The AI Secret Weapon: Michael La Spisa’s Bold Move to Quit His Job and Build OptiCommerceAI

From side project to AI powerhouse, Michael La Spisa's journey with OptiCommerceAI is a testament to bold leaps and strategic pivots. In this Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur Spotlight, Michael shares how he transformed a late-night hustle during paternity leave into a thriving business that revolutionizes high-ticket local services. Inspired by his father's resilience and his newborn son, Michael quit his job, closed three deals in three weeks, and hasn't looked back. Discover how honesty, innovative AI tools, and learning from real clients propelled Michael from aspiring entrepreneur to industry leader.

Hi, Michael! Thanks for joining us today. Tell us about your business. Who do you serve, how do you serve them, and what's the impact that your business and work makes?

I run OptiCommerceAI, where we build AI systems for owners of high-ticket local service businesses: plastic surgery practices and med spas, HVAC companies, property managers, law firms, and home services. Most of them are losing revenue in ways they can't see, usually calls that die in voicemail after 5pm, or work that eats their whole week and should have been automated two years ago.

We do three things. We build AI voice agents that answer every call 24/7, qualify the caller, and book the appointment. We build AI operating systems, which is a second brain for the business connected to everything the owner already uses, so the AI actually has context on their clients, their numbers, and their workflows. And we build custom AI software: dashboards, CRMs, lead pipelines, and reporting systems that the client owns outright.

The impact is measurable, which is the part I care about most. One plastic surgery practice recovered 656 missed calls and booked 31 consultations in two and a half months, all from calls that otherwise would have gone to voicemail. Across our agents we've now handled over 400,000 minutes of live call time. When a single consultation is worth thousands of dollars, answering the phone at 9pm on a Saturday stops being a small thing.

Tell us about the moment you finally felt like you went from wantrepreneur to entrepreneur.

January 2026, the month I quit my job.

I had started OptiCommerceAI in October 2025 during a three month paternity leave, so for a while it was a side project I worked on at night after the baby went down. I had a good job, good benefits, and a newborn son. Everyone looked at me like I was crazy when I told them I was leaving.

I closed three deals in the three weeks after I quit.

That was the moment. Not the day I registered the business, and not the day I signed my first client. It was the moment I realized that the only thing capping me was the hours I had been giving to someone else. I haven't looked back since.

Describe the moment or period in your life/career that motivated you to make the entrepreneurial leap.

Two things stacked on top of each other.

The first is my dad. He came here from Sicily when he was twelve and didn't speak a word of English. He worked in a factory, started businesses that failed, went into debt, and kept pushing until he made it work. Growing up around that, the idea that a job is the safe option never really landed for me. He is my inspiration.

The second was my son Marco being born. My brothers and I had already built GoogiPet, our dog vitamin brand, so I had seen firsthand what AI could do for a real business. Then I got my hands on Claude Code and agentic AI, and I started building things in a weekend that would have taken a team weeks. Sitting there holding my son, doing work I knew was worth more than what I was being paid for it, really lit a fire under me. My wife Analia was working a job that I wanted her to be able to quit one day.

At that point it stopped being a question of whether I should go, and became a question of how fast.

Describe a tool, service, or software that has been a game-changer for your business. How does it contribute to your success?

Claude Code, without question. The entire business is built on it.

Claude Code is an AI coding agent that runs in your terminal. The plain version is this: it can read your whole codebase, write the code, run it, catch its own mistakes, and fix them. I use it to ship client software in days that an agency would quote as a quarter-long project. I also run my own company on it. My CRM, my proposal generator, my internal dashboards, and my own second brain are all things I built with it.

What I value most is that it works as a sparring partner. I'm not just typing instructions and getting code back. I'm arguing with it about architecture at eleven at night and getting pushed back on when I'm wrong.

The proof point I lean on isn't even mine. My two older brothers are not technical at all, and they have built real, working software with it. That's the part most people miss. The barrier to entry has never been this low, and there's really no excuse nowadays not to go build the thing you keep talking about.

We know that success is very often a non-linear path. Tell us about a failure, pivot point, or lesson that changed your course or direction and helped to get you where you are today.

I had a $32,000 AI operating system build closed, with a $3,500 per month retainer behind it. It was validated, the client genuinely wanted it, and it was the biggest deal I had ever done. Then it fell apart on his cash flow. He simply couldn't fund a build that size out of a single month of revenue.

Losing it stung, and it took a real chunk out of my numbers for the year. But the lesson was worth more than the deal. I had priced that offer for the business I wanted to be selling to, not the business that was actually sitting in front of me. Self-employed owners do not write $32,000 checks out of monthly cash flow, no matter how badly they want the outcome.

So I'm building an entry tier where the monthly payments credit toward the full build. Same destination, but a door they can actually walk through. Before that loss, almost everything I sold was quoted deal by deal, which meant I was rebuilding my offer on every single sales call. That failure is what finally pushed me toward productizing, and it's probably the most useful thing that has happened to my business this year.

What unconventional strategy did you employ that significantly impacted your business?

We tell every caller they're talking to an AI, up front, in the first few seconds of the call.

Almost everyone in this space does the opposite. The whole race right now is to make the agent sound human enough that nobody notices, and clients often ask for exactly that. So I ran a split test on my own call data to find out whether it actually mattered. When the agent disclosed that it was AI right away, we saw around 90% positive caller sentiment. When it tried to pass as human, that dropped to roughly 75%.

People don't mind talking to an AI. They mind being tricked. Once a caller knows what they're dealing with, they adjust, they speak more clearly, and the call simply goes better for everyone. It also means the practice never has to have an awkward conversation with a patient who figured it out afterward.

Being honest turned out to be the higher-converting option. That isn't usually how the story goes, but the data was the data.

What’s something you wish you knew sooner that you’d give as advice for aspiring or newer entrepreneurs?

That you learn more from one real paying client than from six months of getting ready to have one.

I spent too long believing I needed the perfect offer, the perfect website, and the perfect pricing before I was allowed to go sell anything. None of it taught me what a single paid project taught me. My pricing, my positioning, and my best-selling offer all came out of doing the work and getting things wrong in front of people who were paying me.

The other one, which I'm honestly still learning, is that believing you can do everything yourself is a ceiling, not a strength. With agentic AI I genuinely can do almost all of it, and that is exactly what makes it a trap. If I want this to be bigger than me, I have to let go of parts of it.

So pick the thing, go get one customer, and let them teach you the business. Put your head down and grind, have a little faith, and just go after it.

Want to dive deeper into Michael's work? Check out the links below!

• Visit OptiCommerceAI's website: opticommerceai.com/
• Visit GoogiPet's website: googipet.com/
• Connect with Michael La Spisa on LinkedIn: Michael La Spisa