In this episode, Seth and Jay interview Peter Shankman, serial entrepreneur and author about the speed of iteration, the new world of legal services after Covid, and hiring neurodiverse employees. Also, Nalini is back to talk about new updates to Google My Business.
Welcome, welcome, welcome to the Thursday, August 27 edition of maximum growth live. I’m your host, Jay Ruane, with me, as always, Seth Price. Seth, how are you doing this week?
Doing great. Doing great, Jay.
So, Seth, we have a phenomenal show today, but before we get to the show, we want to talk about a couple of things. Number one, we’re always and have been a member of maximum lawyer media, and you can hear this podcast edition, not only on our standalone podcast, but as part of the maximum lawyer podcast. And we are sponsored by firm flex, which is my company’s social media marketing for lawyers, and we’re also sponsored by your company, Seth, tell us about your company.
BluShark Digital, it is essentially a passion play, our in-house team from Price Benowitz spun into its own digital agency helping lawyers around the country with their digital marketing needs.
Fantastic. So, we have a phenomenal get for our show today, and we didn’t really promote it that much because we weren’t sure we were gonna get it, but we got him and tell us who we got coming up in the show today, because I think minds are going to be blown.
You know, coming up today we got Peter Shankman. Peter is just one of my favorite entrepreneurs. I ran into him in the mid to late 90s in New York when he was starting geek factory, and I was, had left big law and had gone to New York to make my millions in the first .com bubble. After starting a company in the music space, I ended up as a founding employee for US law, and each night it was crazy. You’d work all day till about five o’clock and then you’d go out to the nicest clubs in New York, and all these dot coms with crazy venture money. We’re throwing these insane parties, and from like six to nine, you’d go party hopping, and Peter was a mainstay of this of this world. We got to be great friends, got to see him through that period. He, then when things were rough after 9/11, hooked me up, he took me out to the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas, I’ll always be appreciative of that, and watched him build Haro Help a Reporter which is still a great resource for link building and PR, something that he sold years ago, did very well with that written several books on business, on ADHD, on consumer focused businesses, and really has become one of those guys, a sought after keynote speaker who goes around the country and his sort of helped school business on how to deal with consumers, and it’s just a fascinating look, he professes to be faster than normal, and when you hear him speak, he certainly is. So, I can’t wait to have him on the show.
Yeah, I’ve seen him speak a couple of times and, you know, I really am really looking forward to this interview. There’s a lot of great things that we can talk about, but before he’s ready, we’re first going to bring in Nalini. So, let’s get her set up. Next, we’re going to be, as people know, we’ve been looking for a name for her segment, we think we found it. It’s called Nalini school of thought. So, after we get done here, we’re going to bring in Nalini, she’s going to talk about some digital marketing tips, and then on the back end of the show, we’re going to bring Peter in for our a little more in-depth conversation, and I think both segments’ people are gonna get a lot out of this week. So, thank you all for being with us. What we’ll do is we’ll take a quick break right now and when we come back, we’ll have Nalini with the Nalini’s school of thought.
Hey, everybody, we’re gonna focus on Google My Business today. Some of the new features that Google have put out in this past month, they’ve been kind of busy. Still, in that same vein of always trying to gather information about your consumers and about the engagement with your business. Google is now allowing you to engage with your business and edit information from your business profile from new sources. So, before you had to go and log into the backend of your Google My Business, a few years ago, they started to allow this functionality on the front end so that if you Googled your business name and your address, and your Google My Business popped up on the right hand side of the search result, there was an edit my information button, a couple of other features you were able to edit, you can add photos… Google has now brought this to the Google Maps app, which is a big deal, because you don’t necessarily have to go log in and be in the back end with the insights and all this extra information, but if you look at your Google Maps, as if you were going somewhere and you were putting in your navigation, in the top right-hand corner, you’ll see your little Google profile, it’s whether it’s your logo or your photo, and when you click on that, you have access to your business or all of the businesses that you manage, you can easily add a post, you can change your business description, some of these very easy functions are available now there, that’s brand new as of this month. And one of the cool things that I like is when you go and you, if you search your business, and you see your, you know, you can press like directions to your office, but if you see your Google My Business pop up when you type in your business name into Google Maps, you can actually see the number of people that have actually seen this Google My Business over the course of the month, there’s actual on page, information and data. So, very quick snapshot, if you’re just playing around on your phone, and you want to see how your Google My Business is doing. I think that’s really cool, it’s a good indication that Google is really trying to get people to log in as easily as they can and to actually update information or to post if you’re not doing that yet, your Google My Business posts are a really good way to interact with your audience. The second thing that we saw that was kind of cool, is that there’s now the call button on a lot of Google My Businesses on desktop. So, we know that when we looked up services on our phones, there would be the call button you could click to directly call. The way that it’s working now on the computers is that right next to website, there’s buttons there at the top that you usually see, website directions, save, there’s now a call button, and if you click that button, it will automatically open a pop up that says would you like to call from your Android, and there’s different apps that you can set up with your phone, the, if you have a Mac, what it will do is ask you if you want to call from your cell phone. And so, this is interesting, right? Because it’s on a desktop, but what’s really cool is that you’re gonna get a lot more data on the back end in your Google My Business Insights now that are actually showing you who’s trying to call you when they’re at a desktop, right? Before you would only get that information from the mobile, so to have that information from both aspects, more data is power, to understand how your consumers are trying to get in touch with you to make decisions based on, hey, maybe my call volume is pretty high and I realized how much I was getting in here, maybe I need to do something with my intake, right? So, very cool data signals. And then the third thing is something that wanted to end on which I thought was cool, and it’s headed in the right direction, but not quite there yet. So, there’s always been this debate about should I put 24/7 as my hours as a law firm, because, you know, maybe I stop at six and my doors are closed at that time, but I have an answering service that can totally take intake from anyone who’s gotten in a car accident or is having trouble with their family, you know, or got arrested. And so, people would put 24/7 but then Google would sometimes see this as spammy, and you’ve heard other SEO, people say it’s too spammy, don’t do it. You’ve seen people be able to easily suggest a change, and then it makes it look bad that your profile is lying. So, a lot of people have gone back to putting, you know, eight to five, nine to six, whatever your actual hours are. So, there’s this new feature that Google just added this month, and it’s called online service hours. So, they came up with this field a couple of weeks ago, but now we’re actually seeing it on the front end. So, the way that this works is when you pull up your Google My Business on the desktop, you are still just seeing your regular brick and mortar hours. In addition, if it is your online hours, it still marks you as closed. So, you see the red word that says closed, you only see your online hours if you click into the more hours section, and then it’s underneath. But the thing that I think they’re going with here is they’re trying to see how many people do work, you know, after hours or would use that as a feature would want that to be something that was seen immediately by someone. And I think there’s a lot of industries, especially legal, where you guys do have 24/7, you’ll pick up the phone or you have someone dedicated to answering the phone because your clients may need you at any time. So, while it doesn’t show on the front end right now, it is a step in the right direction that maybe that 24/7 versus should I put my real hours to be will be handled in the future. It’s also really interesting because they’re starting to put up information about online hours and virtual things. So, I’m very excited to see what kind of new items come out, especially with regards to satellite offices and people maybe not having brick and mortars as much and, and so I’m waiting for that to break. I know that last summer was a big show where we all said, hey, guys, if you have a Regis or WeWorks, even if you’re like a small, just started your law firm, and it really is your office space, you run the risk of being suspended. And you could have your whole Google My Business gone, and I know Jay could talk for a while about the huge dip he saw in analytics from when his, his Google My Business was suspended for quite a while, so if you really look at it, it’s really interesting to see that they are looking at people who have online businesses, your offline hours, they’re trying to really play to the people who are adjusting to this new way that people have to do business with, you know, Florentine and corona. So, really interesting stuff, new stuff coming up, I’m sure. If you have questions, I’m always here to answer but we’ll keep an eye on some of these new features and go ahead and tinker with it. Look at it and see what kind of cool things are on that Google My Business app, because that’s, that’s a good way for you, even if you’re not tech savvy, and you can’t sign in, you can go on the Google app. I’m sure you’re on the Google Maps app when you’re trying to get directions to somewhere and you can see some of your analytics right there and you can change things. So, some easy DIY tips and I’ll be here again next week. If you guys have things you want to hear about, or Jay, Seth, have other questions. For me, that’s what we’ll do next week, thanks.
In this world today, if you want to grow your business, you want to grow your firm, you want to take on more cases and make a better impact, you have to have a digital blueprint. Statistically, throughout the time that we’ve been working with BluShark Digital, our law firm, the Atlanta divorce law group grew over 14,100%. They truly understand where we’re headed and how we want to get there. I have a team in BluShark Digital that I feel like has my back.
Well, thanks to Nalini, I mean, always great stuff. She’s so knowledgeable about the industry. But we don’t want to keep Peter waiting because he moves fast, and I’m afraid that if we keep on waiting any longer, he might hang up. So, he’s on the call right now. Give me 30 seconds, not even, and let’s get him in here now and we’ll take it from there. So, 10 second break, folks, and when we come back, Peter Shankman will be with us. Thanks.
Peter, thank you so much for joining us. Peter is a longtime friend and mentor, this, this guy has done it all. He’s written books, he’s figured out how to have steaks delivered to the airport. He has really made business people question and dig deep and reflect upon how they do things, and thank you for that, Peter. You know, on max growth live, we spend a lot of time focused on figuring out, you know, how law firms get to the next level, and I know you have very strong feelings on how the new economy will reshape things as far as need for space. Let’s start there.
Yeah, I mean, I think that if you’re, if you’re still paying for $50,000 a month lease so you can have a fountain in your lobby, you’re an idiot. You know, people don’t care that… I stopped caring where you worked 20, 22 years ago. My first job and 95 work for America Online and they didn’t give a crap where I worked or how I worked, as long as I got my job done. This was 95, right? And I remember I moved back to New York, and I took a job at a magazine and realized that most people still didn’t care, and that kind of sucked, but they don’t anymore, right? I’ve written my last three books on airplanes to Asia. My, in the past 20 years, I’ve met my financial advisor, and I’ve met my accountant in person twice, you know, I don’t care where you are, and COVID just sort of accelerated that, you know, ask yourself, do you really need that office? Do you really need, you know, the… We managed to switch over to virtual working because we didn’t have a choice. And then about four months into it, you know, the stories that are coming out, Oh, it’s not as productive as everyone. Well, of course, it’s not because you slam people into doing what should have taken five years into three months, but now that they’re there, the ramp up is going to be a lot easier, right? I mean, I have a spider Regis office just that I had to get my, because my kid was young and I needed to, I needed a place to call my own work, you know, I can work but I’m at the point now I’m like, what the hell am I paying 1600 bucks a month for? I haven’t even been there three weeks already, right? So, the question becomes, am I going to renew when the lease is up in June? Hell no. You know, we’re at the point now where, where internet is finally prevalent enough, it’s fast enough, you know, the onus to getting work done is fine. It’s really going to come down to the person working as opposed to other things like location or whatever, there’s really no excuse, not to. I remember in 2008 or 2009 my parents were flying to London for their birthday, or for my mom’s birthday and anniversary, something I don’t remember, and I decided to surprise them, and I flew down and met them for dinner, right? And just because I could, and I still got, I still got my work done, still got everything done, and my clients had no idea. It doesn’t matter anymore, and I think that people are at the point where they don’t care, get the work done from a forest in Tanzania or Borneo, it doesn’t matter as long as you get the work done. And so, I think that we’re seeing that, and even, even in law, you know, yes, there’s still, you’re still gonna have to go to court, but 99% of the stuff, I mean, I still, my lawyer is still working, he’s still doing his stuff, he’s just been doing it from home. The funniest thing is the hardest thing that is, that lawyers have had to deal with is figuring out how to get paid, because no one’s in the office to take checks anymore, right? So, I introduced my attorney who works for a very large firm, by the way, something about something called Venmo. I’m like, here, this will change your life. By the way, there’s also this wonderful thing that’s called the Internet where you don’t have to use your fax machine anymore. So, yeah, that’s, you know…
Peter, I’m gonna push you a little bit on this, because look you, you built an empire as you, for those people that are leveraging other people, some of the largest companies have tried with the, with remote work and some have pulled back saying, hey, we don’t like what we see. Now, granted, this is, as you’ve alluded to, the band aid is off, people didn’t take enough time to put it in place, and with greater thought and technology, more and more can go remote. BluShark, for example, you know, remote fully, and maybe for the foreseeable future and figuring out how to leverage space back, but the question is, is it going to be space? Will people want that socialization? Is there a serendipity of being together? Part of the reason I became a friend in the 90s is we spent time in the same physical proximity and we did deals and met people and had opportunities that we wouldn’t have had otherwise. Do you think that there is some value, especially in scaled organizations, to having some form of physical interaction, even if it’s not 100% of the time?
I think you’re confusing, you’re confusing quarantine with homework. What do I mean by that? Quarantine means we weren’t allowed to go out, right? It means we had to work from our home. Homework means you work from home, or you work from wherever you want to go into an office, go into an office, you want to meet at a coffee shop and do some work together, go into a coffee shop, you want to meet in Central Park and hang out and get a tan while you’re having a meeting, go for it. There’s a difference between the quarantine that we went through and the concept of working in a way that works for you, works best for you, and that’s what people really need to understand is that the premise of working in a way that’s best for you means that it doesn’t have to be one way. My favorite story, you know, the baboons in the, in the cage they put bananas up on the top when the baboons gets to the other four, gets sprayed with cold water so that the baboon quickly gets the crap beat out of him and learns not to go after the bananas. They take one of the baboons out put a new one in he gets the crap kicked out of him before he even gets the bananas. No one gets sprayed with cold water, eventually all five are replaced, all five know not to go for the bananas they’ll get the crap beaten out of them but none of them know why, and the answer being well, that’s the way we’ve always done it, right? So, you know, at the end of the day, you don’t have to do that. I’m not saying never meet, I’m not saying don’t go to the office, I was not saying don’t have personalization, right? My kid is going… Did, you know, her school, that I’m paying 50 grand a year for, for second grade isn’t starting in person until mid October, and you know that’s going to not be until January. And yet, you know, and they’re having a, they’re having a day an introduction, a meet your meet your friends again day in September on the first day, what would have been the first day of school, right? So, there are ways to do things, you can’t look at it as, oh, it’s either quarantine or nothing. When this when, when, when somebody gets their goddamn act together, you know, and we become like every other industrialized country in the world, then and we and, you know, the, the curve does drop, you know, when people don’t equate to wearing a mask with their fucking freedoms, pardon my French, then, you know, we’ll get it together and we’ll see a difference, and we’ll see that we can work from anywhere and it doesn’t matter. The rules are going to shift, not because of quarantine, the rules are going to shift because time is brought the rules to shift.
Great. Jay?
Yeah. Peter, thanks so much for being with us. I want to take a take a step back. I had the pleasure of seeing you at PubCon a number of years ago, and you were at, then you were talking about your ADHD diagnosis and you framed it in a way that really hit home for me, in that you talked about it being somewhat of a superpower because your brain works faster than other people’s brain. And as somebody with a child with ADHD, I came home from that sort of empowered by your story and by your reframing of, of the skill. Shared it with my wife, talked to my son about it and he has really embraced that as a way to sort of, like look at his skill set differently and not as a negative but as a positive. And I’d like to talk to you a little bit about that, because I think you have a unique perspective about how speed really does matter in the new economy, and what we saw over the last five months is those, those law firms and lawyers that were able to adapt quickly to change had been able to be successful throughout this. So, can you tell us a little bit more why speed truly does matter in the next generation?
So, you know, I have written five books, one of them is a best seller on ADHD, right? One of them, and I have a, I have a best-selling book award winning podcast on ADHD, pretty much everything I’ve ever done has happened on an airplane and regardless of every, where it’s happened, everything I’ve ever done has happened has been put into place, has been put into motion in less than 48 hours, right? When I came up with the idea for the last company, I saw help reporter out, I thought about it in an airport. By the time I landed in New York, I had a website. I was in LA, I flew to New York, I did everything. So, you know, the nice thing about speed, there was a book out, there was a book once called perfect speed is being there, right? And what I love about that title is that perfect, I would change the title, and to your, to what you said I would explain to suggest that, again, pardon my French, perfect speed is not giving a fuck, and here’s what I mean about that. Every bit of success I’ve had has come because I’m gonna, you know what? I’m going to try something if it works great, If it fails, I’ll try something else. And the amount of freedom you get when you stop caring what other people might think is mind blowing. And the nice thing about ADHD is chances are we’ve discovered that years ago, I mean, growing up with ADHD in the 80s in New York City and public school, it wasn’t called ADHD was called sit down you’re disrupting the class disease. And, you know, having a big mouth and never knowing when to shut up and always, you know, always racing for that new thing, that new thing, that new thing, you know, not knowing at the time, that was my brain trying to fill itself with the dopamine that normal people get automatically. Once I realized what I could do with that my life changed for the better. And so perfect speed is understanding that, get it out, have fun with it. If it works, keep doing it and improving it, if it doesn’t work, try something else. And so yeah, the, you know, I’ve done some studies, 25% of the workforce is going to be neurodiverse the next 10 years. So, add ADHD autism spectrum, there’s a spectrum executive function disorder, dyslexia, you name it, how is your law firm going to handle that? How’s your law firm going to handle one, one out of every four employees, you know, is neurodiverse, and by the way, those are the most creative employees you’re gonna have. Those are the ones that three in the morning, you want to think of this way, this brand-new way to defend the case that no one ever thought of before. How do you make sure you keep them, right? So, it’s time to start embracing the concept of speed and quickness and faster than normal and all that as the gift, not the curse, that it is, or, you know, it’s a gift, it is not the curse the people think it is. And sort of the beauty of that is that when we learn how to do that, it takes us in a very different trajectory. You know, I’ve said this publicly many times that I believe in any given day I’m three bad decisions in a row away from being a junkie in the streets, because when you move that fast, there’s not a lot of room for course correction, you have to anticipate course correction, you know, eons before you actually get there. And so, you know, there was a study out that said, if we can achieve 1/3 Lightspeed that would be enough to get to other planets, that’d be enough to get to, you know, past the sun, but we would have to start slowing down and have just 1/3 Lightspeed, we’d have to start slowing down seven years before we actually got there, right? Think about that. So, you know, it’s sort of the same in your ADHD is I’m not looking about the next day, two days, three days, I’m looking about the next quarter century, right? And that makes it kind of a bitch when, when, you know, you’re trying to, when you’re, when your girlfriend or whatever says, hey, don’t forget dinner on Friday, and then it’s Wednesday, you know, because you’re like, oh, okay, what year, you know, but it’s there, you know, we have to start embracing the fact that this is a gift and, and, and the narrative. Keep in mind, also that neurodiversity, the concept of that faster brain, we don’t know what it was, like 300, 400 years ago, but chances are DaVinci had a chance there. Einstein had, all these people, but we looked at those, those were the outliers who were the geniuses, the rest of the people were idiots and either wound up in jail or dead or slaves. And so, if you look at the premise of it as a gift, we’ve only been looking at that maybe 50 years, which is, you know, 1,000,000,000th of one millisecond in the grand scheme of time. 1,200 years ago, we still had two forms of life. We hunted and ate after we caught something or we starve to death, and that was it, right? About 800 years ago, 600 years ago, we discovered agriculture, or 1,200 years ago that we discovered agriculture, well, 1,200 years ago, so we started farming, all of a sudden, shit, there was food to eat. We didn’t have to go running for it. Well, we’ve spent millions of years building our brains to give us dopamine after we exercise, to give us dopamine after we run and catch the saber-toothed Tiger. Oh, we started running? Let’s flood his dopamine receptors so that opens up his eyes so he could see better at night, let’s pull the blood toward his toward his heart and lungs, protect that area, all this stuff. And now in just 1,200 years, you’re trying to, you’re trying to do that stop, that seven-year Lightspeed stop because it’s not normal. That’s not, that’s not normal, right? And so, if, the concept of hunters and gatherers, gatherers can eat whatever they want, but the people who are ADHD are still hunters, and we still need that. You know, it’s not, it’s not a coincidence that I’m a licensed skydiver with close to 500 jumps, right? It’s not a coincidence that, that when I get angry, I get on my peloton, because if I wasn’t on my peloton, I’d probably be doing cocaine. So, find the good and find the ways to take that ADHD and that, and that creative brain, don’t, don’t push it down. And if you have employees, don’t squash it out, embrace it, let them be crazy, that will, the revenue you’ll generate from that and the growth you’ll experience from that is off the charts.
It sounds to me like a positive thinking firm would actually start recruiting for Neurodiversity.
No question about it. I teach companies how to do that. I gave, I gave a keynote at Indeed, for God’s sake, the hiring firm on exactly that.
So, Peter, you know, we talked about the physical layout changing, and this is sort of talking about the workforce changing. I’d like you to talk for a moment about the client expectation. You’ve written a lot on, you know, customer service and great customer service, and we’ve seen in real time lousy customer service moves an influencer like yourself from one rental car company to another. Talk to us a bit about how you perceive, you know, this new world that we’re in where consumers are now used to Zoom. My parents at 85 use it, they don’t necessarily want to go to an office, granted, you know, post COVID That may loosen up, but what, how should businesses, law firms and other businesses, adapt to what consumers are going to be expecting going forward?
So, my father surprised me, 79 years old, my father surprised me by sending me in a Gmail calendar invite for a family, weekly family chat, right? And I have a lot of family, I have a couple of cousins, my parents, me and my daughter, a weekly family chat and I’ll be damned if we haven’t been keeping up with it for like four months now. And so, you know, when, when you give, when you don’t give people a choice, technology is there, and technology, when used well, brings out the humaneness, brings out the best parts of humaneness and improves humaneness. You know, we have seen stories, horrible stories, of, of parents, elderly parents dying in a hospital bed of COVID with no one allowed to be there, but there’s a Zoom and there’s, they can see their face of their parents, the parents have to face their kids, you know, that would have been unthinkable 20 years ago. The difference being is that when America Online started, America Online became popular for parents. Let me take that back when Facebook started. Facebook became popular for kids’ college students, and the second it became, second parents realize well, shit, I could save a quarter point on my mortgage if I just click on this Facebook link all of a sudden Facebook was for parents, right? And it blew up. So, there’s always something that allows that transformation to happen, COVID was this, right? We have the technology, and people starting to realize it’s very useful. The scary side of that, of course, is you have people who are starting to use it, you know, unchecked, it’s the same technology that helps bring families together, unchecked can destroy democracy, you know, and we’re seeing that as well, but I do believe that good always wins and the concept of tech, keep it simple stupid still applies. The reason Zoom is working, Zoom is not a digital communications company, Zoom is a marketing firm, Zoom is a marketing company that has a very, very cool product that you can use for free making you the product, right? I pay for the, for the, for the paid version because it’s worth it. It is a good technology but it’s not a technology, it’s a marketing firm, right? They get millions of people to use it, the name is everywhere, they went public, you know, when, when I’ve been using my peloton bike since 2016, 2015, and when, when I bought it, everyone thought I was crazy. Oh, what? Do you ride at home? Well, first of all, I hate people so I didn’t want to ride in, you know, with a bunch of screaming, 20-year old’s screaming out whoo every 32 seconds but, as I kept using it, I started to see this cult of personality that I hadn’t seen since my days at AOL, right? I mean, I have not seen brand awareness and brand loyalty. I remember I was, I was the guy named Meyer Barolo, who was the head of advertising in America Online in 95. We were both outside in the back, the front parking lot of AOL smoking a cigarette because it was 95 cigarettes were good for you, and we were out there and we, this car comes in these, five people get out one of them runs over them. He takes, he hands me a camera, so, excuse me, can you take a picture of us in front of the AOL sign, I say sure I take the picture, I give him back the camera, they get in their car and they leave, and I turn around, I go what the hell was that? He goes, that was brand loyalty. He goes, I guarantee you, those five people in the chat room. This is their one week off from the factory whatever, they work all around the country for a year and they decided to meet up and come to where they were all started. I haven’t seen that level of brand loyalty since I started going, since I went to a couple of live classes at peloton back in like February. And you see these housewives who fly in from Nebraska, right? And they’re wearing their peloton T shirts and they’re there for that 6am class in the big New York City at the homeschool, it’s un-freaking real, right? But that’s where we are. And so, when, when people find something that they can relate to positive or negative, they’re gonna blow onto it, and that’s where we are.
It’s getting ironic… This weekend, one of us… Were we are talking…
I run a Facebook group with about 75 people and then we’re called before the sun and we’re usually on the bike by 4:00 4:15 am.
Wow.
And it’s great because it, you know, we have to check in every day, here’s my ride, and it keeps you, keeps you focused.
You know, something that I’ve been curious about, that I assume is front and center in your mind for a guy who makes his living keynoting at this point, what is the future of conferences? You know, obviously, if people felt safe to travel, there’s still a desire but are we going to see a pullback just like you might have for in office meetings? Will certain conferences be superfluous and only ones that really need that tactile, human touch? Where do you see that going?
Conference industry is $3.2 trillion industry worldwide, it’s not going to go away, but what you will see is smaller events, you’re not going to see Sony send 500 of their people to CES next year, when they can send 50 and then do video conferencing for, for the other 450, right? So, I think that we’re gonna have to, it’s not going to go away, the travel industry is not gonna go away, it’s gonna come back, right? I think that, you know, you’re gonna have to be smarter. I’ve been doing strangely, my keynotes have actually been going up, I’ve been doing more keynotes since this whole thing started because companies are willing to, you know, pay three fourths of what they would pay me to fly out without having to pay for travel and do a Zoom call. Downside for that is that what you, a three-to-45-minute keynote that used to take three days with travel, and that takes 45 minutes, and I’m just so fucking bored.
… But your books if you’re not on the plane.
Doesn’t… You know, it’s funny, New York has turned into a shithole over the past six months, especially where I live in, near Times Square Hell’s Kitchen, because they’ve dumped about 4,000 homeless people into hotels here that didn’t have any revenue coming in to stop slow the spread of COVID, which is a problem when they don’t tell you about it. I fully believe that we should have help for the homeless and that we should have help for with mental health, and things like that, but you don’t drop 4,000 people into a residential neighborhood without telling anyone about it at all, and that’s what happened here. So, it’s a bit, it’s a bit tough right now in New York, and I realized that one of the reasons I was surviving, I would always survive, born and raised here. One of the reasons I always love New York was because I wouldn’t, I would never be here for more than a few weeks straight, I always be going somewhere, right? So, you travel somewhere and it’s sort of a reset, and so now I’m at the point where it’s like, oh my God, I’ve been here six months, if I don’t, if I don’t leave soon, I’m gonna start firebombing. So, it’s been tough, but yeah, the conference industry is not going away. We’ll, we’ll see it come back and…
He was talking to go away. What changes do you see?
Smaller conferences, a lot more videos. The first company to come out with really, really good holographic imaging, like 10 times better than Tupac, when you come out with that, you know, that’s gonna be it. Big companies will invest in that whole infrastructure, and everything will be holographic. And then why the hell do you have to fly anywhere? I think that the, the big losers are gonna be commercial real estate and airlines.
Jay?
I definitely think commercial, I definitely think commercial real estate is, is, is poised for just a dump, you know, over the next decade, I would not be wanting to be one of those guys holding massive amounts of commercial real estate right now, because I think it’s going to be a problem. One of the things that I think, Peter, we should talk about a little bit when you’re trying to gain the intention of a consumer is the fact that over the last decade, you know, 20 years ago, 1995 or wherever we’re talking about, you know, you had some cable TV, you had your network TV, and you had, and the internet started coming around. Now we’ve got Netflix and prime, and now Quibi, and we’ve got the attention span of the consumer has just dropped minimally because there’s so many different resources to pull that attention away from the marketing message. How do you think businesses that are trying to grow can compete in a, in a economy, in a world where the attention span has dropped precipitously?
Become a better communicator. The attention span used to be, it was 60 seconds, and there was some sort of three minutes in the 50s. No, actually, it was six minutes in the 50s, it was three minutes in the 80s, it’s about 2.7 seconds now. So, if you want to become smarter, learn how to better communicate with your audience. Learn how to talk to your audience, learn to understand that your audience can be very useful to you if you communicate with them the way they want. Ask them how they like to get their information, give them their information the way they want, become a better communicator, become a better writer, for God’s sake, don’t make stupid errors, be brilliant at the basics. I had a client or a company where there’s a company in New York kidville they have a, we’ve got one here, yeah, you bring your child you drop them off, It’s like socialization when they’re really young and they throw them in a ball pit. I think they leave in there for a couple hours you pick them up, but remember the first time I brought my daughter there, I was little scared to do that and I dropped her off, she seemed to enjoy it. I picked her up, she had all her fingers and toes. I was happy. I still think I’ll bring her there tomorrow, I got a letter from them that night, dear Mr. Shankman, just want to thank you so much for taking the time to, to bring Jessica to visit with us today. Well, my daughter’s name is Jessa, not Jessica, right? You had one fucking job. Okay, how can I trust to keep my kid alive when you can’t spell her damn name. So, it’s stupid little things like that, right? Just become better at the basics and just ask your audience how they like to get their information, give it to them the way they want.
If you were prognosticating for somebody right now, we’ve been through all different platforms, right? Google Plus to Facebook, you know, TikTok exploding. If you are somebody from the business side looking to find audience, I know it’s a very general question, what are you bullish on right now? Where would you be putting weight over the next couple of years?
I would be putting weight on wherever your audience happens to be? I can’t answer that, only you know where your audience is, but I would say that video is will be primary, wherever that is, but on the flip side, you know, if your audience is on the go and constantly running around, and only you know, maybe, maybe in their driving, maybe it’s only audio, ask your audience how they like to get their information, give it to them the way they want. They’ll tell you, they are dying to tell you, just ask them.
Jay?
Yeah, that’s, that’s really interesting because over the last couple of months I’ve been, you know, I’ve been home, so I’ve been decided, I’m waking up in the middle of the night and saying, hey, let me try this and I’ll do, like Peters done, just get to work and doing it. And one of the things that we found is, we actually had some video ads running on the social media platforms, we cut those things down to six seconds or so, and now we’re getting full engagement and we’re actually getting a better return from a six second ad than we were getting from a 30 second ad because people are clicking through so much more because we’ve piqued their interest and that, and that, and now we were realizing that that’s what the consumer wants. They don’t they don’t need a 30 second story as to why they should hire you, they want to know how to hire you when they need you and just be…
Short, you have such a short window, right? Such a short window, why not reach out at the right time, get the people and, again, just ask them, they’ll tell you what you need to know.
So, Peter, I have another idea, that I figured I’d run by you because it came to me in the middle of the night, and it’s for lawyers who want to grow their practice. And one of the things that I think lawyers tend to do errantly is, is they try to be everything to everybody, and one of the things that I’ve thought about doing recently was instead of trying to market my firm to everybody from age 18 to age 90 is say, I’m going to own a decade. So, I’m going to start marketing heavily to the 30 to 40 year old’s, and then next year, I’m going to market to 31 to 41 and then the year after that 32 to 42, and I’m going to try to own this decade of people and avoid, you know, diluting my message and going wide and just really starting to just focus narrowly on this one decade of people and stay with them through their journey. Do you think that has any value or any any possibility? Or do you think that’s just a crazy idea that I, you know, I woke up at 3am and shouldn’t even try that.
There’s nothing wrong with trying it, I mean, again, try everything, right? I don’t, I don’t think you should put your eggs in one basket but sure if you become a, I know, I know someone who’s the feminist lawyer and she only takes cases that have to do with feminism, right? I know someone who’s this lawyer, that lawyer, you know, again, find nothing wrong with finding your niche, of all times, now niche is huge but, you know, don’t do it in such a way that you throw yourself down and lock out everything else.
Great, does that. Peter, yeah, thank you so much this. This has been awesome, any final words for inspiration is a refer to as an emotional roller coaster their days were like yeah, we’re rolling their days like what you know, I visited New York and I’m like, we’re kidding ourselves. This is what I was talking about before.
I mean, look, I appreciate you have me on, on this, on this what the, this 874th day of April. It’s a, you know, it is a crazy time. The one thing to keep in mind, as my beautiful seven-year-old daughter jumps into frame is that life is short, you know, and we can have a lot of fun. The rules are gone, they’re pretty much our no more rules, so have a good time, enjoy it, right? And try something new. What’s the worst that could possibly happen? It fails and you do something else.
I love that. What a message. The rules are gone and just keep doing it. Yeah, I mean, hi Jessa, I remember her.
You did. All right. Thanks for having me.
Thanks for being here.
Thank you so much. Thank you for being with us. Bye. Bye, guys.
Bye, guys.
Well, Seth, I mean, I don’t know what to say. I mean, that, that, I probably need to slow it down. Normally, I listen to things at two times speed. I think that’s something I have to slow it down and go in half speed just to sort of wrap my head around everything that Peter gave us. What were your thoughts?
No, I, my thoughts exactly, I’ve known Peter for a long time, heard him speak as you have many times, and whether I’m speaking to him in a small group of two or three people or hearing his keynotes, I always find that I need to digest the information because there’s so much packed in there, he is thinking faster than most of us. And the idea that he has put thought into what’s going on, and for most of us, we’re sitting there with our day-to-day businesses and putting out fires, maybe trying to plan for the future, but to have somebody whose full-time job is sort of figuring out and thinking about dynamic changes, I find incredibly valuable and the idea that you can sit and stew and reflect upon what he sees from where he sits as a guy who is plugged in socially as well as anybody, as well as somebody who then touches all of these different major businesses through keynoting. The perspective is just invaluable.
All right, so let me ask you this question because we talked a little bit about it with Peter, have you already ordered the peloton? Because I placed my order yesterday so I, it’s getting coming in a couple of weeks. Are you getting…
We, we did it midway through COVID. It shows up tomorrow morning.
Oh, fantastic. Oh, that’s gonna be great. So maybe one of these days we can get a clip of you. Are you going to join his, his before the sun club?
That is not my mojo. I think I will be the afternoon ride, or morning, all that there are playlists that I need to, that I need to find this was driven by my wife, you know, when we went to a birthday party of 50, if not that long ago, we were the only couple at the table that had not bought in. So, we were sort of like the last holdouts in our friend group. But I think COVID has shown us that if you, there are days you can’t get out and it appears to be if it incentivizes you to exercise, oh, it’s about gyms, you know, whether it’s a cheap gym, or an expensive gym, if you go and use it, it’s worth every penny. And I feel that like the peloton, while not inexpensive, if it gets you to exercise, it is great. I just hope it doesn’t become a clothing rack like other exercise equipment can be but everybody I know has it loves it and can’t wait to drink the Kool Aid and join in.
Yeah, you know, for me, I work out a couple days a week. Now, I’ve been doing it through FaceTime with my trainer, but I got a full weight bench and I’m doing that stuff all through COVID, I’ve never, I haven’t really missed any of my appointments, but one of the things that I’m terrible at is cardio, and it’s because cardio is boring to me. So, I’m hoping, like Benjy Bronk, I am able to get into the whole cardio with a group thing, even though like Peter, I kind of hate people sometimes, so the idea of being with people but not having to actually be with them is somewhat appealing. So, mine will come in months, I think I got a check but it’s, it, you know, there’s, there’s so backlogged, it’s amazing, but it, you know, it’s interesting that you talk about how it’s something that if you get it and you use it, you’re gonna get something out of it. That leads me to talk a little bit about one of our upcoming episodes, which is going to be our top 10 growth hacks for 2021, because this episode is going to be phenomenal, and I guarantee you of the 10 ideas, you’re going to find two or three that you can use, you’ll love and you’ll be able to use them successfully in 2021. So, be on the lookout for that episode coming up in a couple of weeks. I think you’re gonna really get a lot out of it. But I think that’s gonna do it for us, great stuff from Nalini as usual. I mean Nalini just a gem, and, of course, just wow stuff from, from Peter that I, you know, what can you say? You know, he’s just, he goes a mile a minute, and he gives you two miles a minute with, with great ideas. So, I think we should end the show there. Seth. we’re a little shorter than normal, but that’s not a bad thing.
Because we had somebody who was faster than normal, it condensed it.
Right, exactly. He was going five miles, he is going five times the speed. So, that’s just, that just makes sense, but with that, I’m gonna let you guys know, if you want this podcast edition, you can go to maximumlawyer.com. You can also get it on any one of the major podcasting platforms, maximum growth live, we’d love you to join our Facebook page, just follow us so you can get up to date information, I send out invites every week, so you’ll be reminded about the show. If you have any questions, drop us a note down below in the comment section, we’ll happily talk to you about that we are looking for people for a hot seat. We’ve done a couple of them in the past, but we’re looking for a couple more people. So, if you want to have your growth issues addressed by Seth and by me live on a show, please put your name down below. Tell us what your growth challenges and we’ll get you into a hot seat very soon. But for that, Seth, I’m going to leave it. Any final parting words?
No, you know, go out there and crush it.
Absolutely. That’s just the way, you know, I think, I think you got to take the approach that Peter has, when you decide on something, go for it and just go all in. So, that’s a great, great message that he gave us today and I think everybody would. So, we’ll say bye for now. We’ll see you next week for another edition of maximum growth live.
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