Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Alex Khassa Founder and CEO of Clients Blackbox

Episode Date: September 8, 2026

Alex Khassa is the founder and CEO of Clients Blackbox, a Meta Ads agency in Austin, Texas. The firm runs Meta ad campaigns for companies across financial services, from wealth management and private credit to fintech, lending, banking, and insurance. Its video first approach turns cold audiences into qualified customers. Clients range from emerging firms to enterprises managing more than $10 billion. In 2026, Inc. magazine ranked Clients Blackbox No. 641 on the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest growing private companies in America, with 536 percent revenue growth over three years.Learn more: https://www.clientsblackbox.com/Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-alex-khassa-founder-and-ceo-of-clients-blackbox

Welcome to influential entrepreneurs, bringing you interviews with elite business leaders and experts, sharing tips and strategies for elevating your business to the next level. Here's your host, Mike Saunders. Hello and welcome to this episode of Influential Entrepreneurs. This is Mike Saunders, the authority positioning coach. Today we have with us Alex Kasa, who's the founder and CEO of Clients Blackbox. Alex, welcome to the program. Mike, thanks for having me.

Hey, you're welcome. So I'm excited to talk to you because I know you've got some exciting news to talk through. But before we dive in, I want to hear all about your story and background and what got you into this industry. Oh, yeah. So we run meta ads for financial services companies. And the way that I got into that is before counting clients, BlackBlocks, I had another marketing agency and I used to do some freelance work as a digital marketer. And I worked with different industries. And what I learned is that for a marketing company or a marketer to do the best job possible for their clients,

you really have to know the end consumer and understand the industry. And to do that, you can't be running ads for e-commerce and law firms and financial services and, you know, CPG. Because the learnings don't transfer necessarily. So I had to pick. And I picked financial services because we had some early traction. We had three accounts that all had a 10x return on investment at the time of working with them, working with us. And I didn't see that with other industries. And I'm also very passionate and interested in financial planning, financial services.

My YouTube feed is full of interviews with Jamie Diamond and Ray Dalio and all these things. So a lot of passionate industry, found some early success and decided to double down and only work with financial services companies. And I've done that six years ago. and today client stock box, we just won't think 5,000 or 2026. We're pretty excited about that. You know, I want to drill in a little bit deeper on that because I think you just dropped a piece of information

that could be like a masterclass for the next two hours of a conversation, which is target audience, niche, ideal client profile. So I feel like so many times entrepreneurs, business owners, they just feel like I want to do all things to all people because I can sell this widget and I want to sell them to anything. And so in financial services, here's this financial advisor. And let's just use this as an example. They say, I help couples retire well. Well, that can be any kind of couple from any walk of life at many ages, but there can be some instances where an advisor could go, you know what, I only work with airline pilots because maybe they came out of the airline industry. What are your

thoughts around working with the advisors you've worked with over the last six years. Have you seen that as a trend with advisors who then take that same thought and they drill down? Will that help them and their message resound better with their target audience? Yeah, well, you have to think about it from a first principle standpoint. The end consumer, the customer has a choice. And they're never only looking at you. They're looking at multiple options.

So why would they choose to work with you? You don't operate and avoid. We live in a competitive world. You have to give the end customer a reason to work with you. And being a specialist is one reason to do that. You know, work with financial services companies and wealth management financial advisors. We have found that advisors who are all things to all people have a harder time growing organically than advisors who specialize. For example, advisors who specialize in working with pre-retirees and retirees have a harder time growing.

an easier time growing than advisors would take clients in all walks of life because they were able to develop a methodology around helping people retire better. And even that, as you said, there's a lot of advisors are successful with pilots, for example. There's other specific industries or specific professions that advisors can specialize in that will give them a good reason to work with them. With that being said, there are some exceptions. You know, the way the industry has worked for the past few decades is that you go work for a bank, big bank, and then you get the clients that you get, then you grow a book of business, you go independent, and that's how you end up with your book of business. And if that's the way that you go in your book of business, that's one way to do it.

But if you want to grow organically, it's a lot easier if you specialize. And much of that comes from, like what you alluded to a little bit ago, where it's like you kind of learn the language and the secret handshake and the phrases and the acronyms and there's fears and desires. And someone's fears and desires that is an airline pilot using this example versus someone who's a school teacher might be totally different. So as you start dialing that in, you're just really resonating with that target audience that much better. And then, like to your point, if you had a client who's an advisor that really has their target audience dialed in, doesn't that make your job

that much easier coming in to work with them? Because now you've got a dialed in message to really get it out in front of the perfect target audience for them. Yes, absolutely. It makes it a lot easier. What we like to tell people is that no marketing partner is going to be able to find product market fit for you. You have to do it on their own. And the marketing partner is only able to amplify that for you. So if you are all things to all people, there's a really hard to market value proposition versus being a specialist in just working with airline pilots or federal employees or, you know, whatever industry or profession that you've chosen. It doesn't have to be a profession, you know, it could be a wealth level.

Like there's there's a few, but there's a few advisors who are very, very skilled who work with ultra high net worth entrepreneurs, business owners, investors, right? There's not that many of them, but that is a way to specialize. You don't have to specialize specifically a profession. It could be, you know, a segment of the wealth. There's a lot of advice that's great in the mass affluence space. So specializing definitely helps grow fast. Specializing has different flavors.

colors, but find a path that you can really go down and really call it your own and really dive in deep there. So that's awesome. You know, you mentioned that you made the Inc. 5,000 and actually at number 641, what drove that growth? Well, we'd like to think that it's focus because only working with financial services companies, we're able to share the learnings between our clients. It's not our first time doing this. You don't have to pay the trial and error cost of research that a new agency might have to do if they're generic. So, you know, our client number 200 has a better experience that our client number one, because we've done that a couple hundred times, right, for a similar vertical. So we want to think

its focus. Also, we believe that financial services is underserved from marketing standpoint because some segments of it, particularly wealth management, underspends on marketing. So it has not been of major interest for marketing partners versus like an e-commerce or law firms that's been a lot more in marketing. Financial service is also a little bit harder to market because of financial services category on meta specifically, which severely limits your ability to target, which makes most marketers who have experience in other industries have a tough time cracking the code, which we have in financial services. So I want to say it's focus. Compliance. Compliance. is also a friction point for a lot of marketers in this industry because compliance slows down every step of the process.

And that is just how the industry works. And we see it as, you know, we got to do it this way. You know, that that's a moat, we'd say, for us. And financial services is a pretty big. It becomes a competitive advantage, really, right? Because once you know that you can't use that word versus this word and you have to do it this way, then when you are speaking that language, that kind of sets you apart. And then when that client goes to their compliance department and says, hey, how does this look? And they go thumbs up first pass. It really makes you shine. Absolutely. And it is such a pain for a financial

services firm to work with an agency that has never worked with financial services. And then they have to educate them on how compliance works. And the agency is surprised. They're like, why can't we say this? We've done this with this other clients, you know, and just try this. And it's such a pain. So we get to saving that pain as well. So you mentioned something a second ago that I think, you know, the only thing constant in life has changed. But meta has changed the way that you can target. And it used to be there was this whole laundry list of, I want people that likes to read

the newspaper versus digital. I want to target people who. And nowadays, it's not as robust and vibrant, right? So talk a little bit about how that deep targeting has changed and how you're able to kind of really zero in on that to make your. ads work for your clients. Yeah, absolutely. So meta, if you look at it,

if you're advertising on meta in 2026, it's completely different than 2016 back when I first started advertising on meta. Back then, you could get super granular. There's a lot of alpha or benefits in optimizing for people that use a certain device for interest in certain things. And meta is cracking down on that.

Specifically, I mean, it's even worse for financial services because financial service category severely limits the way you can target. And they're doing that for, different reasons because their targeting is too good. It does not mean that meta is working worse now. It actually is working better for us than before. It just means that the game has changed. So there's two sides of advertising on meta.

There's the media buying side. And that is the person that's on the meta ads account who is choosing the targeting, choosing different segments that's going to choose how to allocate your budget, all that. That's media buying. Now, I mean, I'll make a prediction. three to five years, you will probably not even need a media buyer to run your ads that way. You can just plug in your Claude, MCP, two meta, and it will just run your ads for you.

Wow. Then there's a creative side. The creative side is the actual content that you're running on meta. And that aligns with the new meta and dromeda update that dropped recently. The meta andromeda update basically says you need a lot more. creative, a lot more ads than before in order for your cost per result to remain reasonable for your returns to remain good. The way they want the algorithm to change is to make it way more personalized to you. So for example, if you're, Mike, if you're on Facebook, they want

you to see an ad that says versus saying, hey, if you're an entrepreneur, they want it to say, if you're an entrepreneur who loves to interview entrepreneurs on their podcast and running this, you know, PR business. And you're like, that's me. You want the people in the mind to go, ooh, that's talking right to me. Exactly. So back in the day, you'd have to actually choose Mike from a certain sub segment in the audience settings. Now you just have to say that in your ad copy in your message, and that will reach Mike directly. So what Meta and Drameda is forcing us to do is to make a lot more creative that is niche in who it would resonate with.

So that means that maybe one ad in the past might spend two or three million dollars for us across different accounts. now each ad might only spend 10 or $20,000 before it dies. So we need to create a lot more creative. And that has allowed us to become really a creative powerhouse. The amount of creative we create today versus a couple years ago is orders of magnitude higher. AI has helped with that, of course.

But that is what's required to stay competitive. So meta's changed their algorithm. Metas changed the way they target. It's no longer about the media buying. It's no longer about, you know, cost caps versus automatic bidding versus all these different quant terms. It's more about the actual creative. It's about making the right creative that resonates with the right with the end consumer,

but also making a ton of it, a lot more that you think is reasonable in order for you to have good results and maintain the results that you want over a long enough period of time. So that's an opportunity is to learn how to make that creative really speak directly to your target audience. What are you seeing as a mistake financial companies make with paid advertising? because there's got to be a whole bunch of them. So what are some of the top ones? Yeah, well, I would say the number one mistake is that they believe that compliance will water down their messaging.

And they let compliance to write their ad copy. You know, love compliance. We want to stay compliant. You want everything to be compliance approved. However, we don't just accept what compliance sends us as a rewrite. You say, hey, well, why did you reject this? will because of X, Y, and Z. Well, let me rewrite it in the way that I think you'll approve and I believe we'll perform

as well. So the number one mistake is letting compliance water down your messaging. And you got to take ownership up there as the market or as the financial service company to actually make it work and not let it get watered down. The second mistake is that they make too few ads. So they might just create one amazing ad because they think it's great. They think the audience will think it's great. that is no longer the game.

You're not making one amazing ad for a Super Bowl. It's a different way of advertising. You're making dozens, if not hundreds of ads for the meta-alogram to serve different niche pockets of the audience and be served to them that way. And it's more about volume with quality, but it's not about making one perfect painting and thinking that we are Van Gogh. Van Gogh created a lot more paintings than one. Yeah.

It kind of makes me think what you mentioned there of. like ad fatigue. Like if you do want to hang on to that great one ad, because it's working good. At some point, it's not going to work good because people are used to, yeah, yeah, yeah, I've seen that before and then they just ignore it. So you need a lot of different ads for many reasons for the algorithm and meta, but also your audience, right? Absolutely, yes. Yeah, the audience will, you know, get fatigued by that. But also, different people respond to different things. So, you know, some people respond to responsive benefits, others will respond to removing a negative.

Some people respond to a logical argument. Others will respond to an emotional argument. Also depends on the time of day that you catch them. So you really want to have different angles. And maybe being contrarian and something sticking out like, you know, this is, you know, terrible. The three critical mistakes about whatever. Now, what is your strategy? Are you pushing people to see this ad and go right to book a call or see this ad and watch this video?

Or what is kind of the process there to help drive? draw that audience in? Well, every segment of financial service is a little different. However, what we've seen for wealth management and even private credit investment firms so far is that video works really well in order to get your point across, especially wealth management, because really what you're selling is more, it's less of a product because the products in planning is nowadays commoditized. Let's be real about it. You're selling a relationship. So having the advisor in front of the camera, educating people about retirement planning strategies, tax optimization strategies for high net worth investors works. And the funnel that we've found

worked best for that is having a short video on Facebook. And the length of the video, it's a pro tip, the length of the video in seconds is going to be pretty close to the age of the end consumer. So if I'm targeting a 30-year-old, I'm going to have a 30-second video. If I'm targeting a 60-year-old, I have a 60-second video. They have a longer attention span. Interesting. I wonder what's the psychology behind that. Is it because a 30-year-old's got so much more going on at the 60-year-old, maybe not as much?

But, I mean, I don't know really who's pinpointed that reasoning, right? What do you think? Well, most advisors that I work with are 50-something years old. And if you see them using their phone, they're a little slower than their kids, 425. or just scrolling, scrolling. You know, TikTok made it worse for everybody, right? So the older demographic has a little bit more attention span than the younger one. And if I just see, you know, for example, my 15-year-old sister using Instagram or TikTok,

she's scrolling way faster than I would. Yep. She's got a whole lot more things going on. So what's next for you guys? You've got this dialed in with the meta ads. Are you looking to bring new things to your client? that will help expand what the results that you deliver for them? Absolutely.

So we've recently just revamped our creative production process in order to really 10x the amount of content that we're able to produce for our clients. And we're seeing that lead to much better outcomes for them. And that helps really, it helps a lot more if you are local. So for example, if I'm just advertising to your office plus 30 miles, there's less people there typically than if I'm advertising nationwide, right? Which means that the ads will fatigue faster. I need way more creative to resonate with the same people in different ways. And that has forced us to develop our creative process in order to really like 10x the amount of content we're able to take care for our clients without charging them more. We just done it a different way.

It's the same cost. Bigger, faster, stronger, more efficient. And for the same dollars, that is music to anybody's ears. That's awesome, Alex. Well, congratulations on your Inc. 5,000 award. You really, really are shining there. And to be number 641, I think you said, it's pretty amazing because that's at the upper end of that range. So if someone is interested in reaching out and connecting with you, what's the best way that they can do that?

Well, thank you. And you can go to clients, blackbox.com, clients with an S blackbox.com, and book an intro call. We take 15-minute intro calls and see if what we do can help you. Excellent. Alex, thank you so much for coming on. It's been a real pleasure chatting with you. Thank you for having me, Mike. You've been listening to influential entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders.

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