In this episode of The Inventive Journey, Devin Miller talks with Abbas Mohammed about cold calls, persistence, remote hiring, AI, and business focus that keeps founders from becoming full-time firefighters with laptops.

Abbas’s story starts at 19, when he dropped out of college to pursue real estate. That decision sounds bold in hindsight, but it came with the classic startup starter pack: uncertainty, long hours, rejection, and a calendar that probably needed medical attention. He spent about a year making calls, working long days, and pushing through before landing his first real transaction.

That first win opened the door to growth. Abbas began scaling his real estate business by hiring virtual assistants, eventually growing a larger team of cold callers. By increasing outreach capacity, he multiplied activity without personally doing every single task. That helped him grow substantially and become one of the top RE-MAX agents at a young age.

But real estate also exposed a limitation: geography. Abbas saw that his growth was tied to local markets and location-based constraints. That realization pushed him toward a new opportunity. He started Remote Leverage, first as a cold calling agency for real estate agents, then pivoted into a recruiting model focused on helping businesses hire Latin American virtual assistants and skilled remote talent.

The Remote Leverage model focuses on direct hiring rather than a traditional staffing-agency structure. Abbas explains how this gives small businesses access to capable remote workers while keeping costs lower than many local hiring options. He also highlights why Latin American talent can be attractive for U.S. businesses: similar time zones, strong communication, and collaboration during normal business hours.

A major theme is quality. Abbas is not arguing that founders should hire the cheapest possible help. His point is that the right remote talent can create leverage when the business has clear roles, expectations, and systems. Cheap support without structure can become expensive confusion. Good support with clear direction can become a growth engine.

Devin and Abbas also discuss AI and its impact on virtual assistants. Abbas shares that AI has helped his company increase productivity and revenue, but he does not view AI as a complete replacement for human talent. Instead, AI changes the nature of the work by supporting research, summaries, workflows, and faster execution. Human judgment, communication, accountability, and problem-solving still matter.

The episode also explores business decision-making. Abbas talks about testing ideas, learning from failed experiments, and recognizing when client expectations do not match reality. One lesson involved marketing ROI timelines. Clients sometimes expected results faster than Abbas anticipated. That kind of lesson is painfully useful, which is entrepreneur-speak for “we learned it after the invoice was already emotionally complicated.”

Near the end, Abbas shares one of his clearest rules of thumb for founders: focus on the bottleneck. Many entrepreneurs chase too many initiatives at once. They add products, tools, campaigns, hires, and meetings without first identifying the one constraint most limiting growth. Abbas recommends finding that bottleneck and solving it before scattering attention across everything else.

For startup founders and small business owners, this episode offers a practical scaling playbook: talk to the market, do the hard work early, delegate repeatable tasks, hire for quality, use AI as a productivity multiplier, and keep asking what is actually holding the business back.

Abbas Mohammed’s journey from cold calls to Remote Leverage is a reminder that business growth is rarely about one magic tactic. It is about learning the work, creating leverage, adapting the model, and refusing to let the founder become the bottleneck.

To chat about this one-on-one, grab a free consult at strategymeeting.com