February 26, 2017

Meet Allen Ashouri of EMRG in West Los Angeles

Local Stories

Today we’d like to introduce you to Allen Ashouri.

Allen, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
I’ve loved business from a very young age. Whether it was setting up lemonade stands, trading Pokémon cards to get the best (since I couldn’t afford to buy as many as my friends), or selling custom CDs as a kid. It felt good being independent for my own costs and lightening the burden on my family from the age of 13.

We always had enough and got by; I was always fed and clothed and had a lot of love as a kid. But things weren’t always easy financially. When my parents split up when I was younger I watched both of them struggle. I particularly remember my mom working 60+ hour weeks and always making sure we had everything we needed. I credit a lot of my drive and ambition to watching her work as hard as she did. She ignited the fire in me to do well financially and buy her the dream home she always deserved.

As a teenager, I was given the opportunity to work for my 85-year-old neighbor, Ms. Halmy. She was a sweet lady that offered me $10/hr to teach her how to use her computer over the course of several weeks. $10/hr was a lot of money for a 13-year-old kid back in ’03. That slowly led to an ambitious 14-year-old charging $40/hr for everyone in his neighborhood and slowly placing flyers in neighboring areas like Beverly Hills. After a while, I realized how bad of a computer tech I actually was and decided to hire people better than myself. This is how Comp-Pros was built, a computer repair and IT Support business that’s serviced over 5000 computers and is now one of the highest rated IT Support companies in LA on websites like Yelp, Google, and others.

After several years of service, Comp-Pros’ clients started asking for more; specifically websites. We started designing and developing websites and quickly became very good at it. Fast forward another 8 years, and we have created a new brand out of a division of Comp-Pros call EMRG (pronounced emerge), designing conversion-focused websites that focus on increasing profitability for our clients through design techniques and analyzing data trends for different businesses.

We’ve come a long way since I was a computer tech. We are proud to say that we’ve completed over 1500 website projects, have extremely effective online marketing campaigns that increase our clients’ profitability, and have a clientele base that includes fortune 500 companies and public entities like Westfield among others. Our mission statement at EMRG is and has always been about increasing profitability, high levels of integrity, and having a “giving back” approach built into the business. We’re glad to say we’ve continued to hit on all 3, and currently sponsor several children and their families, have contributed to organizations like the National MS Society, Childfund.org, Catholic Community Foundation LA, and others.

I don’t plan on stopping here either. We have added some key players to our team and are always looking for like-minded individuals to grow our company further and add value to all of our clients.

We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc. – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
We’ve seen everything, from personnel problems to cash flow problems, to having to move offices several times because we’ve outgrown our space. But with each day that passes, I remind myself to enjoy the journey and be grateful for what we do have. We might not be exactly where we want to be yet, but we’re constantly making progress and we’re not where we were last year either.

So, as you know, we’re impressed with EMRG (emrgonline.com) – tell our readers more, for example what you’re most proud of as a company and what sets you apart from others.
EMRG is a marketing firm specializing in conversion-focused websites, strategic online marketing campaigns custom built for each client, and an organization that focuses as much on giving back as we do on financials and profitability.

What sets us aside from our clients is the quality of the product we deliver. There are many people are Craigslist that will build a website for $100, but these websites won’t give you what we do. We study your target demographic, your competitors, your industry, and your customers’ behaviors. We use this alongside all the data that we’ve collected over the years building websites as to what design elements work, what pushes for more sales/client captures/conversions, and we customize our approach to building more profitability for your business.

We couple our website strategy with our unique marketing strategies. A lot of businesses have trouble with their online reviews and Yelp accounts. We analyze what they are currently doing. We implement strategies to get their accounts to 5 stars and more importantly get more business. We don’t pay for reviews, nor do we recommend anyone does this. From our experience, any company that is already in business CAN and SHOULD generate positive reviews. If they are not, then we need to identify areas of inefficiency and present cost-effective solutions on how to deliver better service/value to your clients.

We also offer SEO, Pay-Per-Click ads mgmt., Social Media, and others. However, it’s not one-size fits all like most companies offer. We like to strategize and see which combos work for each business separately. I believe this is why we’ve had such strong client retention. Quite frankly we get results and our clients love us for it.

So, what’s next? Any big plans?
We are moving into an office 3x the size of our current office. We continue to hire and are always looking for talented individuals who can share our mission statement with us. We plan on continuing to grow and offer service lines that will benefit our clients by increasing their profitability.

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