Rahul Alim Got His First Customer Before He Left the Parking Lot

Rahul Alim had left his job, but he had not yet left the parking lot. There were calls to make. In his telling, the first customer for his new agency arrived that same day, while the building where he had worked for Realtor.com was still close enough to be part of the scenery. An office could wait. A sale, apparently, could not.

It is an appropriately unceremonious opening for someone whose coaching business would acquire the name GSD, short for Get Shit Done. No unveiling, no elaborate headquarters. Just a salesman changing the terms of his employment by finding someone willing to buy directly from him.

The more interesting part is what he was selling. At Realtor.com, Alim had watched real-estate agents purchase digital advertising and then struggle with the practical business of using it. The technology had made it into their hands. The work remained. He saw room for someone who would take responsibility for that awkward interval.

Today, as founder, president and CEO of Custom Creatives, he operates in a much wider field. There is the agency, mentorship for other agency owners, and a role as chief revenue officer at Thinkrr, a voice AI company. Follow the work backward, though, and the same concern keeps appearing: after somebody expresses interest, buys a tool or agrees to a plan, what happens next?

An education under the desk

Before there were advertising accounts, there was his parents’ office. Alim remembers a childhood in which his bed was under a desk. Business was part of the household atmosphere, something he could observe at close range rather than a remote adult occupation that began after the school run.

He has also recalled waking up to deals being closed at the breakfast table. His family supplied a running demonstration of entrepreneurship: decisions, conversations, the work of persuading someone else that an arrangement made sense. A breakfast table can be an economical classroom. The tuition is listening.

His younger ambition pointed toward a different arena. He wanted to become a professional soccer player. The attachment to sport survived the change of career: he follows football and basketball as well as the Premier League and La Liga. Time with family has included Dodgers and Galaxy games. Competition is an interest he has carried comfortably into marketing.

His public education history includes Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo from 1997 to 2001. But one of his more revealing lessons came earlier, at sixteen, working at Thrifty’s. He scooped ice cream, cleaned floors, organized aisles and took care of the less glamorous jobs that keep a shop functioning.

What stayed with him was the importance of recognizing an employee who had done good work. The lesson is small enough to escape a founder’s presentation deck, which is one reason to keep it. A person cleaning the floor still wants someone to notice that the floor is clean.

The useful misunderstanding

Alim’s entrance into internet advertising involved a mistaken assumption. When he applied to the business then known as HomeStore, he thought he was approaching an online furniture company. The interview introduced him to Realtor.com and a different commercial proposition: helping real-estate professionals advertise on the internet.

He became absorbed in the way search could connect a person’s intention to a purchase. A house, a pair of shoes, tickets to a game: people could look for something and move toward buying it in a short stretch of time. His own attention settled on the real-estate market and the people paying to reach those buyers.

By his account, he began at Realtor.com in 2003. His agency career started in 2004 with Success Marketing Solutions. The opportunity grew out of conversations with agents who needed somebody to manage the systems he was selling. Their difficulty gave him a concrete offer to make, and a group of customers whose work he already understood.

That beginning is less romantic than discovering a completely unoccupied market. It is also more useful. Alim could see the purchase and the unfinished task beside it. He did not have to explain the entire internet to a stranger before explaining why his service might help.

“I had to quit www.realtor.com to finally get my raise”

Rahul Alim

Realtor.com eventually became an agency client. The relationship had crossed the desk: a former employee was now supplying services to the company he had left. The line about a raise has a salesman’s neatness, but beneath the joke is a consequential change in responsibility. He was running the operation that had to deliver.

One industry, repeated well

Real estate gave Custom Creatives an early focus. Alim has described how specializing helped simplify the company’s systems and products. Work such as banner advertising could be organized around recurring needs rather than treated as a fresh invention every time a customer called.

The appeal of that arrangement is easy to understand. A team that knows the customer, the format and the delivery process can spend less time discovering what the job is. Familiarity becomes practical knowledge. It can inform pricing, hiring and the questions asked before a project begins.

Expansion came as the business acquired experience and talent. Custom Creatives moved into a broader range of services and industries, including web development, advertising and search marketing. Its work has included local businesses alongside larger names such as GEICO, Advertise.com and ReachLocal.

That range presents its own management problem. The person buying help for a local business and the person choosing a supplier for a large organization may need different conversations. Alim’s account of growth gives considerable attention to matching people and responsibilities to those differences. Winning the work is only the beginning of understanding it.

The founder learns to step aside

The equipment list for Alim’s early business was brief: a cell phone, a borrowed laptop and his parents’ Wi-Fi. He sold an offer he could explain, then used contractors for fulfillment. Payment for the work came out of what he earned. It was an improvised way to get moving with limited resources.

Resourcefulness, however, does not settle every question of company design. He has described trying to handle too much himself before realizing that the business needed other people to take responsibility. Delegation became a means of making room for strategy, longer-term goals and the next stage of the company.

There is a particular difficulty here for a capable salesperson. Personal effort produces an immediate response: make another call, pursue another account. Building a team asks for a different sort of effort. Someone else has to understand the job, make decisions and carry it through without the founder becoming the answer to every question.

His coaching work returns to this transition. He wants entrepreneurs to move beyond the habit of doing everything themselves and create businesses with a functioning division of labor. The assembly-line image he uses is deliberately practical. Tasks need an order. Responsibilities need owners. A customer should not have to depend on one person remembering every detail.

GSD turns those lessons into another business. Alim works with agency owners on selling, hiring and operations, alongside colleague Cody Getchell. The audience is a revealing choice: people in his own trade, facing versions of problems he has already encountered. They may need help turning a skill into a company that can deliver consistently.

His approach also involves deciding which customers suit the business. He looks for people prepared to invest in growth and use technology. That choice affects the work long before a contract becomes a project. Every new customer brings expectations; an agency has to decide whether it can meet them on terms that make sense.

Someone still has to answer

Thinkrr puts Alim’s commercial experience beside a newer set of tools. The company’s team identifies him as chief revenue officer, alongside CEO Mohan Gulati, CTO and co-founder Reza Tayefi, and chief marketing officer Cody Getchell. Its products use voice AI to help businesses handle customer conversations.

The applications include responding to inquiries, screening prospective customers and booking appointments. A real-estate inquiry or a request for a home-service visit can arrive while staff are occupied elsewhere. Thinkrr’s proposition is to make a response available at that moment, including outside ordinary working hours.

Alim’s interest fits the rest of his career. In his early advertising work, a customer owned technology but needed help making use of it. Here, a business may have attracted interest but still need a way to handle the conversation. Both situations concern the work between an initial opportunity and something useful happening.

He continues discussing that work in interviews, from team communication to using the product itself in the sales process. The vocabulary has moved from banner ads toward voice agents. The questions remain satisfyingly ordinary: who needs help, what is going wrong, and can the proposed service make the next step easier?

Outside those conversations, his recommendations for Los Angeles include Grand Central Market and the Bradbury Building. There is pleasure in that specificity. A founder can talk for hours about systems; he can also tell you where to spend an afternoon.

The parking-lot story survives because it is easy to picture. Its sequel takes longer to tell. Alim learned to find the customer, build the service and share responsibility for delivering it. The first call could be made alone. Much of the work that followed required other people.