo has several.

The first mistake nearly destroyed the company. Gustavo didn't like firing people. He wanted to be a good boss. In his mind, good bosses work things out. Bad bosses fire people. So he didn't fire people even when business was slow and he didn't have enough clients to keep them busy.

For a period, PowerISA had 10, 15, 20, even 30 people who were essentially doing nothing because there wasn't enough client work to support them. But Gustavo kept paying them. In an agency model where most of your costs are people, this is catastrophic. Fixed costs mounted. Revenue didn't. The company nearly went out of business.

"It almost went out of business because of that," he says. The harder part wasn't firing people who performed poorly—that's easy. The harder part was firing people who did nothing wrong. The market was down. The company couldn't support them. They were great people. But they had to go. "Out of no fault of their own. That's a much harder message to deliver."

The lesson was brutal but clear: "If the company can't support these many people, if I want to keep the rest of the people, we've got to let some people go."

The second major mistake involved hiring. "I didn't know how to hire managers," Gustavo admits. "I still don't know how to hire them perfectly. But I learned through trial and error." He made hiring mistakes. He brought in people who didn't work out. But as long as the mistakes didn't kill the company, he kept going. "You lose money, you lose clients. But you get better at hiring people and better at holding them accountable. That was definitely a skill I had to learn."

The third was trying to scale paid ads himself and failing repeatedly. "I just waste a lot of money," he says. It took him four attempts before he realized he needed to hire professionals. When he did, everything changed.

The Moment He Had to Bet Everything

Every entrepreneur Gustavo knows well enough to discuss business has one story like this. Often more than one.

"I remember the first time I had to take money out of my savings to cover payroll. Should I use this money to close everything? Or should I use this money to try and see if we can recover next month?"

Earlier in his entrepreneurial journey, Gustavo promised himself he'd never let his company become insolvent. If things got bad, he'd shut down before that happened. In theory, it's a reasonable approach.

In practice, it's harder than you think.

Facing that decision about his savings, Gustavo had to choose. He could walk away. He could shut everything down and preserve what was left. Or he could bet everything on his belief that he could turn things around in the next month or quarter.

Against his better judgment. Against what he said he was going to do. He didn't do what he said he was going to do. He went all in. He bet the money on himself.

"It could have gone the other way," he acknowledges. "It's a gamble. Sometimes you lose on those gambles."

He talked to older, more experienced operators about their journey. They all have similar stories. "I had to mortgage my home. I had to sell this. I had to cancel that. I had to do something where I overextended myself. I didn't know what was going to happen. It was very uncertain. And if I hadn't done that, I would have lost anyway."

For some of them, it worked out. For others, it didn't. They became insolvent. They had to close down. They had to ask friends and family for money. "Very uncomfortable things just to succeed."

His perspective on businesses that fail has transformed: "I used to think, oh, bad operator. They don't know what they're doing. That would never happen to me. Now I realize sometimes it's not even in your control."

Why He's Not Focused on Selling the Company

I asked Gustavo if he has an exit strategy or a specific number at which he'd sell PowerISA, and his answer is honest: "It's just something I haven't really thought about."

But when you dig deeper, his reasoning becomes clear. "If you want to focus on enterprise value, you're going to solve the problems I'm solving anyway as a business owner."

His logic for why selling and running a great business require the same approach is worth understanding. To sell a company, you need multiple lead sources so the business doesn't depend on one channel. You need a strong leadership team incentivized through company results. You need to be removed from day-to-day operations because your enterprise value is zero otherwise. The company becomes you, becomes a job, becomes worth nothing to a buyer.

"Whether I want to run a really good business or sell it, the answer is the same," Gustavo explains. "Find multiple lead sources. Build a great team. And me not have to be involved in the day-to-day activity."

Currently, PowerISA still doesn't fully meet that standard. Gustavo no longer does sales. He no longer manages operations or fulfillment. But he's still involved in marketing and ads—the critical function that drives growth.

His plan is to change that by 2026. He wants to hire an "acquisition leader"—someone in charge of all client acquisition. Not just ads, but ads, content, partnerships, referrals, all of it. Someone who owns the entire client acquisition function. Once that hire is made and that person is trained, the business runs without Gustavo's daily involvement.

"You have to have leaders in place to cover these functions," he explains. "You can't be an operator founder and expect to have any kind of enterprise value. In a services-based business, if you're the owner-operator, your business is worth zero."

The harsh reality is worth repeating. If clients hire PowerISA because of Gustavo, if operations depend on his decisions, if marketing strategy reflects his instincts, then the business has no value independent of him. A buyer is buying a job, not a business.

Even with a great team and multiple lead sources, service businesses don't command massive exits. "Some friends of mine have exited marketing agencies just like mine. It's not that interesting. Quite frankly, I'd rather run a business that I like running. It gives me a great lifestyle. That just seems better than a medium-sized exit."

His final thought on the topic is refreshingly pragmatic: "I'm going to do what I should do to sell the business because it's going to make a better business to own."

The Lifestyle Today

Gustavo works from his home office in Mexico. Everything is virtual. In theory, this arrangement offers maximum flexibility—he could work from anywhere, travel constantly, live the digital nomad lifestyle that appeals to many entrepreneurs.

In practice, life happens. He has small children in school now. That changes priorities. Early in his entrepreneurial journey, he did embrace more location flexibility. "If I were a young guy, yeah, I would work from a cafe like on the beach somewhere." But he built PowerISA while simultaneously starting his family, which he acknowledges wasn't ideal. "Not recommendable. If you can avoid that, don't do it with little kids."

He started as an entrepreneur in his thirties, not his twenties. He notes that this fact aligns with a broader reality. Outside the startup mythology of Silicon Valley, most successful founders are in their thirties and forties. "The most successful founders also are a bit older. I think they have some experience in the field. A little bit more experience and tend to be better operators."

So now, grounded with family responsibilities but running a fully remote business, Gustavo has found a balance. He doesn't work from beach cafes. He works from his home office. He's present for his children. He runs a growing company with 120 clients across the time zones. The flexibility exists if he needs it, but the daily reality is a stable routine with family commitments prioritized.

What Makes PowerISA Different

In a market where competitors could theoretically copy the business model, several factors create real differentiation.

First, PowerISA only operates in real estate, only in the U.S. and Canada. No other industries. No other countries. This singular focus means every hiring decision, every training module, every operational decision is optimized for real estate specifically.

Second, the team consists of native English speakers from Latin America. Many are people who grew up in the U.S. or are bilingual due to migration patterns between the U.S. and Mexico, Colombia, or other Latin American countries. This creates a competitive advantage against Philippines-based competitors where agents may have accents or English as a learned language. "One of the biggest complaints they have about working with people in the Philippines and India is the level of accent they have."

Third, PowerISA charges premium prices and justifies them through domain expertise. They're not competing on price. They're competing on quality and results.

Fourth, PowerISA uses a transparent pricing model where clients know exactly what the VA makes and what PowerISA's management fee is. No hidden costs. No surprises.

Fifth, the call volume is significant. 200-2,000 calls per day depending on strategy. Gustavo's agents are expected to maintain high activity and accountability.

Sixth, training is relentless. Team leads meet with agents daily, not weekly or monthly. Problems get caught and corrected immediately. Skills get developed continuously.

None of these factors are secret or proprietary. Competitors could theoretically implement all of them. But they require sustained commitment, domain expertise, and quality focus that many competitors never prioritize.

The Path Forward

PowerISA set a goal for 2025: reach 100 clients. They achieved it and now have 120.

The 2025 goal is 200 clients. "What got us to 100 is not going to get us to 200," Gustavo notes. "Different problems to solve. Different strategies needed."

When looking at long-term potential, he benchmarks against existing models. Large call centers in Mexico have 1,000+ people. The Philippines and India have 3,000-5,000 person centers. By those standards, PowerISA remains small. There's significant room to scale.

The constraint, as always, is marketing. Once paid ads work reliably and consistently, growth accelerates naturally. Acquiring customers becomes a predictable process instead of relying on organic reach and referrals.

Gustavo's summary of the entrepreneurial process remains grounded: "There's no magic formula. It's just trying something. It doesn't work. Why didn't that work? There's no real playbook when you're that small. Just keep gaining customers and try to outgrow your mistakes."

Key Takeaways

The business validated itself immediately. Four people giving $10,000 without negotiation and one agent angrily demanding to personally hand over a check—that's the clearest signal of product-market fit you can get. It meant the market genuinely needed what Gustavo was building.

Scaling a service business means solving different problems at each stage. The first 10 clients are hardest because you're proving the model. Then growth accelerates. But at each new level—20 clients, 50 clients, 100 clients, 200 clients—different bottlenecks emerge. The solutions that worked before stop working.

Competition exists, but abundance mindset prevents paralysis. With 1.5 million real estate agents in the market and less than 0.5% penetration over 10 years, PowerISA doesn't need to dominate. It just needs to own its niche and execute well.

Mistakes will happen. The key is ensuring they don't kill the company. Learn from them. Adjust. Keep going.

Building for eventual sale—even if you never sell—makes a better business. Multiple lead sources. Strong leadership. Founder removed from operations. These create enterprise value whether you stay or leave.

Running a 120-client business while managing only 2 people directly is possible through systematic delegation, clear metrics, daily training, and building leaders who build leaders. It's not magic. It's process.

The lifestyle benefits are real. Remote work. Flexibility. Time with family. The ability to live in Mexico while running a U.S.-focused business. But it's not the romantic beach-cafe lifestyle of startup mythology. It's stability with opportunity.

The path forward is clear. For PowerISA: reach 200 clients, figure out paid ads, hire an acquisition leader, remove Gustavo from daily involvement, build enterprise value. For any entrepreneur: start with a real problem you understand, validate the solution quickly, scale with systems not heroics, and focus on building something you'd want to own regardless of exit timeline.