In this week’s episode Seth & Jay talk with Ken Hardison, founder of PILMMA, about giving away information, how the successful firms are managing COVID and how to identify growth by acquisition.
Welcome, welcome, welcome to the Thursday, September 3rd edition of Maximum Growth Live. I am your host, Jay Ruane. I’m the owner of Ruane Attorneys here in Connecticut, and the CEO of Firm Flex. And my friend over here is Seth Price, managing partner of Price Benowitz in the DC, Maryland, Virginia area and CEO of BluShark, and we are Maximum Growth Live. As you know, if you’re with us today, Maximum Growth Live is a weekly live Facebook show where we dive into all things relevant into growing your firm at scale. Maximum Growth Live is sponsored by Maximum Lawyer Media and the Maximum Lawyer family. And I, Seth, I want to start this week by asking you, what did you do to grow your firm this week?
You know, one of the things that I felt like is we are about to come out of Summer, COVID Summer, and in the guild this week, they asked what’s the one thing you’re doing? I gotta say I felt weird. I had felt guilty cuz I didn’t have one thing, to me, It was getting everything firing on all cylinders. We’re no longer during the summer, we know what the new normal is we’re playing in it. It’s, It’s good, It’s bad, It’s it is, and the idea that we have intake firing on all cylinders, we have marketing falling, falling on, the attorneys are now understanding the obstacles they have and what they’re doing, and that as we look at numbers for September, October, November, assuming that something miraculous doesn’t happen, we now have a set of rules we’re playing with and I feel like our responsibility is to sort of move out of what we did during panic beginning but now say, hey, for the foreseeable future, this is our normal, and we need to play with that set of rules.
Yeah, I think a lot of people have been waiting for it to just sort of bounce back to the way it was, and I don’t think you can predict that. So, I think you got to deal with this is the new world, this is what I’m dealing with and you got to move on from there. One thing I did this week to grow my firm, and this is interesting, and I actually got the idea from something that we’re about to talk about, is that I got an email shortly after I ordered my peloton bike, and it actually had me give a sliding scale and some feedback to them about the purchase portion of their process. And so, I got the email I said, you know what, I’ve never really surveyed my clientele about, you know, I asked him, where did you find us? I asked him that type of thing, but I never really engaged with them that early on, in sort of like the NPS, one to 10 scale, or how did my intake and client care team do? So, this week, I actually scripted it out, added it to my my, my onboarding campaign, where six hours after we open the file, they’re gonna get a survey asking them how did our intaking and Client Care Team treat you during the intake process, and I think this is gonna help us give some feedback, and I modeled it on my peloton bike. Seth, do you have that picture for me of like… Alright, we’re gonna flash it up on the screen right now so people can see it, but this is Seth on his peloton. So, I think it’s great, I can’t wait to get mine and then we’ll have to have a Maximum Growth Live event where everyone that’s in our audience that has a Peloton, we can all do a ride together, I think it’ll be a lot of fun.
But keeping it real, like I’ll tell you that with, with those surveys, I’ve been working on rolling that out for our firm for months, and it’s just, you know, it’s glitchy it’s not there. It’s days away, it’s been days away for several weeks and that’s part of, that’s part of like running and growing a law firm, is that as, especially at scale, as you use more complicated software’s some of the things that sound like they’re really easy, what they do is genius, half the time when you finish, you know, at a restaurant and you get a survey, they don’t care about what you’re saying, they just want to get you, you know, to remember them for a future, not for the first survey, but at the end, they’re always looking to say, hey, remember me as a referral source, get a review out of it. And so, the idea that they’re already, Peloton has already they do an amazing job, there’s, their processes in saying, but that the idea that they are already building their raving fans from that first moment is just remarkable.
Yeah, and you got to do that as well. And, you know, this is a, you know, we are all customer service firms and we just sell different types of legal services, but we are in the customer service business, selling legal services, and I think that’s the way people should approach it. But we’ve got a great show today, we’ve got a lot of stuff on the back end of the show, where we’re going to talk about some stuff that’s coming up. So, you definitely want to stick around and watch the whole show because there’s some cool stuff that we’re going to talk about up at the end, but first, we’re gonna talk a little bit about who’s coming on the show today. So, Seth, why don’t you tell us a little bit about our guests? And so, we’ll, so our, our viewers will know what’s in store.
Ken Hardison is one of the, sort of, premier law firm consultancy. He’s built PILMMA, which is an organization that started with personal injury firms, he’s pivoting beyond that now, but the idea is, this is a guy, he’s a lawyer by training. He built a firm, sold it, built a firm, sold it, who is really been very instrumental in helping lawyers figure out through masterminds, through annual summits, through his organization, to figure out best practices and work on everything that’s, what drives me, the non-courtroom, the non-practice of law. So, let’s bring Ken in and get him going.
Yeah, so give me a second. I’m going to… I’m going to set it up so that we can get him in here. You’ll hear a couple words from our sponsors and when we come back, we’ll have Ken Hardison, PILMMA with us. So, just give us a few seconds and we’ll be right back with you. Thanks, folks.
We’re thrilled to have Ken here today. Ken Hardison, friend, mentor to many of us. Can not only build not one but two law firms, selling each of those and created PILMMA, an organization that has historically focused on personal injury lawyers, I think it’s pivoting beyond now, but the idea being focused on management and marketing of law firms, and something that I’ve found a home at. So, welcome, Ken, thank you for being here.
Oh, thank you. Thank you for having me.
Well, we, Jay and I have spent the last several weeks talking to people, not only about what’s going on during COVID, but how they can sort of deal with their law firm as a business. And the thing that we keep hearing are pivots that people are trying to take, and things they can do to be creative during this time. Jay was just talking before we came on about how you’ve been particularly creative with PILMMA, and how you’ve adjusted during this unusual time. You want to share with our audience a little bit about what you’ve done and how you’ve done it?
So, you know, when the, right when it happened, we were, we were promoting our big event, we have a big annual event in June down in New Orleans, and we were just setting record goals, I mean, this is gonna be bigger, we expected five, six hundred lawyers. And when this happened, we just said, you know, this isn’t enough time to be selling, this is a time to be giving. So, what we, what we, we kind of surveyed our members and found out what they were needing. And so, what we created this whole COVID Resources Center, how to survive, you know, so we had, we would do a weekly webinar or we would put articles on there, anything I found, they didn’t even have to do with lawyers, but if it was about going remote, how to manage remote people, people, you know, the PPP loans, everything that was going on about what you, what you could do, what you couldn’t do, what they had to do when they were kind of back, what you needed to do, what you didn’t need to do, we just pretty much gave it away and tried to kind of be a resource. Then with my masterminds, you know, we usually meet live three times a year. So, we had to pivot and do them at home, on Zoom. And what we did too, because we saw that, here was the big deal: everybody was rattled and scared and didn’t know what to do and like some do a pull out by March, because we have some members that do spend six figures a month in marketing, we got some that spent, you know, $5,000 too. But the deal is they didn’t know whether to back off, whether to double up, and everybody was kind of, you know, so we started doing weekly zoom meetings. And that seemed to be, we did it for like, I guess 12 weeks. I kept doing them until there was hardly, nobody showing, everybody was getting back, and I said, you know, I thought it would probably just last eight weeks, but it lasted about 12 weeks, so we did all those things. We cancelled our bit, we put on a virtual internet domination bootcamp. Back in May, we give a big discount to that because we felt like giving it back and it didn’t cost that much to put it on. And then we’re doing this new event in October, Law Firm Growth Maximizer, go to yourlawfirm.com if you’re interested, go to growyourfirm.com, excuse me, growingyourfirm.com. But doing those things, and then another thing I did was I got on the phone a cold, cold I think I’m almost out talk to but I call every member until it took me about two and a half, three months, and just checked on him to see how we’re doing and see if there’s anything I can do for personally or professionally.
And Ken, seeing as you make those calls and you’re speaking to me, that’s what I think one of the great things about what you do is you sort of have, you’ve seen to all these different firms. What have you seen generally for the firms that are excelling during this time? And what, what, and what are you seeing for the firms that are struggling calling saying I need help? Can you see any things that may be takeaways for people here of what the firms are doing right, what people are doing wrong?
Well, I think what I’ve seen is that the smart law firms didn’t go in and just fire everybody or lay everybody off, they tried to hold on to good people. And they did start working remotely, and they started, the ones that are doing successful with it are the ones that have a whole lot of communication, and that’s at least once, if not twice a day. And it’s funny, I’ve been running PILMMA remotely for three years, so we’ve been having, we call a daily huddle every day that lasts about seven to twelve minutes, then we have a weekly meeting that lasts about an hour, and then we have a monthly meeting that lasts about three or four hours. And so, nothing really changed for PILMMA itself, but I got the law firms to buy into this, the ones that I could and the ones that did, they seem like they were doing a lot better, and then what I saw, is that they were monitoring, but not really spying on their employees. And some of them were actually doing better, and then some of them were doing worse. And I think the ones that had kids home that were small or whatever were bothering him, whether they had a problem, and they can’t help that. So what they did, they tried to when the, when things started, they started bringing in people that will do and it’s good If they let them on, because they wanted a space, they need the space distance and the six-foot distance stuff in their offices. So they couldn’t bring everybody back, and I think all of them looked and with little bit of marketing, and it depended on where you looked at, what you would do was: we had a lot of smart ones that were doing TV, that were able to negotiate and get twice as much for TV or twice as much on radio for the same price. Some even got billboard companies to give them an extra three or four months on their contracts. We had some that were negotiating their leases, get some kind of loan, they were getting PPP loans, and then I got them to to call their clients, to one lawyer I said, “Call your clients”. So, they were getting people in our office to call away, I had one lawyer to call and pick up like six new cases in one week just by calling them. Clients that were present and just checked in, and if somebody went further and sent letters out to all their present clients and old clients. They let them know they were here for them, and they picked up like 20 some cases, just because people, you know, what is it that they knew? You care. So that we’re the smart ones did that. Yeah, I think that was like, some of the major things, I mean, you know?
You know, Ken, one of the things that we get asked a lot is, you know, you know people start to say, hey, I see this much revenue coming for this practice group, and people come to Jay and say, hey, I’m thinking about pivoting into another practice area. I want to get your thoughts. I remember I went to an early PILMMA and realized about a third of the room was doing SSDI and I was like, I gotta go do it, and I built a website, did it, I realized it wasn’t for me in my, in my market, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. But the cost structure in an urban environment is not a good place to be, in my opinion, for an SSDI practice where you want lowest labor, lowest rent. What are your thoughts on when people come to you and say, hey, I want to expand my PI? What, you know, what, what type of advice do you have for somebody?
Yeah, well, I think you can expand it, but don’t go into a whole different practice area, just kind of leech out in some of the layers in your area. Like I created a basketball area, and you just do general, maybe you want to really, because this is gonna really push some content out there about domestic violence, you know what I’m saying right, it goes up when people stay with it, right? You know, if you’re a criminal lawyer, do expungements. I mean, that’s something that people, you know, if you’re a PI lawyer, you know, not as many cars on roads, so there weren’t as many cars, that was the big deal for PI lawyers. They were, they were actually making money, but they won’t get the cases and they’re gonna feel it eight months from now, you know, maybe five months from now. But, you know, go into stuff, look at dog bite cases, look at, swimming pool cases, you know, look at motorcycle cases, because those guys will ride, they don’t give a shit what’s going on, right? So, go out, leech into the area that you are already in, but to turn it into, like, I want to go into bankruptcy because the economy is going bad. You know, if you’re going to do that, you better buy a law firm, because to get up to speed, it’s just gonna be too much. Now, if you could go buy a bankruptcy law firm, and you gotten the money, you can get a good deal, maybe not a bad idea. But I don’t know if anybody’s gonna want a sell right now, because they need money, right? I mean, you know, so it’s always what? Supply and demand. But, you know, I’ve been preaching it, In fact, I got a call yesterday: I got a firm that’s trying to break into a new market, and they’re having problems, and so what they’re going to do is try to buy a law firm that already has a good name there and absorb them, and I think they will actually save money in the long run, and other deal is, think about it: I’m a baby boomer, all the baby boomers, this is the last big deal. These lawyers are getting into retirement age, and some, maybe not old enough for retirement, but they don’t want the headaches of running a law office. You know what I’m saying? And it’s great opportunity for some, a lot of lawyers out there, to buy the law firms, make the personnel your counsel, use their good will, do a transition for that guy or the girl that’s leaving: they make money, you make money, everybody used to, when I first started, when a lawyer, he just died and his practices died with him. I mean, that’s just the way it happened. Things have changed so much, I mean, so much now that there, there’s actually businesses out there that do nothing but broker law firms now, I mean, it’s the big, it’s becoming a big business. I think it’d be more to the next five, seven years, I broker one already that this year, back in, well we did the deal last year, but we didn’t close it till February this year, right before COVID, but he’s doing good, and he’s actually doing good. I’m still working with him. You know, I helped him buy, I didn’t help him with his money, but I helped him negotiate the deal and get some good sources of money, financing that was not crazy, you know, not having to pay 20% interest with some of these hedge funds, like they like to do. That upset them, 6, 7%.
Awesome. Ken, I actually have a question about that, you know, as someone who’s been in the position to sell your prior firms, and also assist lawyers with purchasing a firm, what are some of the things that a lawyer who’s thinking about getting into that purchasing of a firm to take over their business and expand that way? What are the things? What are like the top three things that a lawyer should be looking for when they are approached with the opportunity to buy a firm? Is it, you know, current caseload? Is it, you know, what, is it, is it projected revenue? What are the things that at first, you know, you say, these are the things we need to know, and when you were positioning yourself to sell your firm, what did you do to make your firm attractive to an outside buy?
The number one thing, and most lawyers don’t believe me, the number one thing I will do, they have a list. I’ve seen corporations pay millions of dollars for other corporations just to get their list and then close the company there. If you’ve got a list, a mailing list, the current mailing list of all your prior clients, an email list, whether or not they’re contacting them or not, that is worth its weight in gold, in my opinion, because you could take everything from me, just leaving my list and I could have another firm up and going and flourishing within six months, I promise you. And I could do it very, pretty cheaply too, with just emails and direct mail and stuff like that. But that would be the number one deal, the number two deal would be to know what your reputation in the community is in top level lawyers, and then I would also look into Google Plus Reviews, I mean, that’s gonna tell you most of what you need to know. And then I want to know, what is, why are they wanting to sell? You know, is there something there? Is there something there I need to know about? Is this like, gotta get rid of it, get it done, you know what I’m saying? I don’t want to buy a firm like that because that’s going to taint, you know, I might buy his list, but I don’t want to buy the firm.
I’ve been down this road a few times, you know, on smaller scale acquiring, but one of the things I’ve seen as I’ve tried to get bigger and buy a regional player in a geography just beyond mine, has been, unless somebody is sort of literally you get them at the moment before they’re about to collapse and pass away, you very often get unrealistic expectations of what the firm is worth. And it, you know, I find that I end up myself with the opportunities. I wish, I wish I could say that I’ve been more successful with this, of people who are literally on the way-out, bloated overhead, that you’re not going to be able to maintain files that are a mess, and that you end up with a huge headache. I really aspire to be at the other end, where it’s a viable firm before the baby boomer, you know, while they’re still around with what, the rest of business does, like a three-to-five-year buyout, that’s how the real world works, the lawyer world and given what’s going on in Utah and Arizona, who knows, maybe we’re going to see more of this in legal soon. But do you have any thoughts on how to get the timing so that you’re not knocking on doors? Were like, yeah, sure, I’ll sell it to you for a price that’s silly, versus getting something where it’s defunct, and while you might get a decent deal, you’re gonna pay in sweat equity, cleaning up the mess.
What I do for lawyers, I’m getting ready to do it again, is I’ll find out what community or area, geographic area, they want, what kind of practice they want, and I just do a mass mailing, maybe about three of them in a row, in three months, and say, listen, and I do different angles on it, and you know, when you’re tired of the headaches, whatever, you have an exit strategy, and find somebody that wants to sell, don’t try to talk someone into selling that doesn’t want to. Just give them these things about you, maybe there’s a way I can, maybe I can help you or hook you up with somebody that can take these off of you, to let you do what you want to do, still make some money, because, you want to, you know, protect your family, your estate, things like that. But you’re right. I mean, one I did, not the last one, but the one before, like two years ago, we had to go through a lot, a lot of times the prints because everybody thought it’s like when you sell a house, you always think it’s worth more than it’s worth because it’s your house. My car, my house, it’s worth, you know what, I mean, you know…
Even more so than the house because it’s, and whether or not revenue is irrelevant, It’s your people, it’s this whole thing that that has nothing to do with, you know, numbers. And, you know, again, given that there’s that window where you need the motivated seller, clearly as we’re both saying, you need somebody who’s motivated to sell, but not so motivated that there’s nothing left. I have a particular deal on the table right now on the immigration side, and the group has wound the firm down so much that while the pricing is fine, the lifting, the labor, the mental anguish for myself and staff would be so much that I’m not sure the juice is worth the squeeze.
Yeah, and that’s what you gotta, yeah, you got to look at that too. I was, like I say, why did they have to sell? I mean, they were, have you got much to sell? Really, although I’ll tell you, I’m doing this back, this is years ago, this is back in the 80s. Older lawyers, when they died, I’d go to their spouse and try and buy their phone numbers. And you might for $500. And you know, what, why do you want to buy, “this is a sort of a popular phone number”, whatever, but no I want their phone numbers, I want it because these old clients are still going to call them. And you know, and I say, well, no, this is law offices, but that’s not him, he’s deceased, but what can I help you with? I’d be like four or five of those in the 80s. Overall, your dad in town. And people thought that was crazy, but I thought it was, I thought it was a smart deal. I don’t know…
I agree. I’ve tried 2.0 that was buying me URLs for those guys at it. It didn’t have, I don’t think it was quite as successful, generally in the sense that the number was still coming. The older guys with URLs, the sites didn’t have that much traffic and there wasn’t there, but as we now, we’re looking at boomers, they’ve had sites for a decade, and as Jay knows, on the marketing side, those crusty old domains, you can’t, you know, you put one of those out, we’re just joking the other day, a domain that I planted years ago, and haven’t done anything to in years, I’m driving to the beach, and I tested my search on the way there and all of a sudden, the site I hadn’t touched and 10 years was top of the SERPs. You know, it was like time to dust this one off. So, when you can get those, again, the analogy to phone numbers can be very valuable.
Yeah, I think there’s something to be said for, you know, putting up a three-page site now, that you’re gonna harvest in a decade, and, you know, get your ideas, we can, you brought up something, and I want to touch on it before we get too far off of it. And you talked about if I had to start from scratch with a list, you know, in six months, I could be profitable. And as we see some lawyers trying to pivot, or people who are striking out on their own, I think that’s something that you can provide some insight to, what, how long should it take for a practice to become profitable? Because so many people think, hey, I’m gonna hang a shingle, and at the end of the first month, I’m going to have money in my pocket. But you’ve seen a lot of these firms, what do you think is a reasonable amount of time to get a firm from zero to, okay, we actually have something here?
It depends on what type of practice, to like, you know, let me give you one extreme to the other. One of my mastermind members, she got in to veterans’ disability, she lost $2 million before she started getting profitable. It took her four years, but now she’s killing it. Seven years in it, she’s killing it, I’m telling you killing it. But that was, you know, most lawyers couldn’t hang in that long, you know what I’m saying? She had a very profitable, social security practice, to hang on to. Now, so security practice, it’s gonna take about three years because the cases take two years, you know, 18 months to two years, and you got the DLP operators will take about a couple years.
Frankly, it depends how you account for it, right? We’re not in a legal space, you open a business, you capitalize it with X amount, you know, if you’re saying, you know, your SSDI cases come in a couple years later, your PI cases come in a couple years later, you still have all that expense for those two years. The first few cases are not making you profitable, one that may be profitable in that month, but, you know, how well are you capitalizing what you’re doing? And are you realistic for what the, the horizon is to get to true profitability?
So, that’s something that I actually preach this, now probably more than I did 10 years ago. You have got, most businesses fail because of lack, of the lack of capitalization, all kinds of businesses, you know, they go within five years. You know, burn harvest is a, revenue is for vanity, profit is sanity, but cash is key. If you don’t have the cash, you know, anybody that knows I’ve been through it, where you, you’re making money and you have to pay taxes, but you ain’t got no damn money. It’s been a mica. And I went through that, and let me tell you, it’s not fun when you got to write a check for $300,000 or $400,000, you only probably drew out cash out of 120,000. That’s tough, you know what I mean? Because you’re having to pay these loans back, like you say, you didn’t have that money up front, right? It’s got to catch up, so you got to pay it back. But you’re still making profit on the books, but you’re not. It’s just, it’s a circle. But yeah, but I mean, you know, so it takes a while, that’s why I like that idea of maybe, if I was gonna go to a new practice area maybe trying to buy a firm, I think it’s a lot easier. But you got to be careful when you get an overpay. You got to make sure they got the list of why they’re selling it, and do it is you’re buying it up front and wider selling and all those things. I mean, I’m not saying it’s easy under the scene, and it gets quicker to profits than just starting from scratch. I started a Social Security practice from scratch, after I sold my first firm, just to prove that I could build a firm off of 6,000 hours of marketing, and I did, I had like 700 cases in like, two years, spending up to more than 6,000 dollars a month on marketing. Yeah, but it was a lot of work too, did a lot of grassroots stuff, but my deal was, you know, I sold it in two years, but it’s still in profitable about I made my profit by selling it, because I really had started making money, I was losing, I lost money the first two years but I still made money on it because I sold it. Now, I made the decision that the margins were so thin that I was going to have to still have a set amount of cases, that was gonna be 4,000 cases, and I just didn’t want the headaches of all those people because social security is very intense on labor force, lowers the staff, and I just didn’t want the headaches. So, I sold it, but somebody like criminal, you get paid up front, I think the road there is a lot quicker than it would be like for a PI or disability or somebody else, you know, flat fees gonna go to get profit quicker than anything else, but it depends on what your average fee is too, you know, that’s, that’s the, that’s the big deal, I mean, for the most part, lawyers don’t charge enough, just to be honest with you, and they’re scared to lose the clients and they don’t charge them enough. And the truth is, it’s like I had this lawyer ask me at one of our bits one year, she says, I’m a domestic lawyer here, she says, I’m working, you know, 60 hours a week. She’s making good money about this but she’s frazzled, she’s just dead. She said, “what can I do?” I said, how much do you charge per hours? $300, I said “can you get to 600?” “Well, I’ll lose half my clients.” I said, “absolutely.” I said, “you’ll work 30 hours and make just as much.”
Look, your points well taken, whether it’s an exact one, but I’m a big believer in that, the idea that if the rate is higher, you’re perceived by the community differently. We early on, on our criminal practice, as we moved into white collar and the higher end federal, you would lose people if you didn’t have a higher number, but the number your peg that, if somebody is getting divorced, and they see a $300 an hour number, that pegs you as a lawyer, it shouldn’t, but it does. And if you say I am a $500 or $600 an hour lawyer, look, realistically, you may have a sliding scale, say, oh, military discount, that’s $300. You know, you know, destitute Mom, we can, you can get your pricing, so it’s not that much different, but you’re not going to get the higher end cases. You know, as I built out my firm with all the lawyers, I’ve always had like a high-end criminal lawyer and then a lower-end person who could do the cases where there’s less funds.
And below is Seth Price, who doesn’t really go to court.
So, the idea being that as you do that, when you’re talking that solo, Ken, the idea is almost like you have to wear two hats, because what that person is doing is they’re only getting the junior money. They’re not taking advantage of the fact that they also, assuming that they have that experience and gravitas, that they could be that senior person at the higher level getting that in. You know, again, they could say I’m only there, but the idea that if you are one person, you don’t have associates yet, the idea that you have to play both ends of it to be to be viable, or to be most profitable I should say. Jay?
So, Ken, tell us a little bit about your October event, because I know some of the people who are watching might be interested in that.
You know, it’s something, you know, whatever with COVID, we had to kind of pivot, and so, I’m doing something I’ve never done. I am going to do an event for three days, like from 11 o’clock Eastern to five o’clock Eastern like Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, I think it’s the, I can’t remember it’s like October 15, 16, 17, that day, and it’s really gonna be me, probably 90% of it is me, and I’ve never done this before. Usually, we had three or four days, I might speak twice. And I just think, you know, whether I’m right or wrong, I think that the people need me more now than ever, to be honest with you. So, I want to share some stuff I’ve never shared before, other than with people that pay me like, $300-400 an hour and getting to have a one-on-one consultation, but I feel like it’s time to help, help the lawyers out there. And some only charging like, $497 If you’re a member appeal was $297. And I give 100% money back guarantee, because, you know, my deal is, if you don’t think it’s helping you, I don’t deserve your money, right? I enjoy what I do, and nobody’s ever gonna say that take your money right now because I just give you the damn money back. I don’t need it that bad, you know what I mean?
I went to your first event over a decade ago, and I remember seeing that offer, I’m like, oh, he’s gonna make that offer, you know, I’m in. And over the years, have you actually more than a handful, more than two or three people ever come up to you for that?
0. 0 in 11 years. But I expect that any day, you know, just make the next one. Somebody’s gonna do it.
Right, you’d be happy to do it. I tried to think of it that way. I wish we could 100% be this way with clients. Jay, I don’t know if you feel the same way. But you have traffic matters, everything, I don’t think this was right. You did the work, you’ve earned it, but if somebody’s really not happy, you know, you know, make that person happy.
I gotta tell you, that happened to me. Three weeks ago, we had that hurricane here, knocked out power. I had a client who, against my advice, optics, just started the hearing before I could get to internet access, and they went through the hearing, they got denied on their expungement, which is what they wanted. He called me up, he said, I’d like, I’d like half my money back. I said, you’re getting 100% refund. I’m sorry that that happened, but it is what it is, you went forward against my advice. I’m just gonna refund you go with God have a nice day. And he actually wrote a nice review, saying things didn’t go well, and I really respect this man’s integrity for just giving me all my money back when he definitely did a lot of work for me. So, I think that helps people long term to think of it as you’re not serving this as one client, you’re serving your entire career. And we’re in this business for decades, you know, what you’re doing in 2020, it can also impact you in 2040, you know, so…
For sure, absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, it’s what it’s all about, man, I really believe that marketing as we know it is in a process of changing online and offline. I think it really is. When all my brother boomers are going on, I think you’re gonna see something completely different than what you see now. It’s gonna be really a trust-based relationship marketing, I think it’s going to be so much more about that than it is about being on the first page of Google or, or, or being on TV or being on media. I really believe that the really successful lawyers are gonna be the ones that really their damn past class or marketing for. I really believe that, I might be wrong.
You say that now. And last week, we had Peter Shankman, and he talked all about it’s a customer service economy, and that’s really where things are at. So, it’s interesting, you know, two people who haven’t heard each other speak are talking about the exact same thing. Seth?
No, I just, look, I appreciate it, Ken, thank you so much for everything you’ve done for both myself and for the industry. We love having you here and hope to, hope to have you back soon. But thank you for making the time today.
Well, thank you.
Take it easy. We’ll see you in October.
Y’all be good. Thank you.
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 bigger 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 1,400%. 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.
Alright, Seth. So, let’s talk about this because it came up during the interview with Ken and made a little bit of a joke, but it’s something that I think, you know, it’s, it’s sort of a gut punch, right? And it’s that you’re not in court every day, like some of the lawyers in your firm. So, let’s talk about that.
Right, and, so, from my point of view, I look at it as a superpower. We had Peter Shankman, I’m talking about ADHD as a superpower. So, to me, the idea that I’ve divided and conquered with somebody who loves to be in court, where I was good in court, I was 6-0 in my legal career, but, you know, but in my courtroom career, but that I feel that I have the ability to focus on things that we all speak about, the whole show is about, you know, growth and marketing and operations, and the idea that you can sort of try to do both, and it’s funny things, the ADHD is kicking in, but there been a lot of articles written and stories about women, can they have at all? Can you raise kids and have a full-time career? And there was a very controversial column and the posts and you really can’t, you can’t be at the top of your career, and also fully be there for your kids along the way. Again, that’s that’s one sort of side piece that is out there. I’m sure there are examples that counter it, but these were very accomplished, people said you really can’t, can’t do both. I believe at some level, it is very hard to do both at a law firm, that if you don’t want to be, you know, David is, you know, in court, teaching at Harvard Law, you know, taking on cases, he just got that case of the person who was supposedly doing espionage for Russia, while within the military, I mean, like, you can’t be the A + plus level practitioner, and also take care of everything else, unless you take certain steps or something’s gonna give. So, to me, the fact that I have not put myself, I’m guessing like a John Morgan, is not in court on a day-to-day basis, and you had sort of had a pop culture reference, talking about the fact that this is not new. This is something you back in the 80s people were talking about.
Yeah, it was, you know, it’s the, I used to watch LA Law, you know, when I was a kid who is 13-14 years old, and there was a scene where all the guys and the women in the boardroom were making fun of Douglas Bragman saying, you know, you’re not a lawyer, you know, you just run this place, but you don’t do what we do. And you know, he actually had a very unique approach to a case that they wound up adopting, and it won the case, and he was like, look, I am a lawyer, I only do this so that you can do your job, I don’t want to be doing this. This isn’t what I signed up to do, I didn’t go to law school to do this. And it’s interesting, because, you know, it’s something that we’ve talked about a bunch of times, you know, we see a lot of law firms grow, and they sort of hit a wall, right? And now, I’m looking at my own firm, I’m sure you’ve done some introspection looking at your own firm, and we’ve been able to grow because of who we are, because of my fascination with systems, because of the things that I put into place, but the things you, the way you aggressively go at markets and that type of thing. And I wonder if there are people who are watching this who are thinking, I just want to be a lawyer, I don’t want, I like, I like the idea of growth, but I like the idea of being a lawyer more. And, for me, I, you know, I’d love to get back to actually doing some legal stuff, but I can’t do that in my firm because I’m the only one who can do what I can do, you know…
About that, I’ve pushed you over the years saying, you know, you’re, you’re not going to bring somebody in who’s as good as you on lawyering side. I’m gonna go to court, you’re gonna pick up cases and all, that’s fair. But the question is, you can only do so much so well, and what your, what is that? What can you, not outsource, but what can you add to? You know, I think one of the things I’m most proud of is early on a max law when I was on an early Maxwell episode with Jim and Tyson, somebody listened, Dane Phillips, and he’s like, he heard what we were doing. He’s like, I want to be part of this, and the idea was, it was exactly what you’re talking about. He loved going to court, but he didn’t want to run a firm, he was sort of ready to be out on his own. And so, to me, it is that segmentation where you can allow people to do what you want. And it’s fraught with peril, because let’s say you say I just want to be, I just want to be in court and you find a local person who happens to want the opposite, the odds of a business marriage working, probably not unlike a personal marriage, you know, there’s a very large failure rate. So, again, what I’ve loved about Price Benowitz is the fact that we’ve been able to bring people on and work them into our system so they can have their own practice within our practice to actually practice and have intake and marketing and ops and everything else taken care of for them. The thing that I sort of look at as we talk to our many of our listeners, who are like, hey, how do I find that missing piece? You got to do one of two things, you either have to go out and buy it and hire somebody to do it, or, and that may not be cost effective, or you got to bring somebody in with equity, who’s going to balance you out and pick your poison, right? You know, well, while you’re, you know, you have the lion’s share of what, what the profitability of your firm is, but you have a lot on your shoulders. And the question is what’s right? You have to figure out what’s right for you. And history is written by the victor, if you find the right partner, friend of mine locally with a large digital creative agency, rolled up into a larger agency, he went from like 2 people to 100 employees to a huge roll up, they will probably go public. And the idea is he found the right partners along the way, and history will be told by that, how many people do we know that partner with somebody, it’s a disaster, it sets them back years? So, if, if if you can either, hire the right person or if, if, if, you can partner with the right person and create something bigger, either as a great path, the question is, can you find something that actually will get there versus the rose-colored glasses in the wish, and then you find out the reality after the honeymoon, that you really don’t have what’s needed, or it’s not as synergistic or friendly situation?
What I find is, a lot of times, you find solos who wind up partnering up with another lawyer, and they partner up with that lawyer thinking, wow, this means that I’m not the one on calls on Saturday and Sunday anymore, or there’s going to be somebody else for me to, you know, to worry about splitting that rent with, and what they really are getting is another person and all of their problems that now they have to solve. So, your problems go for 100% yours to now 100% yours and 50% of somebody else’s. So, you’re really only adding work to yourself by adding a partner to the mix sometimes, if it’s not done with the right sort of introspection and vision. And this goes back to stuff that we’ve talked about in the past. And it really is, what is your vision for how you want to practice law? That should be your overarching decision, you know, there are a lot of law firms that have grown and scaled, because that is the vision of the partners who are making those decisions, but there are simply some that decide to stay and maybe they add one or two associates, maybe they add more staff, but they don’t want to necessarily get large to 40 lawyers, 60 lawyers, 100 lawyers and staff, because that’s just not part of their vision, and they’ve made those concrete steps. I’m going to tell you right now, I’m happy where I’m at, I may, you know, I may add one or two staff I met, may add one or two lawyers, may subtract one or two lawyers, but I think I’ve decided to I’m maxed out, I’m, you know, I’m nearing 50, I don’t want, I don’t want to have to put in the effort to get to get huge. I just don’t think it’s for me and, and it’s taken a long time to come to that decision. So, I’ve grown, but I think I’m gonna cap my own growth. Maybe not necessarily in profitability, but in size. That’s the way I’m looking at it.
Vegas would take odds on it, I’d probably bet against it, but, you know, meaning that we may not see the last of Ruane Attorneys in its expansion, but it’s another thing. I would say…
Price Benowitz when they want to get into Connecticut, that’s what I’ll do.
Lead up with PB and R. So, we, you know, when you, one of the things you mentioned was people look at business partners. So, that’s could be a topic for an entire show is how do you find a business partner, right? And a lot of life, a lot of business life, I relate back to dating and probably get myself sued at some point, because I use it with employees, whether it’s recruiting, it’s the same dating, whether it’s clients, an intake, it’s, you know, it’s all about that dating dance. And I feel that very often, when I look at how people choose to be law partners, you see really dysfunctional courtship going on, where you know somebody, but it’s sort of like being friends with somebody and then deciding to get married, and not having those tough decisions, whether in the personal side, it might be what religion are you? Are you, how can I live with your, your in law is going to drive me so crazy, it’s going to end the marriage? Do we want to have kids? How many? Like all those decisions, and I see those hard questions that really need to be asked along the lines of what you were just talking about, which is what do you want? You know, are you interested in doing working in this part of, it isn’t actually synergistic? Or is the two people talking about what they want? So, two things happen, you get into the marriage, let’s assume that it’s good for a moment, but two things happen. One is what people say they want isn’t always what they want, which sucks is true. In the personal side, It’s true, you know, every profile, that when I, when I dated, people love their family and love to travel and you find out that they can’t stand their family and hate, hate leaving their home. You know, that what people say is not necessarily the actually what they believe. But secondly, people change so that you’re in this marriage now with somebody and things happen. Their marriage breaks up, there’s a substance abuse issue, their marriage in, their marriage is good and their family grows and they want more time at home. All of those things are such a variables, and that, look, if you thought about it too much, you’d never do anything, but thinking about it smartly knowing all of those variables and asking at least the threshold first questions, Jay, that you referred to a moment ago, so that you have an idea, are we both getting something that complements each other versus two people that want to be the frontman, and you hear this a lot, who don’t want to practice and want to focus on marketing. If you have two people that are aspiring to do the same thing, you’re no better off than you were before.
Yeah, you know, it’s interesting, I get into this debate sometimes with my wife, she’s gonna hate the fact that I’m gonna bring it up but, you know, she has a tendency to try to maintain relationships for, you know, 20-30 years, and I said, you know, some of those relationships, you became friends with those people merely because you lived in close proximity to them, not necessarily because you had a lot in common with them. And so, now that you’re older and wiser, and I want to say, set in your ways, but you sort of decided certain things about your life, those friends may not necessarily be true friends anymore, if they ever truly were, and that’s something that I think you got to look into. You know, it’s nice when you’re undergoing the shelling of the daily practice of law, when you’re being fired upon to have somebody else in the foxhole with you. It’s a whole other thing that when the shelling is done, you know, is this somebody that you can actually spend some time with and build something with, and I think that’s something that we got to keep talking about, because we want to remind people that that’s something that they have to talk about. But once again, Seth, we are, we’re going to be overtime if you didn’t know, that, it happens, almost every week, except for when we have Shankman who goes a million miles an hour, but we’re going to be overtime, for sure. So, you want to leave it with this? I got a couple of things to talk about. First off, if you want to take this on the go, you can subscribe to our podcast, it’s available on all of the podcasting platforms, or you can get us through the maximum lawyer podcast. As you know, we are sponsored by maximum lawyer media, as well as my firm, Firm Flex, and Seths firm, BluShark, but we have been working on a bunch of things for you guys in the coming weeks, and I think it’s going to be some cool stuff. So, we’ve got a new segment that’s going to air next week. Let’s look at with Ryan McCain. Seth, you know Ryan, so tell me what you think he’s gonna bring to the next year?
Well, look, what we’re trying to do is have some fun and B, bring as much value as possible. So, Ryan is just a great innovative attorney, who is also bridging the gap between amazing practitioner and creatively running a firm and building it out. It’s just awesome to watch in action. And the idea that he’s going to do something which I am dying for, which is to basically do a deep dive on a book a week, I don’t always have time to read all those books, but I’d love to sort of be inspired, get enough takeaways from him, figure out which ones I want to spend my time on, you know, reading fully, but I can’t wait to have Ryan and create different segments. So, let us know what it is you’re interested in and if there’s a particular book you want Ryan to, to focus on or something, a topic for the show, bring it to us, but I’ll leave Jay with this. You know, I’m closer to your, to your wife in the sense of I hold on to people for many, many years, but it is interesting that while I do it for myself when I’m out there, and I see over the COVID period, and you watch people’s social interactions from a distance, you do see it’s fascinating when you do see relationships that are out there easier to see, and other than in yourself, that are really dysfunctional, but have just stood the test of time. And the analogy can be brought to the business world. It’s not dissimilar, there are relationships in the business world that are, you know, that were, that served a purpose for a long period of time, but if sort of outlive that, and you have that loyalty piece, you’re not going to give up true friends over that, but very often as I think you were alluding to, where the friendship really has devolved, and it’s really just an obligation, It’s a much tougher, tougher thing, and maybe a future discussion for us here.
Yeah, I think that’d be a great thing to talk about. And the other thing, before we go, we are bringing back our hot seats, we’ve done some a couple of weeks ago, and if you’re interested in being in a hot seat, let us know down below in the comments because we’d love to have you talk through your growth problems, see what we can do to help you out. We’ll bring you on a show and we’ll give you some unbiased free advice and see if we can help you get to the next level because that’s what we’re here all about at Maximum Growth Live. So, with that, we’re going to end this show this week. I am Jay Ruane, he’s Seth Price over there. Thank you so much for being with us and we’ll see you again next Thursday on another edition of Maximum Growth Live. Bye for now.
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