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Abbas Mohammed, founder and CEO of Remote Leverage, recently sat down for an episode of the Grit Daily Startup Show, the podcast from Grit Daily News that explores entrepreneurship, founders, and CEOs across every stage of the startup journey, from conception and funding to exits.
In the episode, “Abbas Mohammed on Why Better Talent Beats Doing Everything Yourself,” Abbas shares the hiring philosophy that took him from $1.7M a year in real estate to $1.5M a month at Remote Leverage, and why the biggest cost most founders pay isn’t payroll. It’s the years they spend trying to become the expert at every job themselves.
Abbas built his first million-dollar business the hard way. At 18, he got into real estate, working 16-hour days, seven days a week. By 19 he was making $350,000 a year, but he’d hit a wall: he couldn’t add more hours to the day. So he started hiring virtual assistants, one at a time, until he had a team of 25 handling cold calls, appointments, and client documents. That team took his business to $1.7 million a year.
But the real lesson wasn’t that outsourcing saved money. It was that specialists could outperform him. As Abbas explains in the episode, most founders try to learn every skill their business needs: running ads, building landing pages, writing emails, closing sales. The problem is that real expertise in any one of those areas can take years to build, and no founder can be the best marketer, best salesperson, and best operator at the same time. Once he accepted that, the question stopped being “how do I get better at this” and became “who is already better at this than me, and how do I afford them.”
When Abbas started Remote Leverage, he ran marketing, sales, and fulfillment himself until the business hit roughly $40,000 to $50,000 a month in revenue. Only then did he start hiring, and always in the same order:
His advice to founders is to hire based on what will actually move revenue, not based on which tasks they’re personally sick of doing. A founder who’s tired of sales but doesn’t have enough leads to keep a sales rep busy will just turn payroll into a new cost center. He’s also blunt about a related mistake: trying to save 20 to 30 percent on a hire’s salary often costs far more in lost results. In his words, the difference between an average hire and a great one isn’t a small edge. It’s often the difference between a position that drives revenue and one that just drains it.
One of the more unusual parts of the conversation is how much weight Abbas puts on customer fulfillment, a topic he says most business books skip in favor of marketing, sales, and tech. In Remote Leverage’s early days, clients had his personal cell number and would text him at all hours, because there was no real process in place yet. Rather than pour money into ads to grow faster, he deliberately kept marketing spend small and spent months documenting every client question, objection, and confusion point, then rebuilding onboarding around it.
The goal was a process that didn’t depend on him personally, so every client got the same experience regardless of who they worked with on the team. Two years and $1.5 million a month in revenue later, he still revisits and adjusts that process every month.
Abbas also gets candid about why placements sometimes don’t work out, and it’s rarely the talent. The most common issues he sees:
Abbas shares that Remote Leverage grew from roughly $500,000 to $600,000 a month in revenue to $1.5 million with the same internal headcount of 120 employees, largely by using AI to automate lower-level, repetitive work. But he pushes back on the idea that AI is replacing people. In his view, automating entry-level tasks increases the demand for experienced marketers, sales leads, and operators who know how to use the technology to get more out of their work. He’s clear that he wouldn’t replace his head of Facebook ads, his Google ads lead, or his head of sales with AI. He’d just give them better tools.
Abbas and the Grit Daily Startup Show host cover:
The Grit Daily Startup Show is the podcast from Grit Daily News, the premier startup news hub covering Millennial and Gen Z entrepreneurship, funding, and founder stories. The show features single-guest and multi-guest interviews with founders and CEOs across every industry, digging into the decisions, mistakes, and turning points behind their companies.
Remote Leverage is a U.S.-based company helping businesses build and manage exceptional global teams. Our own team consists of 120+ team members spanning Latin America, Europe, and Asia, representing over 25 countries. Diversity is the foundation of how we work.
We’re the all-in-one partner for hiring globally. We start by finding the right people: our recruiting team sources, vets, and matches top remote talent to roles that fit each client’s specific needs. From there, we handle everything that comes next, including onboarding, payments, contracts, compliance, and the day-to-day support that keeps distributed teams running. One partner, one invoice, one point of contact for the entire lifecycle.
That end-to-end model is the difference. Most companies stitch together a recruiter, a payments provider, a contractor-of-record, and an HR platform to make global hiring work. We replace all of it. Our clients get the people they need and the infrastructure to keep them, without managing four vendors to get there.
But our work isn’t just about filling roles. We believe great talent exists everywhere, and that the right opportunity can change a career. Every placement we make is an investment in two outcomes: a business that grows with confidence, and a professional who builds a meaningful, long-term career, wherever they are in the world.
That’s the leverage we’re after.
If this episode has you rethinking what’s on your plate, we can help.
