These days Nima Hakimi leads Convoso, a software provider for outbound contact centers, with a global team and steadily growing top line (the company has achieved a 40% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) in revenue over the past five years). When the company entered the space 20 years ago, voiceover IP (VoIP) was a hot new technology. Twenty years later, the company is fully immersed in AI.
Yet the story of Convoso isn’t just about embracing technology, change, and innovation. The foundation of the company’s growth is in the relationship of Nima with his business partner, co-founder, and older brother, Bobby.
Nima Hakimi and Bobby Hakimi at their office in 2019
FAMILY MATTERS
While Convoso is by far Nima and Bobby’s most successful business, it wasn’t their first joint foray into the world of commerce.
Toward the end of high school, the pair created an advertising network that ended up bringing in significant revenue. That first experience in running a business became the groundwork for building the successful company that Nima leads today.
Nima admits that going into business with a relative can result in crossing boundaries that normally wouldn’t be crossed. However, he’s also keen to highlight the positives: “It’s someone you will trust with your life, so that connection is automatically there. You don’t need to work on building that … but at the same time, your big brother is your big brother. There are certainly those dynamics. You know, am I going to listen to you or not?”
He believes that their complementary strengths have been a key to success. Nima has a more structured and thoughtful approach, and has focused on strategy and overall business operations. Meanwhile, Bobby applies his creativity and action-oriented approach to product and innovation for the company.
Even 20 years down the line, while there’s plenty to figure out, Nima believes that reviewing the business performance together each month helps them stay aligned.
EARLY DAYS OF CONVOSO
Shortly after the brothers’ first business venture had dissolved, a relative asked Bobby if he could help him automate his call center.
At the time in 2006, voice over IP technology was brand-new, and people were making phone calls through computers for the first time. The two brothers realized they could help put together a system to utilize the technology, which ended up having a noticeable impact on operational efficiency and revenue potential.
Buoyed by the success, they started reaching out to more people in their network, turning a favor to a cousin into a full-blown business.
The original vision was to bring outbound dialing into the cloud, at a time when SaaS companies and cloud-based technologies were just beginning to gain wider adoption. Convoso offered a pay-as-you-go model at an affordable price for a service that most companies were accustomed to paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for on-premise software and hardware. It took 10 years to truly get the formula right (after rebuilding the product three times), but successes along the way showed there was strong potential for continued growth.
Soon, it started to pay off. “We saw excellent growth after about a year, about six figures in revenue,” Nima says. “The second year, maybe half a million in revenue. And then, every year thereafter for the next three or four years, we kept doubling and were in the sub-couple million in revenue.”
Nima at Closers Club podcast – Summer 2025
THE NEED TO REINVENT
But eventually, growth stalled. Somewhat counterintuitively, the large number of customers they had acquired was starting to become a problem—there were issues with the infrastructure and software. The technology had effectively hit its ceiling.
First, the team tried to make it better by hiring more developers. “We spent a year or two trying to do that. And we thought, oh, it’s going to take six months. Nothing takes six months in tech,” says Nima with a laugh.
Next, they sought to clarify which customers were truly worth doing business with and subsequently cut their customer base in half. Since they’d cut the lower-ticket clients, revenue remained the same.
A key realization during this period was that the contact rate (the percentage of calls placed versus answered) was the most important metric for the customer.
“Through rebuilding the platform, we focused with that objective in mind,” Nima says. “We were continually asking ourselves, ‘How can we engineer our solution to enable our customers to connect with as many prospects on the phone as possible?’”
After rebuilding the platform from the ground up and relaunching in 2016, Convoso finally hit a breakthrough. Word spread that they had the highest contact rate on the market, and subsequently landed their first customer with 100 agents.
A later challenge was regulatory compliance in the space. Monitoring the latest laws is essential for their customers to stay in business, so Convoso started educating both the team and its customers, and building features into the platform to help customers manage compliance.
Then, in 2019, the outbound call center industry was impacted by the significant increase in call flagging and blocking by the carriers. Even when Convoso’s compliant-minded customers had consent to contact the consumer, they still might find their calls labeled as scam or spam, or blocked altogether. Managing one’s caller reputation and avoiding the unjustly assigned spam and scam labels became essential for staying in business.
“Once we introduced our new caller ID reputation tool, that’s when the company really took off,” Nima says. “We were starting to see 30% to 40% growth annually, year over year.”
Nima at Law Conference of Champions 2025
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Innovation has always been at the center of Convoso, building sophisticated algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) into the entire platform architecture.
Nima believes that the main job of AI is to reduce burnout and increase productivity of the agents, which is incredibly important given the high turnover rate in the contact center industry.
“When I look at AI, a lot of people think about replacing the human being, but that’s far from it,” he says. “It’s about helping the human to be more successful, to empower them, to equip them with things, to take away the repetitive, mundane tasks.”
Other potential jobs of AI include helping schedule call times through texts, listening to calls to check whether an agent is compliant and following all the talking points, and getting data about the performance of agents.
“If you’re a law firm for personal injury, a customer might go on the website, fill out the form, and the intake specialist will get that lead on the phone, and it’s a high-value case. Maybe a senior partner at that firm wants to know about it right away when that happens,” Nima says. “Well, AI can listen to the call, and it can notify them of that happening so that there’s more real-time action.”
Going forward, Nima has even more ambitious ideas for how to use AI. He is in the process of building a ChatGPT-like functionality so customers can ask questions about their campaigns to more strategically and intelligently use their data. For instance, they could ask, “Which lead sources convert best when worked by which agents, on which days and times of the week?” In high volume environments with tens of thousands of leads in play, that is not a simple report. It is a complex real time analysis that surfaces patterns a human analyst would struggle to spot fast enough. The system can deliver these insights instantly, enabling managers to reassign leads or adjust calling strategies on the fly for maximum impact.
“There’s a lot of power in the data,” he says. “When you have a business like this where you’re depending on leads, and you have agents that have a lot of activity going on all the time, you can get a lot of insights.”
FUTURE DIRECTION
Nima says he’s always trying to improve as a CEO. “My DNA has always been about personal development. I’m always looking for ways to get better.”
He used to be part of Vistage, an executive coaching organization, and has a mentor in David Ghiyam, co-founder of MaryRuth Organics.
Across all these growth experiences, what’s his biggest takeaway? “The biggest lesson is just to embrace the pain and use it as a path to growth,” Nima says. ”When you’re experiencing pain, a big breakthrough is coming. Then you can shift your mindset right away.
