Conversations on Law Firm Growth and Leadership

Brittany 3:38

Because education isn’t about just telling someone what to do or what path to follow to make them successful; it’s about making sure that they retain all of the knowledge so that they don’t need us forever.

 

Will 29:47

Yeah, it sounds like, you know, building those foundations with, you know, AI in mind as opposed to modifying them, right, is something that is creating a lot of advantages.

 

Transcript

 

BluShark Digital  00:00

Ladies and gentlemen, tonight’s spotlight shines on the rising stars of the legal world, where young firms, bold ideas, and smarter systems take center stage. Standing tall at the intersection of law and leadership, he’s the digital strategist, the legal growth architect, the man with the mic; make some noise for your host. This is Legal Currents with Will McCreight.

 

Will  00:28

All right, welcome back to another episode of the Legal Currents podcast. Today we have a very special guest, Brittany Green, and Brittany Green is the co-founder and a consultant at Best Era Law Firm Consulting, a group that I very much admire and respect in the space. She’s also a former in-house marketing director, and I believe she potentially went to school to be a math teacher. Brittany, I would love to have you introduce yourself a little bit, and thank you for joining.

 

Brittany Green  00:56

Yeah, thank you for having me. Always a pleasure. Yes, I did actually go to school originally. I was a math major, and I got a certification in elementary education. So yes, in no way did I have a legal background, a marketing background traditionally, and I just sort of fell into it. And yes, I ended up along the way at Connecticut Trial Firm, where Ryan McKeen, you know my co-founder now at Best Era, started his firm with a partner in 2016. I joined their firm in 2020 as a client happiness coordinator. They didn’t even have you know a real marketing budget and couldn’t afford a true marketing director. But I also wasn’t in the place to be called a marketing director at that point in my career, so we started out there, and I grew with them. The firm grew to about 40 people, and about two years ago, we had the opportunity to walk away and start something new from the firm. And Ryan and I knew we both loved teaching. Obviously, again, I had that background in teaching, and he started to realize his love of it. He was coaching with other places, and he started his law firm entrepreneurship UConn Law class. So it was just a natural next step to create something where we just got to teach lawyers all day long.

 

Will  02:24

Yeah, no, I love it, and obviously you guys were very successful at your firm. And as somebody who, you know, I’ve been able to see both of you guys, as well as your team, throughout the years at conferences. I also know that you guys are, like, very intelligent, but also care a ton, right? Very forward-thinking. Tell everyone who’s not familiar, maybe a little bit more about what you guys are about at Best Era.

 

Brittany Green  02:51

Yeah, absolutely. I know there’s tons of different coaching and consulting programs out there, and we’re all a little bit different. But we started day one, actually, even before day one, right before Bessara even existed, Ryan and I sat down together and just dreamed up what this could become. And from the very get-go, yeah, we started with our values and what we wanted those to be. And the very first thing we both said was we wanted to deliver 10x value in anything we do for our clients going forward, and also we want to be specifically an education company that does consulting, right? So we are very strategic and intentional about providing education in everything we do, and not just answers, right? Because education isn’t about just telling someone what to do or what path to follow to make them successful-it’s about making sure that they retain all of the knowledge so that they don’t need us forever. Right? We we don’t want to be one of those you know coaching companies that you know keeps you on the hook where it’s oh we’re going to tell you just enough but then you got to keep coming back for more right to really get get all the knowledge no we we give out everything we possibly can because we want to see others succeed so much but and we do that in a couple different ways at Best Era, but the the sort of most strategic way we do that is we created our own operating system that we wish we had at the firm. We operated on traditional EOS, which I’m sure plenty of people out there listening probably know. You know, entrepreneurial operating system. It’s just sort of a basic way, right, of keeping your business running from a planned meeting schedule, you know cadences, goals, KPIs, all of that good stuff. The problem with the EOS that a lot of people realize is it’s hard to fully implement correctly if you aren’t at a certain size. Aren’t at a certain revenue yet, right? EOS is very known for you have to have the visionary and integrator right at the top. What firms have that, right? Most of us are solos that are starting out maybe with a partner, but you’re not traditionally, you know, the two partners aren’t traditionally one’s a visionary, one’s an integrator or anything like that, you know, we don’t have all this money to hire a COO right off the bat to be our integrator. So there was plenty of things we knew that we wanted to take from having an operating system for your firm. We believe that’s important. We started Best Era day one with an operating system and realized, you know, we’re just modifying essentially EOS to work for us, and the way it’s working for us will work for any law firm, right? And we thought it was so important that from day one, if you decide you want to go out on your own and start your firm, here’s a way to do that with our operating system. So we wrote it down, we called it the way, we made it really easy, and that’s really the basis of how we work with a lot of our clients is taking them through the way. And the biggest thing for us is that everyone’s journey is different, so everyone’s way to getting there is going to be different. So while we we help you with a structured path, we never give you one set map for it, which is also you know a little bit different about us, right? A lot of coaching programs have sort of one set of of metrics and guidance that they go along, and this is a way that you should do everything to get you where you need to go. But they also sort of tell you where that place should be that you want to go, right? And no knock to any of that. Like, a lot of people want that, right? A lot of people want to be told where they need to go, right? And what’s considered success? We didn’t want that. We’re, you know, if you can’t tell from our vibe, we’re a little bit more free thinkers. We’re pretty much more, you know, we go with the flow. We like to vibe, and so the sort of people we attract is people who maybe don’t want to follow the traditional path, right? They want to- they want success in different ways, and so, yeah, we figured out that there are structured ways to get there, but we’re allowed to take different roads if we have to.

 

Will  07:17

Yeah, I love that, and something that I can definitely resonate with. It’s a conversation that we have quite a bit on the marketing side of things, right? There are many different ways to get from point A to point B, right? But it starts with understanding what those goals are for yourself, right? Not what the pre-imposed goals may be, especially with a lot of folks deciding to go out on their own to avoid those sorts of things. I guess tell me a little bit about some of those goals that you hear from people. I would love to start there.

 

Brittany Green  07:48

Yeah, absolutely. I know, and that’s what’s always so funny is when we sit down and talk with a new firm or a new client. Oftentimes, again, we’re we’re talking with solos or a very small, you know, leadership group that have just started out, and this is the hardest thing is that vision work, right? And it’s the first thing we do. Aside from values, aside from really talking about what what values you have, it’s that vision work that we sit down and do. And I think a lot of firms and a lot of clients underestimate how hard that work is to do because they have probably never been given permission to essentially dream right out loud of what they actually want. It’s the first time they are being told by anyone, oftentimes that even though, like you just said, even though they have clearly already made the decision of I don’t want the traditional big law track, right? I don’t want the traditional I’m an associate until I get to buy in for partner track. They’ve realized that you know they want to go against the grain. They want to be their own boss. They want to make their own decisions, but then we sit down and say, “Well, what do you want those decisions to be? And that really scares them. Usually, right? We tell them, you know, if we had a magic wand and we waved it in five years, what would you want your life to look like? And that’s really scary. That was actually one of the reasons we changed one of the first things from EOS. Right, EOS says look 10 years down the line and write down what you want your vision to be. We realized how scary 10 years looked for lawyers, so we were like, all right, let’s make it a little less scary. Let’s just think about five years, right? Five years feels a little more doable, and and yeah, we we talk about what kind of goals you know that these lawyers want to set for themselves in five years’ time, and we see such we we literally run the gamut of of differences between firms that we we talk to. You know, some people start to realize. Oh, I want you know in five years I want to make $50 million for my firm, right? And you know they’re currently sitting at 5 million, say or or whatever, and and they’re willing to dream super super big and audaciously. And then other firms are way too scared to to even name a number, right? Like they have such fear around even putting a number down that they’re willing to say that they want, and then even when we like pull it out of them, it’s still clearly to us we can see what’s you know what we’re working with here, and even us we have to say no. You know you can do better than that. You know you you know that even if you were to just do the same things you’ve been doing, you would surpass that. Let’s dream bigger. So it’s really trying to talk people into not just these measurable goals, which are important, right? The revenue numbers, the profit numbers. You know, how many people do you want? Those are all sort, all sort of normal things. But we also really try to get them to dig deep into the things that they aren’t willing to name either. Like, how much time do you want to be able to spend with your family? You know, how what kind of life do you want to be able to live outside of work? You know, do you want to be working on cases or not working on cases? Like, what do you want your role to be in the firm? So, you know, we talk about all the smart goals, the measurable, attainable goals too. Those are really important, obviously. But what’s even more important is the goals of truly what’s going to make your life happy, and how can we get there? Because that looks really different for everyone, right? Like we talked to the person who wanted the $50 million firm. We’re like, well, why are you? What’s that number for, right? And like, what’s actually going to make you happy? Like, if in five years, what do you want your life to be like? And he said, “Well, I want to be able to get front-row seats every time this band comes to town, and I would really love a vacation home here. I’m like, “Well, do you really need $50 million to do that, though? Like, you know what? And let’s think about what comes along with having a $50 million firm, right? All of those things would that make you happy? Would that be the firm that you would enjoy going to every day? And it’s like, well, no. I just was told I should dream big, and dream big just means numbers, right? But so getting to chip away and understand like, what these goals actually mean and what we have to actually have to do to get there, and that is so interesting to me to see the realizations start to hit on our clients’ faces as we work through what they actually want their life to look like.

 

Will  13:03

Yeah, it sounds like you experience quite a bit of maybe surface-level goals that are almost conflicting with, like, the root goal. Do you find that to be the case?

 

Brittany Green  13:13

Oh, 100%. Especially because, let’s be real here, we’re human, right? We compare ourselves to everybody, and so it’s very clear when we’re working with someone, and they’re starting to name numbers or name certain things of what they want in their vision, and we sort of oftentimes have to say, let’s pause for a second. Is this actually what you want, or is this what you’ve been seeing your competitor have that you think you want, right? You know, we get. I feel like we have really good conversations and rapport with our people that we start to work with, and it’s pretty easy usually, you know, to tell whether someone’s just naming a vision because they think it’s what they’re supposed to want versus what actually looks like it would fit their lifestyle, right? Based off the conversations we’ve had outside of work, which is an important reason why I feel like we do our best to get to know our clients on multiple levels, right? We want to understand who they are on a personal level to understand what’s important to them. You know, what kind of family life do you have? Who do you know who’s important to you? What’s important to you? You know, do you have certain communities that you’re a part of that make you who you are? So, yeah, it’s really clear when we’re working with someone, and we start to see like, wait, hold on, are you actually dreaming the dream for yourself, or are you just naming what you think someone else wants from you?

 

Will  14:49

Yeah, it’s difficult, especially in today’s day and age, right? And I think about my LinkedIn feed. You scroll through LinkedIn, and all you see are these phenomenal highlights, right? They look very sexy. On a LinkedIn post, but you don’t see the work behind the scenes, right? Whether the hours spent and dedicated to make that post look phenomenal, right, or the lack thereof, and it’s interesting to hear that you guys are experiencing that on the question side of things as well. How does that complicate your guys’ 10x return, or write the 10x methodology, because you know a quantifiable one that’s going to be a lot easier to go out and strive towards, right? Something that is a little bit more of like the root, or just like a you know, non-measured side of things. It’s a little bit more difficult. What’s your guys’ thought process there?

 

Brittany Green  15:42

Yeah, absolutely, and yeah, and we get it right because, you know here we are telling people because we do ask for SMART goals from people. Don’t get me wrong, as we do ask for the revenue goals and the KPIs and things like that. But we are a little okay with fudging some of them, right? Because exactly, we’re over here saying, you know, we want to give 10x return to everybody, and yeah, there’s not a super great way to attribute that, right, and quantify it. Now, I will say we’ve certainly got some data behind it that we are, more oftentimes than not, doing more than 10x our value, right? Because we do still get from our clients that we work with, right? Like, I mean, pure revenue goals say, right? They, they, we do ask them to set certain things, and they’ll break it. And well, again, oftentimes they’re things that are like 10x or more of what they started with, and through the help of us, they’ve obviously achieved that. So those are easier to say. Like, okay, yep, we’re living our value, but oftentimes it is a little bit more, you know, almost cheering from the background and seeing, knowing, and understanding that some of what we are doing and providing for people is going to be just like a ripple effect, right? And being willing to be okay with maybe not always quantifying every little interaction and you know, impact we have with people, especially in our community, right? We have our Beir community. It’s a private Slack group of 400 and growing lawyers from all over. We only ask $500 a year. Well, and originally it wasn’t even that. It was $1 a day. Now we’ve you know, inflation. We gotta raise it a little bit. It’s $1.39 a day. It’s $500 a year, and we know for sure we are giving way more than 10x value in there if you are using it appropriately, right? I mean, that’s sort of the other crux of it, and in that value, right? We can hand you you know, the rod and the bait and teach you how to cast, but if you’re not willing to sit at the lake all day, and I just recently fished again after a while in time. So it’s this reference is in my head, but you know, so yeah, we we can we can lead you to the water and everything. But if you’re not willing to sit there and put the patient work in, you know, waiting for something to bite, obviously, you know, obviously we’re never going to be able to see that 10x return from you. So obviously, there’s some faith that we have to put into our clients. But that goes back to we try to make our values very obvious and very understood. I think we’ve done a good job based off of the clients we’ve worked with so far. We’ve never, I don’t think we’ve ever had to say no to a client, maybe once where we could tell our, you know, our values didn’t align. We knew that it, we knew we wouldn’t be able to return 10x value, right? Because we could identify from the get-go that that client wasn’t going to, you know, put in the work that we would need to see that return. So ultimately, I think, you know, it goes back to marketing and reaching the right audience. I think we’ve done a really good job of reaching the right audience. That we’ve never had to feel a concern that we’re not doing what we set out to do, which is that 10x return.

 

Will  19:14

Yeah, and you know, I mean this sincerely. You guys get some of the more like most positive word-of-mouth feedback that I hear, right? And I think that Slack group especially is something that I just think is a phenomenal value add for any firm out there. Tell us a little bit more about what that

 

Brittany Green  19:32

1. Yeah, yeah, it was our besides, you know, writing down the way our operating system. It was our first product that we came out with, our first service, and more than anything, of course, it was selfishly, right, our own little way of getting the word out, getting people in a direct audience with us to start telling them who we are, what we do, how we work with you. But the long and short of it is, yeah. So it’s a private Slack community. As I said, we’ve got over 400 people in there and growing, all different practice areas. You know, personal injury, family law, appeals, business lit, criminal, all sorts of stuff. And it’s so fun. I mean, we’ve got so many different channels in there. We’ve got the AI channel that’s always bumping off, right? People are always talking about what’s new, what’s next with what they’re doing in their firms with AI. We’ve got you know a hiring channel, right? Talking about hiring, like what? How are people finding lawyers? How are people finding pairs? What’s working? What’s not? All sorts of referrals. We have a referral channel in there, which that one, we definitely didn’t set out for this community to necessarily be a referral network, but understandably, it makes sense that it would become that. You know, we again, we have such a value of ours to be trusted in our community, and so it’s clear that all of these people from all over who don’t know each other are just willing to trust that if you’re in there, you care, right? So they’re willing to just put those referrals out in there and lend them out, which has been awesome to see. And then yeah, every month we try to do at least one AMA. We shout out to Will. He was one of our AMAs in January this year, and it was great. It was an awesome value-add to our people, and yeah, we bring in experts every month to just again, answer questions for our community. It’s live right there. People can just ask away, and then also there’s the back catalog if you miss it live, and we don’t paywall that. That’s all included. You know, lots of people have told us we’re you know, losing lots of money by not paywalling all of our past content. But again, that goes back to we just want to give as much value as possible, and we’d rather be seen and known for that than, you know, keeping everything behind a paywall, keeping everything secret until you give us enough, right?

 

Will  22:08

Yeah, that’s extremely wise from like a long-term vision standpoint, in my opinion. And and those AMAs, right? I do think there’s something that’s very cool. I was honored to be able to, you know, help out with something like that. But you talked about that AI channel specifically, right? And I would imagine that that is a huge recurring part of the conversation. I know that you guys have, you know, rolled out your AI era. I don’t know if we’d call them masterminds conferences. What, what’s the right?

 

Brittany Green  22:36

This one’s a conference. Yeah, AI era is definitely a conference for sure.

 

Will  22:40

Yeah. What are some of the most frequent questions that you’re seeing in that channel specifically, or some of the more frequent conversations that you guys are having with your firms?

 

Brittany Green  22:51

Yeah, you know, and what’s so interesting, obviously, especially that channel has seen such an evolution, and you know, the short two years that we’ve been here and been doing this, and you know it started out with, you know, what software are you, or you know, what AI software is everybody using? What’s, you know, what’s better? You know, ChatGPT or Claude? And you know, oh is you know how how are you prompting it to do this? And it’s slowly evolved, and there are still, of course, little things with that. Now it’s just maybe the software has changed. Most of us are, you know, Claude lovers in there. I’d say it is the heaviest one. But now it’s a little bit more like legal-specific, right? Is E versus Supio? You know, and the pros and cons there. Who’s using that? What do you know? What are your feelings? But it’s almost slowly started to evolve into not just, yeah, how are you? You know, how are you prompting it this way? What tool are you building today with it? You know, how are you saving time, efficiency? Yeah, that’s all still happening, and it made sense too because last year our first AI era conference was a lot about that, right? It was a lot about teaching. A lot of people were still obviously very new to AI and had not explored it, hadn’t played with it, didn’t have any ways that they were implementing it truly in their firms, and so that’s what a lot of the focus was on last year at the conference for AI era 1.0, we’ll call it. But now, with how fast it’s moved, we’re like, wow. Everyone, for the most part, everyone has played with it. They’re pretty comfortable with it. They’re starting to figure out, you know, how it’s saving me time here. Okay, it’s you know, it’s trolling my inbox every day. It’s helping me do this. They don’t need as much help with that sort of stuff. And yeah, there’s still going to be that at AIAR 2.0, but a lot of it now is so much more human-related and philosophical, even, right, and that’s a lot of what AIR 2.0 we want the focus to be on, which is human, right? Yes, last year we talked about human-in-the-loop. You still need your judgment. You still need to, you know, pay attention to everything before you send it out. All that’s still true. But you know, it’s obviously gotten even better. It’s, you know, you can skim a lot of it now before you have to send it out because you can trust a lot more of it as long as you’re feeding it, you know, the correct data and information. But now that conversations are really starting to be, you know, what’s the human impact of all this, right? How do we not lose the human in all of this? Like, what are your firms supposed to look like now when you’ve got AI doing 80% of you know, your work, but you’re still supposed to be there for the full work week, right? Like, how are we filling our time? Are we just filling it with more work? Are we, you know, finding ways to make our teams’ lives better, more enjoyable? You know, there are so many questions around it, and it’s been interesting to see that evolution of conversations that have started to happen, and what you’ll see a lot of at the AIR 2.0 conference this year too.

 

Will  26:03

Yeah, where do you find that most firms are starting these days? Right, what would you consider, or what would you suggest? Let’s say that I am just starting out my own firm, trying to figure out the first place that I should really start building that foundation. You know, where does that conversation typically start?

 

Brittany Green  26:19

Yeah, and I mean, that’s what’s interesting is there was almost never a really great time to like start a firm maybe 10 years ago right before, almost sort of pre the digital like, marketing age we’re in now, right, because, like, LSAs and Avvo and all that stuff were still cheap and actually you know, fruitful, right, for getting leads and stuff. But then the second-best time, I think, almost is now because of some of the capabilities that specifically these solos that are just starting. Like, I think it’s a little bit harder for the mid-size firms right now. Like, they’re probably seeing, yeah, right. They’re seeing the worst of it, which I feel you know so terrible for, like that. It’s so frustrating. I can understand all of the issues that we’re seeing with that, but yeah, it’s rarely been easier, at least for a solo, though, to start jumping in now because you have some of these freedoms and abilities to, you know, still do a really good job at creating systems from day one, almost easier, right? Because you do have the assistance of Claude that you can use now, right? We’re helping firms do this with, you know, when we work with clients, we record everything on our Claude devices so that we have transcripts running the whole time. You know, we’re obviously working within Claude too to create skills for them as we’re talking to them and thinking about their goals. And you know, you used to have to pay so much money to develop dashboards, right, for tracking data, and now it’s like we don’t necessarily need super sophisticated legal specific technology for these smaller firms for them to still get you know a lot of value you know and and have a really systematized way of working you know they don’t have to feel obligated to you know jump into a file line or Clio, you know, three year contract because they have the Supios now, right? That can help them case manage. They have a whole Google Workspace, right? That is almost as that really can be just as good as as a traditional case management system. So I don’t know. I think it’s an awesome time for solos to be, you know, setting out, and we just are are excited to continue to work with some of those people, especially and teach them. We were just doing it for one last week, and it was so much fun getting to strategically plan his next, you know, year and a half with him, of you know, and and how again how these tools can help him manage this growth. And by all means, that you know, this is a funny thing too, right? Is that people are like, well, oh, we can just not have big firms anymore, right? I can do the work of 20 people with five, and we’re not seeing that that’s the case, right? Almost no industry really is seeing that that’s really true. At least depending on what you know growth you’re you’re hoping to get to, it’s just the I think the trajectory looks different now, and the timelines of of when and where to hire are starting to look maybe a little different, but otherwise, yeah, it’s just such an exciting time for those people for sure.

 

Will  29:47

Yeah, it sounds like you know building those foundations with, you know, AI in mind as opposed to modifying them, right, is something that is creating a lot of advantages. Do you ever find that because of. Where we’re at when it comes to AI and almost the limitless possibilities that it creates, does that almost present a new challenge in the form of there’s a million things that we could do, therefore, it’s difficult to do any of them well?

 

Brittany Green  30:15

Definitely, definitely, and I mean, I’m the first one to sort of, you know, I joke with Ryan all the time, and I by joke I mean I like to keep him humble about things. He jokes right back to me about it, but, you know I I I look at AI sometimes a lot more critically than he does. Where I’m like, all right, sometimes this is making everybody think they’re an expert at everything, right? And when you know we’re not; we just you know think we’ve become experts at at things because Claude is telling us the answers. But um, but yeah, I mean, I found that, and again, I say that to Ryan because, and he he gets it because he is a visionary, like a lot of obviously, the law firm owners we work with, right? There’s a reason they are who they are as people, and they have always had the problem, right, of having so many ideas, anyway, and wanting to do them all right away. And yeah, AI has almost just amplified that because they think, yeah, like, oh, you know, this list of 100 ideas that used to take me forever to try to get to now, yeah, has been condensed, right, with the help of Claude. But right, are we really actually producing, you know, quality work with all of them? So I think it’s been more important than ever to have because this is where it was interesting too, right? Like we’re like, well, if people think Claude can just be their coach or their consultant, you know, are they going to need us? And you realize again that we’ve just now become the person that gets to remind them and strategically plan with them of, okay, we still only have so much time for so many of your projects. Let’s figure out what’s actually going to get us farther, and you know, get you towards your goals that you want to achieve, and then we and then we figure out how Claude or AI has a place in there, right? So, yeah, I mean, it’s definitely AI has definitely made everyone think that you know they can achieve so much more faster, and that it’s this sort of magic fix. But it can only be magic if you are still staying on track and strategically planning for you know, that future vision.

 

Will  32:48

Yeah, yeah, it’s it’s exciting, right? And that’s where these conversations can be some can become super, super important and are already super, super important. Obviously, you know, Alice and Ryan are both phenomenal, but I do want to kind of wrap up today’s conversation, just talking a little bit more about you specifically, right? Because I think that you know the insight that you have, right? Being you know a non-attorney is a phenomenal piece of what you guys have to offer, but even you found yourself getting to that space in a little bit more of a unique way, right? Obviously, we talked about this earlier, and you studied, you know, mathematics and education, right, in school. How did you end up in the legal space?

 

Brittany Green  33:34

Yeah, I mean, it was totally by happenstance. I so yeah, so I taught for a very, very short period of time. I knew the way traditional education, the system, is today, it just wasn’t what I fell in love with originally. So I knew I was looking for a different path. I still did not have marketing as a you know, secondary career idea or anything; I sort of just fell into helping a local high-end salon at that point with their like social media and stuff like that. Obviously, from an elementary education standpoint, I did love creativity. Right, there’s a reason I loved teaching that age because you got to have a lot more creativity with your lesson plans, and you know how to how to you know shape minds right little minds so yeah I just fell into working with a local salon I knew the owners and things like that as I was sort of just contemplating where I wanted to go next with a different career, and then you know, funny little world connections. I I ended up meeting you know Ryan and his old partner, and they were in the perfect spot. Well, the pandemic, you know. Happened, and I definitely was like, okay, I’m ready to. The hair salon shut down. It was finally like, okay, I need to, I need to really like. If there wasn’t a bigger sign from the universe of like, okay, I knew I was ready for a new shift. That was it. You know, I was was loving doing the things I did for them, but I knew I wanted to expand my skills of like helping a business grow and and you know keep a foot because I help them with sort of their back office sort of operations as well and and yeah so it just ended up perfect timing like you know universe can do things when when it when you need it to sometimes that I met Ryan and his partner they were in the place you know with with COVID shutting everything down they could have been one of those firms right it was very much a like sink or swim kind of moment for so many firms and they could have either been doomsday about it, and been like, “Great, the courts are shut down. No one’s driving. We’re gonna go under. You know, they obviously did see their, you know, their revenue go down that year significantly, but they had a vision. They stuck to it. They said, “Nope, we know that the way to start growing again is to invest more in marketing. We don’t have a bunch of money to invest in it, though, so let’s invest in a person. And they were smart enough to hire for personality instead of traditional skills. They understood that they wanted someone who could be human, who could be, you know, good with people, who, you know, understood there was ways to do things unconventionally, which I guess, you know. Yeah, I had sort of, you know, my road to them was unconventional, and yeah, sort of the rest was history, where Ryan and I just hit it off right away. You know, we spoke the same language in that way of understanding that marketing just boils down to you know, getting people to know like and trust you, and it didn’t take someone having to go to school for four years in marketing to understand that right, and also to understand that like if I had if I had gone to school for marketing during the time I was in college, like, so much of that was already almost outdated, right? By the time I started to move into this traditional marketing space, anyways, so you know, life is your best teacher. As I like to, I obviously did not make up that quote, but as I like to read..

 

Will  37:38

Read quote.

 

Brittany Green  37:39

Yeah, you can. What is that? It’s like from The Office. We ingratitude, Michael Scott. Whoever actually said that quote first. Yeah, I’ll attribute it to me afterwards. But you know, life’s the greatest teacher, and you know, you can’t do anything better than, like, learn on the job. And as long as you have supportive people behind you to do that, Ryan always was. He put me in every, you know, he gave me every book that I wanted to read to enhance my skills. He let me go to every conference I wanted to, you know. He suggested all the podcasts. He did everything right as a boss to make sure my skills were grown in the right way, so that, you know, I could be developed into, and also he had the real conversations, right? Of where do you see yourself? Like, is this just another, you know, sort of stop in the road of your life, and do you want something else career-wise eventually, or where do you see, or do you see yourself growing here in some way? Which way? So it was great to have those conversations. It was great to be able to definitively say, no, I love doing this. I love marketing. I love marketing for lawyers. I think law firms are cool. I certainly had so many preconceived notions of lawyers right before being in this space, and you know, fell in love with helping lawyers help people. So yeah, I could never see myself really wanting to do anything outside of something having to do with marketing in the legal space or helping others market in the legal space.

 

Will  39:19

Yeah, and I can absolutely relate on my end to not coming from the legal space background, right? Do you find that that creates any challenges for you on the consulting side of things? Do people tend to challenge your thoughts more, or you know, is that been something that’s been an issue, right? Whether in reality or like, preconceived.

 

Brittany Green  39:40

Yeah, you know, that’s a great question because I definitely assumed, stepping into this consultant role, especially that I would get the challenge. I would get the well, you wouldn’t yeah, you wouldn’t know. You’re not a lawyer, and again, maybe this goes back to we. We attract really great clients that we love, and who maybe aren’t that type of people. I’m sure there may be those types of lawyers out there, but yeah, we have really yet to experience that. It’s been amazing to see the sort of instant support from any lawyer we work with, you know. And again, I, you know, I guess this goes back to obviously I’ve done something right. If I’ve made sure that they know, like, and trust me enough to immediately say, you know, what you have to say matters. I trust what you’re saying, and I’m going to do what you’re telling me to do. Never ever is it mentioned that, yeah, you’re not a lawyer, or even, you know oh you didn’t come from a traditional marketing background, anything like that. It’s I’ve never gotten any pushback from our people. I mean, you know you get the understandable pushback, but it’s never in the oh you’re not a lawyer, how would you know sense, which has just been great, and yeah, I just love the clients we work with in that way because they’re just they’re so supportive, they’re so they’re just so ready to learn, and eager to eat up anything that we’re telling them.

 

Will  41:21

Yeah, and that reputation is earned, not given, right? And that’s absolutely something that you guys have created, and you specifically have created through, you know, advising and almost consulting people in the right direction, right? And you know, earned that ability to have that trust. So with that in mind, I would love for you to plug anywhere that people can get in touch with you. You know, is there anything that you guys have coming up where you know firms can kind of attend, get a sense of what you’re about, or just in general, where can people connect with you?

 

Brittany Green  41:54

Yeah, absolutely. Obviously, love to have everyone follow me on LinkedIn, Brittany Green. Like I mentioned before, there’s that best air community. We always offer a free 30-day trial as well, so it’s like no risk to joining if you want to hop in and see what it’s all about. I can send you the link if you want to put it in the show notes or wherever. I’m happy to do that. And yeah, as I said, we have our AI Era 2.0 conference coming up. It’s November 5th and 6th, Charleston, South Carolina. Nowhere better. Will’s Backyard. You know it’s great, and we really. I swear, not a marketing ploy. We really do only have about 20 in-person seats left available to to sell. So if you’re interested in coming in person, which I highly recommend because it was just so great getting people together in a room. Again, human is is the the word for 2026, and community matters so much. But we do have a virtual option because I understand it it can’t fit in everyone’s schedule to travel, so I will say, the live stream and the content that you receive afterwards virtually is still highly valuable. So either way works, but yes, you can go to our website. It’s all the information you can find there. Bessara.com.

 

Will  43:18

Cool, and I would definitely highly, highly, highly recommend it. You guys do a phenomenal job, Brittany. I really appreciate you taking some time to come chat. Would definitely encourage everybody to connect. Definitely reach out if you think that the you know the best air team might be something that could be a value add for you. I couldn’t recommend that conversation enough. Anything that you’d like to leave the audience with,

 

Brittany Green  43:41

As I said, life is your greatest teacher, Brittany Green. 

 

Will  43:48

Love it. Love it. 

 

Brittany Green  43:49

What more can be said, right?

 

Will  43:51

Love it. Well, Brittany, I appreciate it. Thanks so much for joining.

 

Brittany Green  43:54

Thank you. Bye. Bye.