About Ian M Lacovara
Nobody Was Coming. So I Learned.
I grew up broke, in a house where the person who taught me what working for yourself looked like stopped being able to teach me anything when I was sixteen. There was no plan handed to me and nobody waiting to catch me. So I taught myself, and I have not stopped since. Thirty years later that habit is the thing my clients are actually buying.
Where it started
The habit began as a punishment.
When I got in trouble as a kid, the punishment was the study book. A test-prep volume thick enough that it may as well have been a thousand pages, which I copied out by hand. Not just the questions. The questions and the answers, both, in full. And no matter what kind of day he had had, my father would sit down and go over them with me.
Somewhere in all that copying, the thing that was meant as a punishment turned into an appetite. I stopped resenting it and started reaching for it. I was ten years old, and I have been teaching myself ever since.
It left me with one rule I have never broken.
I would rather know and not need to know, than need to know and not know.
Ian M Lacovara
Where the systems came from
My mother worked for herself, and she did it two opposite ways.
She was a well known fine artist in New York City. Commissioned work, mostly: paintings for private collections and family legacy pieces, the kind people hang and then hand down. You could give her a Polaroid and she would put it on canvas, and what came back was better than the photograph. She sewed her own clothes too, and through the eighties she drafted pattern blueprints for McCall's.
Those two jobs are opposites, and I have been chewing on that pairing my whole working life.
A commissioned painting is singular. Nobody else can make it. The value is in her hand and her eye, and there is no way to delegate it. A sewing pattern is the exact reverse: a blueprint that lets a complete stranger reproduce an expert's result without the expert anywhere in the room. Every judgment she would have made is already encoded in the paper. You do not need her talent. You need her pattern and the discipline to follow it.
That split is the entire job I do now. Walk into any business and some of the work is the pattern and some of it is the painting. The pattern work gets written down, automated and handed off, so it runs at 2am exactly the way it runs at 2pm. The painting work, the judgment and the relationships and the call only the owner can make, gets protected, because that is the part actually worth their time. Most owners are drowning because they have those two backwards.
I did not come from nothing. I came from a woman who understood the difference and made a living on both sides of it.
In 1992 she went into a coma. She came out of it a quadriplegic, paralyzed and unable to speak. I was sixteen. The one person who had shown me what working for yourself looked like could not show me anything anymore, and there was nobody else to ask. From that point I was my own instruction manual.
What I kept
I once lost a library of more than two thousand books.
I had no way to move them. I had to walk away from the whole thing, and it broke my heart in a way I still do not have a clean sentence for. I had liked reading since long before it was a cool thing to like, and that shelf was most of what I had to show for it.
What I learned from that is that the shelf was never the point. These days I listen while I drive, while I work, while I rest. The library is portable now, and nobody can make me leave it behind. Since January 2025 I have read or listened to close to 170 books. I want 200 before the year is out.
The technical half
I have been in technology since 1996.
I have run the wires. I have racked and built the servers. I have assembled the machines, from gaming rigs to the independent local AI boxes I build now, where the model runs on hardware you own and your client data never leaves your building.
That matters for a reason that has nothing to do with bragging. Automation breaks. Integrations change, providers deprecate things without asking, something that worked on Friday does not work on Monday. When that happens, the people responsible for your setup need to know what sits under the dashboard, not just how to click around on top of it. Most people selling AI right now started in 2023 and have only ever seen the dashboard. I have been fixing the layer underneath since before most of these tools existed.
I am also not precious about it. Plenty of what I build has no AI in it at all, because plenty of problems do not need any. When AI genuinely earns its place I use it, and when it does not I say so.
The tuition
I already paid for the education you are getting.
Over the last twenty-five years I have spent mid to high six figures of my own money on professional development, business education and mindset work. I have gone through programs with some of the most recognized teachers in the field. Nobody funded that. There was no employer reimbursing it and no inheritance behind it.
I want to be precise about why, because it is the part people usually get wrong. I did not do it to become the next one of them. I did it to be the only me. The goal was never to copy somebody's playbook and resell it. It was to understand enough, from enough angles, that I could look at a situation nobody had written a playbook for and still know what to do.
When you hire me, you are not paying for my opinion. You are getting the distilled version of an education I already paid for, applied to your specific mess.
The partnership
For most of three decades I built alone. Ten years ago that changed.
I said there were no cheerleaders. That was true for a long time. Jerrica Coyle has been in the trenches of this business for the last ten years, and she is the reason the sentence is in the past tense.
She runs the side of the company clients feel most directly: growth, operations, and whether the experience of working with us is actually any good. I will build you something technically correct all day long. She is the one who makes sure it is something you enjoy using.
She is also a licensed life insurance agent, which is why our insurance work is built by someone who has carried the license rather than someone who read about the industry.
Jerrica Coyle
Managing Member, I Ninja LLC
Business Growth, Client Experience & Operations
AI + Automation
Licensed Life Insurance Agent
Ten years building this business alongside me. Two names on the door, both of them real.
Where I work, and why it is built this way
A business that needs me every hour is a business I cannot have.
I work from the mountains of northern California, in Trinity County. It is beautiful and it is quiet and there is very little here to hide behind, which turns out to be the entire point. Out here you end up face to face with your biggest adversary fairly regularly, and your biggest adversary is you.
I became a father at forty-two. When my daughter turns eighteen I will be sixty. I homeschool her, which means my days have a shape that is not negotiable.
That is not a sentimental aside. It is a design constraint, and it is the reason I am any good at this. A man who teaches his kid through the middle of the day cannot run a business that demands him every hour. So I had to build companies that keep working while I am not looking at them. Everything I sell, I built for myself first, because I had no choice.
How we operate
Human first, and we put money behind it.
We donate 1% of sales to carbon removal through Stripe Climate. That is a real line item, not a badge, and you can verify it directly with Stripe.
We also work with nonprofits, sometimes at reduced cost and sometimes donated outright, depending on the need and the scope of the project. Community work matters to us and we take it on where we can genuinely help rather than where it photographs well.
The same instinct runs through the way we build. A human answers you. A human decides what the automation is allowed to say. If you ever feel like you are talking to a wall, something has gone wrong and we want to hear about it.
Three ways in
What all of that turned into.
Different bottlenecks need different vehicles. Sometimes it is the operation, sometimes it is access to capital, and sometimes it is the person running the place.
Coaching and Consulting
When you already know what to do and are not doing it, or when you need someone who has built it before to look at what you built.
How I work with people
OperationsI Ninja LLC
The systems themselves. Communication, scheduling, follow-up, reviews, listings, payments and automation, in one place.
See what it does
The structureThe Companies
Two companies, I Ninja LLC and Ninja Credit Consultants, plus Life Insurance Solutions as a specialized I Ninja LLC offer rather than a company of its own. What each one handles and which fits you.
How this is actually structured
If any of that landed
Tell me what is broken. I will tell you what I would do about it.
No pitch deck and no obligation. Tell me what the last two weeks actually looked like, and you will get a straight answer about whether this is something we should be working on together at all.