Danny Loa

I’ve always cared about my clients like they were family. Extended family, brothers and sisters from another mother, whatever you want to call it. A mentor once told me I was “loyal to a fault.” Maybe so. But I’ve always believed if I treat someone’s business exactly like I’d treat my own, they succeed, and that success flows back to me eventually, usually in the form of a referral, which I still think is the biggest compliment you can get in this business.

That belief got tested hard at my last job.

The Two Clients

Two of my clients went out of business within 4 weeks of each other. One went bankrupt. The other got bought out. One owed us over $10,000. The other owed $15,000. And when it happened, my previous company didn’t care about either client. They sent both accounts straight to collections and charged back every dollar of commission I’d made on them.

They didn’t care about my clients. They didn’t care about my family, either, since that commission was money I was counting on.

That’s when it hit me. I’d spent ten years fighting for clients inside a system that was never built with their success in mind first. I could keep fighting a losing fight, or I could find somewhere that actually meant it.

My wife had been telling me for years I needed to leave. She watched me come home worn down by arguments that weren’t even worth having, felt underappreciated, and knew I needed room to grow, not just for me, but for our family. I’m the only one working in our household, so “grow professionally” isn’t a nice-to-have for me. It’s how I provide.

So when the headhunters started calling again, I finally listened.

Insert Camille

One of the calls led back to Camille.

I actually trained her during her first month in the industry, right after she graduated college, years earlier, and I knew right away she was going to be great. She cared, she was willing to learn, and she never once acted like grunt work was beneath her. She left our previous company after a year of the grind. I knew we lost a great one, but we kept in touch. My wife is actually a better friend to her than I was, but she had reached out in May and asked how I was doing and if I still loved my job, which I did, but I wasn’t listening at that time. Fast forward to July and I called to ask if her company was still hiring. She told me to send my resume.

I ended up interviewing with four other companies around the same time. They all blurred together. But after my interview with Jazmin at CI Web Group, I knew. This was where I wanted to be. They cared about not only their clients but the people who were putting in the work for our clients.

Past 5:00, But Different

At my old job, I was the one texting clients and coworkers late into the night, fighting battles nobody else wanted to fight, advocating for business owners to get shown some love when they were having tough times during hardships and still paying their bills. That part of me didn’t change when I got to CI. What changed was who was on the other end of the phone.

Jennifer and I text late, but it’s not a fight, it’s a partnership. One night at 11:24 PM, it went like this:

Jennifer: Hey

Jennifer: All seasons

Jennifer: I know they approved, I hate the design

Jennifer: Hate

Jennifer: Hate

Jennifer: Hate

Me: lol

Jennifer: Can I redesign

Me: They are good friends of mine! They will let us do whatever we want

Jennifer: Been working on it for 6 hours

That’s the difference. We’re in different time zones, same intensity, completely different conversation…HELP THE CLIENT.

What “Best For the Client” Actually Looks Like

A few months ago I built four landing pages for a client, at no cost. Nobody told me to. I just knew it was what the client needed in that moment. At my old company, that would’ve gotten someone upset because it wasn’t generating revenue. At CI, nobody blinked. Everyone understood: if it’s right for the client, it’s right for us.

That’s the whole philosophy in one story. “If we put in the work, it will always show up.” That’s something a good friend and I used to say back when we were in year one of this wild marketing world, cold-calling fifty businesses a day, driving around town, getting nothing but no’s for a week straight. It’s still true. It just finally landed somewhere that puts the work behind it too.

Jennifer

What sealed it for me wasn’t just the philosophy. It was watching it in action. Jennifer will jump on a call with a client herself if that’s what a problem needs. Not because she has to but because she cares about the person on the other end.

She’s a trailblazer, and I mean that specifically: she doesn’t hope, pray, and wait for a better solution to show up. She builds it. Proprietary AI agents that make me better at my job. An entirely new operating system built from scratch when everyone else is too scared of the uncertainty to try. She does it because deep down she knows it’s the right thing for our clients, even when it’s not the easy thing.

I’ve seen the results. Clients using us exclusively, pulling 300 to 500 calls a month from organic search. A 21x ROI in a single month for a client who fully committed to the AI work we were doing. Another client called me to “stop promoting HVAC” due to the amount of leads we had generated. And on the flip side, a client who resisted AI, and was told he “wasn’t the best” for a job, and lost a $20,000 job because of it.

So if there’s one thing I’d tell anyone reading this: don’t be afraid of AI. Learn it, understand it, implement it, let it evolve with you, at work and at home. It’s not here to take over the world like the Terminator. It’s here to make you faster and better at what you already do.

My kids and my close friends see this at home. They’ll ask me a question, watch me talk to my AI (literally) and work through it, and get amazed by it. Sometimes they’ll come back and say “I asked AI and it gave me a dumb answer,” and that’s become one of my favorite teaching moments, showing them that the answer you get is only as good as the question you ask.

Where This Goes

I can’t wait to see where the future takes CI Web Group. For everyone who’s all in with us, I’m excited for what’s next, because I’ve already seen what happens when this team puts in the work.

“If we put in the work, it will always show up.”