Will  00:00

Charlie, appreciate you joining. Welcome to the legal currents podcast. Really excited for our conversation and glad that we’re able to make this happen. Charlie is, as you know, many people know you are a man of many hats, right? You’re the founder of a law firm, the law firm Alchemist hosts the podcast “They don’t teach this in law school.” You recently launched Red Crack and Creative, which we’ll, we’ll kind of talk about later, as well as recently, adult League Soccer goalkeeper. So, you know, I guess, to start things off, why not? Why don’t you tell everyone a little bit about, you know who you are, and you know the work that you do. Yeah.

Charley Mann  00:41

And I will say I’m better at some of those roles, roles than others. And we can put goalkeeper pretty low on the list overall right now, but with your tutelage, will I will perhaps get better over

Will  00:51

MLS in no time. Absolutely.

Charley Mann  00:55

Yeah. So I’ve been working in foreign with law firms for the last 15 years. At this point, you know, I came out of college and ended up working for this guy, Ben Glass, who many people may know, and found my way into working with law firms and entrepreneurship. And I didn’t really know much about this. I mean, I was an arts kid, right? So I was a theater kid, and I didn’t entirely fit in in that space, because I didn’t fully understand the idea of how much I loved capitalism and entrepreneurship, which are not things that fit neatly into the art space necessarily. I wanted to be a husband and a father, and, you know, the genuinely quite a long story made short, eventually, was able to chase down who I’m supposed to be, which is who I am. Today, I own a couple of businesses, and I absolutely love, love, love working with lawyers. It at first was the sort of adopted home. Now it is just home, home for me. And so I love where I am.

Will  01:57

Yeah, part of the reason why I thought you’d be such a great guest to bring on here is, you know, the audience that we’re really looking to help is educating people who are, you know, early on in their journey, as far as starting their own law firm, you know, maybe their younger attorney who’s looking to utilize, you know, current tech and stay cutting edge with things. Or perhaps they’re still at their firm, and they’re trying to decide whether or not it makes sense to go out and start, you know, a new firm. So you know, why don’t you tell it, talk a little bit about your experience with people who may fit that role specifically?

Charley Mann  02:27

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you’re, you know, an attorney who is thinking about going out on your own, you’ve just started a firm, and maybe you’re in your 20s, or you’re in your 30s, or, heck, maybe even you’re, you’re in your 40s. And finally, the entrepreneurial bug, 50s, 60s, even. Who cares? Wherever you are in the journey, but you’re early on in it. You are starting at an interesting time, because obviously the technology leverage is bigger than it’s ever been. And that is the most exciting part and the most terrifying part at the same time. Like I don’t I think it’s amazing to start any business right now where you can leverage, say generative AI, to quickly accelerate the development of all of your marketing collateral, if need be to to even help with strategy, all kinds of things. But these days, you also have to cover a lot of bases. So if you’re thinking about going out on your own, understand it looks complicated, because everyone has something that they want you to do, that they deeply believe you ought to be doing. And there’s like 800 of those. And your job at first is to figure out what is the best leverage that I can create, not what’s all the stuff that I can do. You could, you could do activity until the cows come home, but it’s a question of, What is your accomplishment? And that’s, that’s a Dan Kennedy ism, like, the difference between activity and accomplishment, and the gulf between those can be pretty darn significant,

Will  03:56

yeah. And I would go as far as to say, you know, that’s something that firms of all sizes struggle with. You know, you look at the rate of technology and, you know, every other week it sounds like there’s somebody new stepping into the space who’s offering something that’s supposed to help your firm, right? And that’s really a problem that everyone is trying to solve, regardless of the size. But one of the recurring themes that we talk about here is, you know, your time, your resources, your dollars, those are finite levels of resources. And you know, as well as anybody, right, the importance of utilizing those resources that you have. When we look at the archetype of somebody who is brand new in to their journey as an entrepreneur, and, you know, just opening up their firm, I’m curious to hear your thoughts, as far as you know, what are some of the first things that somebody should look to utilize, you know, and how can they start?

Charley Mann  04:55

Yeah, I’m gonna, I’m gonna throw a curveball here, because I know that you are gonna talk with a lot of people who have amazing technological resources that are really smart individuals out there. What I’m going to put as a resource on our table here is relationship capital. It’s something that not a lot of people invest in as early as they should. And I say that will be like a guilty party numero uno. It took me a while to understand the value of relationship capital. Then again, another long, long story made legitimately short, is that, because I moved around a lot as a kid, I understood how easy it was to give up people essentially like lose friendships. So I started losing my interest in investing in those things that started to cost me in a career context, because I thought it all felt transactional. When I finally got over that and realized no building long term relationships that you consistently invest in without it being a transactional fee is one of the most powerful things that you can develop in your life, especially if you have technology coming in and clipping your wings on, hey, I can write really well, like, I can draft faster than anyone else. Yeah, you’re not going to out draft chat. GPT, pace, wise man, it’s just not happening. Claude’s got you too. Grok has it. It’s all going to be really, really fast. But if you invest in who you know, and you spend time building those relationships and then identifying new potential relationships and doing the nerve wracking thing, which is like, I’m gonna reach out. I’m gonna touch base with someone who I don’t know if I’m allowed to, like, I don’t know if I’m supposed to be the person who’s reaching out to this individual. I’m not sure I have the cachet to get to know that person. I can promise you these days, like the good people in are welcoming to them, and if they absolutely hate it, then hey, you were never going to have that relationship in the long run anyways, at least now you know, and

Will  06:54

it’s getting over that fear of it right to that point, it’s also something that, more often than not, is free, right? It is not. It is either free or very inexpensive to take somebody you know out to lunch or have those conversations or utilize the networking and I think to your point as well, oftentimes, especially early on, part of the thing that I really enjoy about the legal community, and more particularly, some of these national conferences and networking events, is that people are a lot more willing to share their secrets and their experiences than you know, you might think from the outside looking in, and those questions, you know, go, go a really, a really long way. And I also appreciate you, you know, taking a step back and saying outside of anything digitally, right? It all kind of comes down to the value of those conversations first and foremost, especially early on. And with that in mind, you know, when we, when we do look towards things like, you know, utilizing, you know, tech, one of the first things that jumps out to me is making sure that we have a CRM, right, or some sort of way that we’re collecting that data, because without that data, we can’t assess things like our marketing, or really a million different things that fall into that subsection. What’s your experience been like working with firms who maybe don’t have a CRM or who maybe bring on a CRM? What are your thoughts?

Charley Mann  08:18

Yeah, obviously, I’m huge on having a list. So that’s like the baseline thing is, why do we keep a CRM a customer relationship management, or client, specifically, client customer. Because I know everyone has their own client management systems where they’re managing their legal workflow. The reason we’re really separating this out is customer relationship management is it is designed to manage an entire list, and sometimes those two software programs are the same thing. These days, it’s so easy to get one of these programs, whether you’re using something like Active Campaign, or using a more sophisticated solution, like a hub spot or some some are being built on Salesforce, like there’s a ton of options in between there as well. What it is is a way to create relationships at scale. The hardest part about relationships is certainly the human side. Like, there are some facts that I know about will right, like, and I’ve learned recently that will was a d1 goalkeeper and college like, that’s That’s wild. There’s all that information that you’ll store. But, truth be told, there would be facts over time that I’ll learn about that maybe I will have a harder time remembering. But if I have a CRM that has Will’s record in it, I can go in there and add notes about, like, oh, you know what Will’s favorite team is? Oh, you know, I know that I will normally attend these conferences, or Will’s a big fan of, like, Japanese whiskey. I say that because we just sent a bottle of Japanese whiskey to a major coach and influencer in the legal space, and you keep those types of notes in a CRM. In addition to now that I have will in my CRM, I can send will an email, a broadcast email regularly that’s designed to be engaging and keep me informed. In front of him, regularly, consistently. So that way, when the time comes and goes like, in my case, it would be, oh, will know someone needs a coach, they’re going to send him over to chart. He’ll send him over to Charlie, or, in case you’re a law firm owner, if all of a sudden someone knows someone, oh, man, you know what? My buddy of mine, who’s over in Maryland, just had his kids, and he was talking about estate planning. I need to go ahead and send him over to this person who’s been consistently sending me these emails. That’s you got to stay in front of people on top of that publishing on social if you send things in the mail, I mean, I have, like, a stack of envelopes over to my side that are already have my return address and a stamp on them, so that way I can easily get notes out the door to individuals. All that stuff is then marked by my assistant, quite frankly, in our CRM system, in order to keep track of, hey, here’s what we’re actually doing. Here’s how we’re communicating. That way, also, if a lead comes in, I can look into my CRM system and say, what have we done with that individual? Oh, that was referred to by will. When was the last time that we sent something nice in the mail? Will I actually receive our print newsletter? Oh, interesting, he is. And I’ve noticed that people who receive our print newsletter send three times as many referrals as anyone who sends a referral who only gets our email. Oh, now I’m starting to build a data set that is valuable for me, that I can then use to make smarter marketing decisions. Yeah,

Will  11:27

I couldn’t agree more, right? And, yeah, to your point, if nothing else, we can use these CRMs as tools to help assess what’s working and what isn’t working. You know, it’s very often that we’ll have a conversation on the BluShark side of things with the firm and try to get an understanding of what they’re doing and what kind of results they’re getting. And you’d be shocked, or you wouldn’t be shocked, but maybe some of our listeners would be shocked at people who just say, I don’t know, right? And so like, the first step to making those educated decisions is to collect that information so that you can truly take that limited resource that you have and put it in the right areas to your point on coaching as well. You know, I’m curious to hear some of your thoughts and your experiences speaking with these firm owners. You know, what are some of the more common issues that people seem to need your help working through or just working through in general,

Charley Mann  12:21

yeah, especially focused on some of the early stage firm owners or people who are looking to go out on their own. I was really lucky that coming out of college, I was a bit of a blank slate when it came to marketing and how you achieve success, because in live theater, as an actor, there’s sort of like you go and audition, right? So I didn’t understand all the technicalities and marketing yourself, because it’s such a simple path that you follow. So I was lucky that I had this quick ground up education where one of the first rules that was drilled into me was that no matter what profession you’re in, the ante to play the game is being good at what you do. That’s not how you acquire clients. That’s just how you’re lucky enough to play and stay in the game. If you can provide a fantastic legal service, I am super happy for you, and if you want to wait around for a very, very long time in order to hopefully cross your fingers just might happen, get your shot at widespread acclaim, success and fortune. That’s okay. That path technically exists, but it is a low odds and a long wait. If you’re starting a law firm, you’re doing it because you want to take control of your life, maybe take back control of your life, and to take control of your life, you cannot wait. The world is not sitting around saying, Will, we’re just waiting for you to start your law firm, man, and then we’re gonna send you hundreds of clients every single year. Oh, yay. It happened. Here’s your hundreds of clients. The reality of it is like, Will opens his law firm and crickets, right? Maybe there’s a couple of referrals from a couple of buddies who are like, Hey, I’m gonna toss a bone. Hey, here’s a couple of clients. I don’t really need them. If you’re not actively marketing from day one, if you’re not thinking about, who do I really want to work with, and what type of work do I want to do, and then putting that out into the world, it can be marketing can be very, very sophisticated, but the baseline is, are you asking for what you want, and are you speaking to the people you want to do that work for? Don’t put up your accolades. Talk about their problems, then show the accolades, then talk about what you’ve accomplished, not against, you know, highlighting your authority, credibility, expertise, etc, but start from a point of like, hey, for you know, Will’s got his law firm set up, who’s will trying to work with what pain is that client experiencing? Okay, now Will’s going to go and try and make connections with those people. But yet, you really have to, from the get go, understand, I. Yeah, success. It comes from marketing if you want to grow fast, just plain and simple and again. Artist, artist at heart, artist in my soul. It would be amazing to live in a world where all you had to do was be excellent at your craft, and success would simply come because of that. What it is is excellence at your craft is the accelerant that you can use with the fire you start from marketing. And if you don’t actually have that initial fire, it just looks like gasoline without fire is just a stinky mess. So you got to actually ignite your fire, and then your excellence will have an opportunity to spread. And that’s that. That’s what success looks like. 

Will  15:51

Yeah, oftentimes, success does not. Often fall right into your lap, right whether, whether you see it, you know, or you have no idea, the people who are in those positions that you’re looking after when you’re trying to Yeah,scale your firm, and you’re trying to get to where they’re at, right? The work has been done, right, whether we see it or whether we don’t. And you know, I’m curious, you know, from your perspective, when we’re even looking at these, these firms, or when we’re speaking with firms who are, you know, very early on in their stages, they may not know what a realistic timeline looks like, or they may not know what a great timeline versus a slow timeline looks like. You know, what are your thoughts as far as some of those initial goals that people can set and what they may want to move towards early on over the first couple of years, could be revenue, could be staff, could be anything. Yeah,

Charley Mann  16:43

great question. So I’ll divide this up into two categories I use when I’m coaching, and that is that we have process goals and outcome goals. So primarily what you’re talking about are outcome goals. And I love outcome goals, so I’ll talk about that first, but understand that. You know, for everyone listening to achieve that outcome, you better get invested in the process. So like, if we say hey, a good goal would to be to be three to four people on your team, including yourself, by the end of year two. If you’re not also saying hey, one of my goals is also to send a letter every or a note every single week to a personal contact, and to press send on a broadcast email, and to make sure that demand letters are going out within 60 days of us receiving full medical records and all those timelines, etc. If you don’t have those processes, the outcomes aren’t going to happen. So I love to have a balance of it, like dream big, but understand, have been a lot of rooms with a lot of entrepreneurs, and I can, I can see when there’s someone who, like, there’s a lot of law firm owners who they’re either saying I’m trying to get to a million dollars, or they’re saying I’m trying to get to $10 million and I had a conversation with a client who I really, really like when he came on board. His firm was doing about 1.2 1.25 in the year, right before we started working together. And he said, Yeah, Charlie, my goal is I want to do $10 million in revenue in three years. So my response to that will is, that’s great. That’s awesome. I’m so excited for you. Okay, so how many attorneys do you think you’re going to need? Well, I don’t know. Oh, well, we probably should start there. Now, do you know how much you’re going to pay those attorneys as well? Okay, so what’s your current client acquisition system look like? Like, how fast are we accelerating and acquiring new clients? Okay, based on that, now we’re backtracking into what your intake process looks like? Like, we’re converting all of our qualified leads into clients. Are we getting what we really need? And eventually what we backed into was the first thing he had to figure out was how to hire the next attorney. He was operating as a true soloist at that time. In terms of being the solo attorney, he had supported staff members, but he was the only attorney. We need to break that first like we need to topple that domino, figure out how that works, because that’s going to show you the model to get to 10 million. I’m not saying it’s not going to happen, not even saying it’s not going to happen in 10 years, but I am saying we have a process that we need to follow on this and this idea that sometimes got preached in the venture capital world, where people can just toss money on it, and you can do, you know, a blitz scale, where all you’re trying to do is burn investor cash to acquire clients as fast as possible, and cross those fingers real tight and clinch that butthole that you’re going to be able to actually make money off of them. That just isn’t realistic in a main street type of business like a law firm, where Main Street economics, and really for law firm owners, personal economics, really applies. I know most of the people I coach will be married. The vast majority of them have kids. That’s just the type of person I tend to attract. And when it’s like, Hey, you can pour gasoline on this fire, you’re not going to put money into those 529 plans for a little while. And I hope you talk with your wife about living on a true, minimal at home budget, because, boy, oh boy, we’re gonna have to put 25, 30% of your money into marketing, and you’re gonna bulk your salaries up to like, 50% of revenue. So if you can scrape by on, say, five to 10% let’s go for it. We’re gonna move fast and we’re gonna break things. I’ll be honest, I don’t coach that journey personally. It’s not the journey that excites me. More power to people who want to take that on. I’m fine with that, but for most people that I work with, it’s like, how do I do this without breaking myself in the process? That’s

Will  20:52

a great point. And you mentioned you dropped a ton of great nuggets in there. You know, to your point, early on, that element of Reverse Planning and kind of micro goals, almost, is so often overlooked. You know, personal experience, right? I’ve been doing a lot of running over the past couple years, and as much as I wish that I could go out and go for a run tomorrow, and, you know, run a marathon in under, you know, two hours, 50 minutes, and go qualify for Boston, right? No matter how much I run between now and then, I will not be able to step out that door tomorrow and qualify for the Boston Marathon, right? So you take that goal and you gotta figure out how we need to get there. Okay, I need to run, you know, 50 miles a week. I need to do a five month training block, right? I need to, you know, before I can run under three hours, I need to run under three and a half hours, and I need to get there right. And that insight about how you establish the correct micro goals, that is how you create those processes that are proven that do allow you to achieve these goals, and understanding, you know, the realistic timeline behind them. And I think that element of being realistic is huge as well, you

Charley Mann  22:01

know. And when you’re doing that, like, let’s say you’re training for the marathon, you often have these breakthrough moments where you’re you go from like, I’ve been grinding this out. I’ve been bringing my mile time down by like, one second every single week, one second. Then all of a sudden, you end up taking this, like, random rest week, and you come back from me like I just shaved 12 seconds off my average mile time over the course of a half marathon distance, which I project to be about a seven second off mile time across an entire marathon distance. And you have these, these sudden breakthrough moments. Same thing in building a law firm, you’re like, oh, you know, I’ve had to hire an associate, but then I had to get rid of that associate, and I’ve done that a couple of times. Now I’ve got a low performing associate. And then finally, you hire the person where you go. This is the model of what I’m looking for. Now I know what I’m scaling for. I know how to identify that person. And it turns out that person has a network of attorneys who would love to come on board over here. And you create these breakthrough moments because of the definition of luck, and I do believe in this definition, which is when preparation meets opportunity. So if you’re not doing the preparation, you’re not taking the reps, even if the opportunity shows up, you won’t be able to take advantage of it, because you just have not made yourself ready at that moment. Same thing, like, if you’re not out there putting in the miles, it doesn’t matter how many marathon opportunities you have to run that are listed as Boston qualifiers, you’re not ready for it one way or another. You got to get ready.

Will  23:34

Kobe Bryant’s not stepping out there at the end of the game and training, you know, the last five free throws of the game, just out of luck, right? It’s because 10s of 1000s of free throws, you know, the years prior, and that that to your point on that element of being realistic, right? I’m of the belief that at some point, if you are looking to scale and grow your firm, at some point, you need to leverage and utilize, you know, vendors, agencies, whatever it may be. Now, one thing that we see on occasion that I think is pretty common in space is, you know, making sure that you establish a realistic expectation and a realistic timeline for those expectations to that point. You know, talk about your experience, you know, working with firms to vet some of these agencies. What are red flags that you’re looking for and how you set that realistic expectation that’s, you know, both fair to the vendor or the agency as well as, you know, ensuring that you’re getting the return out of that relationship on the firm side, that’s important.

Charley Mann  24:36

Yeah, and, you know, that’s funny. I just released a podcast the day that you and I recorded this, a podcast I recorded with Ron Latz of legal Phoenix and geese. A lot of Attorney Sink, you know, those guys, along with Seth Price, obviously, owner of BluShark, those are people that I really, really respect and love their voices on this. And we were talking about this exact kind of subject of vetting vendors and making sure you’re getting a fair ground up deal, like, if we’re being honest with ourselves, there’s a lot of baseline issues from unscrupulous vendors. They oftentimes are vendors out there who want to own all of your stuff. This is issue numero uno, very top of the chart. If your vendor is going to own all of your assets, including your domain, your Google Analytics account, all that, what they’re doing is they’re preparing to hold you hostage. And not just hold you hostage, but bomb the living daylights out of you. Should you decide to go in another direction? I want every firm owner to own their assets because, also now, because I started red cracking creative, which is an agency that does email marketing for law firm owners, we produce the weekly email. One of our early on policies was like, we don’t want to have hostage relationships. We want to have mutually agreed, agreed upon relationships. We want it to be where, hey, if you leave us, you’re going to have all of your templates, all of your content, you have your logins to your email service provider of choice. That is, that’s how that is going to work. And when I see law firm owners buy something because it feels like, oh, you know, I can buy it really cheap. I just won’t necessarily own it. There is always a cost to be paid at some point or another. You will end up paying that price. You’ll have to pay it to break a contract to get a new vendor to duplicate your website quietly on the side, because you know that the vendor that you currently have is going to steal your website from you, and so you’re like, Well, I guess I got to get a new domain name and everything. Or what? Are you going to file a lawsuit, and they’re going to drag it out, and everything’s going to collapse. It’s going to be a disaster from the beginning. Establish the ground rules. Now, for some they would also say, like, oh, you know, vendors should be on a month to month contract. I don’t actually necessarily agree with that. I’m fine with month to month contracts. We do that with red crack and creativity, but there are sometimes when you’re working with an agency where it is fair to give a longer duration to them. So I don’t offer any judgment on that side, because I also know, like I talk, I talk with vendors all the time, and the people who I really like, I know that they are well meaning, and when they have these, let’s say, a 12 month contract, it’s because they really do believe, like, we need six months of solid work with this individual before we can start showing significant results. And I can’t have my team playing scared on their website and always worrying about losing the account. Because if they’re only doing work designed to not lose the account, it may not be that hard, gritty background work that has to get done, that you can only do under the safety of a long term contract. You know, it’d be the same thing as if, if a law firm, you know, was doing the exact same deal where they had someone and it’s like, hey, we need to make sure that your case potentially gets to trial. And in order for us to do that, there’s a lot of early work that we need to get done that’s not really fun. It’s not a negotiation like we just have to collect medical records. We have to prepare a demand package. You’re not going to see any. This is gonna be boring as heck, but we’re doing it believing that you’re sticking with us till the end, right? So that can be, you know, that’s one of the things about vendors that I’m a little I have a more nuanced thought,

Will  28:33

yeah, I appreciate that, because I, you know, I do think that that is not necessarily the status quo. And I think you know, when I’m looking at things, it’s just understanding, you know, what options you have, why these options have, whatever comes alongside of them. Your point about making sure that you know, if you are on month to month, you know, is this agency or this vendor doing everything that they can to to keep you were to also set you up for success, maybe you look at investing as an example, right? If I’m only, and I’m no financial advisor by any means. But if full disclaimer on will right here, financial advisor, but if I’m only, you know, putting your investments in stocks that are going to get you a 3x return, am I missing out on, you know, putting your money in Bitcoin, and, you know, 20 years ago, you’re sitting at a, you know, 2,000x or whatever the heck it’s at these days, and it’s just not having the right approach behind the strategies that you’re putting out there. Yeah, I want to hit on, you know, Red Kraken, because this is something that, at the time we’re recording, has been kind of newly launched. And I’m curious, you know, what you saw in the space that, that you know, made you think, hey, this can be done better. And you know, I think I can put a good solution out there to solve this problem.

Charley Mann  29:51

For several years, I have advocated that every law firm should have a weekly email that goes out the door. Now I refer. It was a newsletter. But my problem with most emails that go out the door for law firms is they are these, like magazine style newsletters that have four or five different sections in them. It’s all a bunch of links and images, and it is not the best use of your email space. One to two main ideas, one to two calls to action. Keep it very, very simple. It should be personality driven. It should have some connective tissue. It’s not just about, hey, here’s a I don’t know, here’s five more things you need to know about estate planning. Or, you know, here’s your six tips for driving on the ice. Those are all fine and dandy. But how do we also make you truly, deeply memorable with people, and I just wanted, like I was looking around, will I? I didn’t intend to start the company, but I looked, because I looked around for a solution. I really did, like I looked around, I needed someone. I needed to find a place that was focused on doing email extremely well and understood the technical details and had the right type of copywriting. They needed to already be bought in on the idea of sending every single week, not monthly, not quarterly. You know, that tends to get tacked on to other contracts. And like no, it needs to be something very specific and well done, and it needs to be focused on law firm owners. Those are the three things I was looking for. And I searched high and low for it, and I couldn’t find it. I found some stuff that was generalist that maybe a law firm could utilize, but it was not built for law firms. The agency was not designed to work with law firms or even really main street businesses. And so I looked around and knew that I wanted every law firm that I work with to do it really two choices. Either I can continue pushing the boulder like a Sisyphean task, of pushing that boulder uphill, of trying to help law firm owners by telling them, here’s what you need to do, here’s how often you do it, here’s what you look like. I was giving away the formula, free, free, free, free, like everyone can have this formula because I want law firms to do this so desperately. And they would start it. They would send a couple of them that would be that, you know, just tumble weeds after that happens. I said, Okay, this has to be done. I’m an entrepreneur. What does that mean? I’m going to build the darn thing. So I partnered up with my business partner, Jenny Sedera, because she is an absolute operations wizard on all of this. So she takes care of the back end on it. I developed, sort of system for it. We found incredible copywriters, and said, All right, we’re gonna go ahead and solve this problem. And turns out, it’s a problem that people were looking to have solved. Yeah,

Will  32:32

yeah. And I think that it’s incredibly valuable to make sure that you know you’re working with providers. And I’m of the belief that you want to work with people who specialize in what they’re doing and what they’re trying to accomplish. I think that oftentimes people fall into the idea of, hey, I want to have one person do all of these 10 different things, right? But are they then doing any of those things successfully to what you know they should be capable of achieving with each of those things. And, you know, something else I wanted to hit on, and this is something I heard recently that I think really resonated with me. And it’s the, you know, the idea that, let’s say I had to travel a mile, right? If I had to travel a mile, I would probably, you know, step out my front door and I would, I would maybe walk that mile, right? But if I had to travel two miles, I’d have to jump in a car, but that car might allow me to, or would allow me to travel two miles faster than I could travel one mile. I’m curious if you feel like that translates to the entrepreneurial space, right? You know, is there something to be said for, you know, setting these goals? Is there a point of going all in that may actually allow you to to accomplish things more quickly than if you’re kind of half in, half out?

Charley Mann  33:52

Yeah, I like that. Will? I’m going to steal that from you. Will? That was really good. Someone

Speaker 1  33:56

else out there. No idea where I saw that.

Charley Mann  34:00

Well, I’ll attribute it to you. So that, yeah, that idea of having the right tool for the job is really important. And there’s some things that there are times where you can look at the distance to be traveled and go, You know what? That’s actually a journey I would like to take on foot, like, I actually enjoy that walk. I enjoy taking that stroll for myself. But then there are times where you look at it and go, Okay, if I had to take that walk, I’m gonna have to, like, wade through the water, like I have to go through the river, essentially, instead of take, you know, going that longer distance downstream and going over the street that I could do in a vehicle, and that is where having outside providers, you know, great vendors, great partners coming in, helping you out, and great team members are all representative those vehicles that create speed, create scale. Because, let’s be honest, you only have two major resources with your law firm. You have. Time and you have money, and if you don’t spend the money with good service partners, you will be spending all your time dealing with the hazards that it can create. You’re going to have a balance. Some things you’re going to DIY, some things you’re going to have an in- house team for, and some things, Lord Almighty, leave them to the professionals. I say this all the time in my coaching program, catalyst. You should be your law firm. Should request reviews for your Google business profile. You should upload images to their regular feel free to use the Google post functions. Double check your nap, consistency, name, address, phone number on the reg. But if you are going to get involved in scaled link building Google ads or a full scale local SEO campaign in a top 100 major metropolitan area. Start talking with vendors and partners. Maybe you don’t have the resources today to pull the trigger, but a lot of these great vendors and partners, like blue shark, at least have some educational resources that you can start DIY in the appropriate things. So that way, when they take over for you, they’re taking over an asset that is partially developed in the right direction, rather than, you know, some complete catastrophe, or even something that is like managed to be a vehicle in reverse for that opportunity cost, the time of establishing that foundation off the jump is huge.

Will  36:19

Maybe you know to stick with that example. Maybe you know you could, you could swim quickly through the river, but maybe there’s, you know, 1000 alligators in that river, right? And somebody can tell you, Hey, don’t swim through that river. You know you, you’re, you’re gonna lose an arm or a leg or whatever it may be. All right, I have two last questions for you. You know, when should a firm realize that it is the right time to maybe bring on a vendor or start relying on people outside of themselves, whether it be you know, support staff, whether it be, you know, a coach, an agency, what when is the time right? I

Charley Mann  37:01

I can’t remember who sort of first said this to me regarding, and it’s particularly regarding hiring, but it very much applies to service providers. Like by the time you’re thinking of it, it’s probably a month too late, right? So once you start to get that inkling, the first thing I advise any of my coaching clients to do will is I tell them to go and start talking with people like talk with the potential vendors, because you don’t want to get yourself into a situation where you are Tim summer Roth, my friend out in Iowa, one of the member of our Genesis mastermind program, Tim always talks about you don’t hire hungry, right? You don’t shop for a web developer hungry. You don’t shop for an SEO company hungry. So have those conversations so you’re not getting to a point where you always want to hire the first person you talk with. I have coaching clients who will reach out to me, or just catalyst members who say, Oh my God. I just had someone recently in Genesis say, Oh my God. Someone in our current company is butchering our pay per click, just absolutely butchering it. And there’s a whole host of other issues that they’ve got with it. What I like about him is I know he’s going to be patient. He’s going to spend some time looking for recommendations and having the conversations before actually pulling the trigger on hiring. So the other thing that I look at is, like percentage of budget, if you’re not spending at least 7% of your annual budget on active marketing advertising, you’re missing out on opportunities to grow, and I would even push that towards the 12 to 15% range. These days, marketing is simply more competitive for law firms. Some of the top spenders in certain markets are spending in excess of 20% in order to develop and maintain their market share. So just think about, are you taking the game seriously on the marketing side or not? 

Will  38:53

And that’s where you can leverage money to help you take it seriously, with the help of vendors. That element of maintaining it is something that not everybody thinks about as well, right? Just Yes, because, just because you’re the starter, the starting quarterback, does not mean that you can take weeks and months off, right? Because there’s somebody who’s trying to take that spot. And I think that’s really, that’s really important as well. And personally, I would like to think, and I know that, you know, we have these conversations all the time, if somebody comes, you know, to us, and we don’t believe that they’re at the right point, right where they have the resources or the time to see those results, right? Hopefully you’re talking to people who will say, hey, now is not the right time, right? Like, let’s focus on doing this, this and this. And, you know, let’s revisit this when it makes more sense and when we’re able to really, you know, reap the benefits of this partnership.

Charley Mann  39:38

And so let me just say, like, because I know you’re saying that on behalf of Blushark. Let me echo it, because I have actual people who I know have talked with you all and have received the likes, you know, look, in order to be highly competitive in that market, here’s what, here’s realistically what needs to be done right now, right? And the. Us giving you the middle tier program wouldn’t be the right fit. You sort of either need to be on the low level, because there’s some foundations that need to be built up over the next year, or we need to jump to, you know, tier 345, on it. And there are companies that have that actual discussion, as opposed to companies that are just like, what’s the maximum I can get out of you. Let me take my best guess on that, based on your budget. I’m pretty sure I can get them to buy the middle tier. So let’s gun for the middle tier.

Will  40:26

Yeah, be cautious of people who promise those quick wins, right? Is that the best you know thing that is really in your best interest? Last question for you, I saw that you did some writing on Bleacher Report, Denver Broncos. I’m really curious to hear about, you know, your experience doing that, and how you even got into doing that. It’s super fun.

Charley Mann  40:51

So this is back in 2009 2010 and that was before Bleacher Report had legitimate press credentials.

Will  40:58

Let me just say I was there before it was,

Charley Mann  41:00

I was there before it was cool, you know. And so I started writing for it. Because you could just sign up for a writer profile and just start writing. And they had all these badges. What they did, what was so smart about Bleacher Report will is they gamified it as a writer, where, if you got an article that had like, 1000 hits, that was awarded a silver level badge, metal, whatever, and then it would be like, gold, and then it would be Ruby. And so you’re always trying to figure out how to get it. I didn’t know that. What I was being taught, essentially, was SEO, like, how to create articles that rank really high. This is my SEO education. I was writing in the era of Tim Tebow. So, like, I was in a sweet spot where I could write all sorts of articles about Tim Tebow, and they would always get, you know, a lot of hits. But I also loved writing about receivers like Demaryius Thomas during that time. You know, defense was a little little iffy at that point. This is right before Peyton Manning came on board, and I actually was now I did become a featured columnist, which means that they pluck out of that group, they would pluck a person or a couple people per team, and assign them an actual editor and an editorial schedule that you would work on. So I was pumping out articles about, you know, top 15 Broncos receivers of all time, or, you know, top six linebackers of the 1990s and how many articles can you write about John Elway’s 15 greatest plays? But it was, it really was like a foundational SEO education, and it also taught me how to have not always polite arguments with then the Oakland

Will  42:34

Raiders fans. Yeah, look, you never, that’s, that’s a great point. You never know. You know what you’ll learn and how that might translate to another facet of your life. And something I really appreciate about you, Charlie, is that I think that, you know, you really provide a lot of great discussion on all of these topics that are so important, and you know, all of the different hats that you wear and the services that you’re able to provide. So, you know, I also want to give you an opportunity to kind of plug all of your stuff that you’re working on, and, you know, let people know where they can hear more from you and hear more of your thoughts.

Charley Mann  43:07

So for a firm owner who’s looking to focus more on how to be less of the lawyer in the law firm and be more of the chief entrepreneur in the law firm, I love working with those firm owners on a coaching basis, and you’ll find the opportunities for that over at law firm alchemy.com so law firm alchemy.com where you can you can search for me on LinkedIn. We can connect there as well. And if you’re a firm owner who has a slightly more mature firm, and you’re looking to add that weekly email newsletter to your marketing stack, you can go to Red Kraken creative. Kraken is spelled K, a, k, r, a, k, e, n, so red Kraken is creative, like the giant squid, mythical beast. Yeah, awesome.

Will  43:55

You know, I definitely want to, you know, encourage everybody to reach out to Charlie. Charlie, I’ve spoken to tons of people who you work with, and all consistently say very good things about you. And you know, I know that when someone is working with you, that they are going to have a realistic approach to things, they’re going to have the right knowledge that they need to make their decisions and really have somebody looking out for them. And you know your LinkedIn as well, you provide a ton of great nuggets out on LinkedIn. So if nothing else, I would really encourage everybody to go reach out to Charlie, connect with them on LinkedIn, and just, you know, be a part of the conversations that you have. So, you know, I appreciate you taking the time to jump on Charlie. Do you have any last thoughts that you would like to leave people with?

Charley Mann  44:39

Yeah, you know, we all have this one life. One of the greatest gifts that was ever given to me was advice that you get to choose the life that you’re ultimately going to live. Right now, if you’re frustrated with where your law firm is, you’re frustrated where maybe you’re at in your career, you can make change. Change, and you can make it better, but it just starts with sitting down, processing it, and saying, Here’s what I want, and here’s the first step that I’m going to take. And when you’re able to do that, life is just it feels like a set of limited possibilities for you,

Will  45:15

The only way to ensure failure is by inaction. Right? Yes, as long as you’re taking action, you’re doing the right things, you’re headed in the right direction. So appreciate your time, Charlie, and like I said, encourage everybody here who’s listening to to reach out and connect and and learn more. So appreciate you taking some time to jump on with us. Thank you so much.