Today Seth and Jay chat with Hector Quiroga about his emigration to the USA and how he built his booming immigration practice tapping into overseas help.
Hector’s firm: www.quirogalawoffice.com
Hello, hello, and welcome to another edition of Maximum Growth Live. I’m one of your hosts, Jay Ruane, CEO of FirmFlex, your Social Media Marketing Agency for lawyers, as well as Ruane Attorneys, your criminal defense and civil rights firm in Connecticut. With me, as always, my good buddy in the Hawaiian shirts, Seth Price. Seth is founder of Price Benowitz, your DC, Maryland, Virginia and South Carolina law firm, all up, taking over that Mid Atlantic area, as well as the creator and brains behind, well, the, the original founder, brains, not necessarily the current brains, behind SEO mastermind group, BluShark Digital. Seth, how’s your week going this week?
It’s going great. I’m really excited for today’s, yes, you know, I got, got to meet Hector on a Mastermind several months ago. And in that time, both you and I, in our journey, have integrated a number of people from Latin America into our teams, and Hector was way ahead of the curve, you know. And he has done a pretty amazing job scaling international talent for all sorts of things. And it’s something that I personally have sort of been, you know, realizing it’s something that I need to be doing at some level and have had some success, but I’m really excited to speak with somebody who’s been through this and hopefully get some nuggets of what are the things that you know, make it successful long term? Because it’s one thing to have this work for a couple of months, but you want this party your long-term play, it’s a very different question.
Well, absolutely, and it’s definitely one of my long-term plays. You know, we’ve, I’ve talked about it, we’ve on-boarded, we had some hiccups, and it’s definitely something that’s been an issue. You know, it’s really sort of, it’s interesting to me, and I don’t want to take too long on this but, you know, I read the Friedman book, you know, The World is Flat. And we talked about how, using the internet and technology, more people, you could touch more people around the world and get the right person for your problem. And I think really COVID sort of accelerated that. I mean, we’re talking about legacy law firms that had standard phone lines, now they have VoIP systems, now they can start to take advantage of those things. You and I were in those systems early on, and so we’re sort of a step ahead of other people, and able to really attack the offshore talent. But there’s some incredibly talented people out there that just happen to live elsewhere. And, you know, I can go back to when I was when I was a college student backpacking my way through Europe, and I can remember getting off the plane in France and being like, wow, there’s a whole country here that survives not speaking a lick of English, and then, you know, and it kind of blew my mind, you know. But now I’m just thinking, you know, if I can tap into these things that, that are available to me overseas, I can really accelerate my firm. So, why don’t we do this thing? Let’s take a quick break and we’ll hear from our sponsors, and then we come back, we’re going to talk with Hector Quiroga, who is an immigration lawyer, but he’s really scaled tremendously using overseas talents. So, why don’t we do that, Seth? And we’ll be right back with more Maximum Growth Live.
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Thrilled to be here with Hector Quiroga, the managing partner of a law firm in Washington state immigration, tri-state area there, tri, tri-County area? As well as Las Vegas, tri-cities. Welcome to the show, thrilled to have you. I’m excited to have you here today because we were at a Mastermind together, and I was, you know, for the, the scaling of immigration. You know, we talk a lot on the show about different offshore opportunities for leveraging, and for somebody, I’ve not met somebody who has done as great a job as you, of mirroring, or marrying, domesti- international labor to put this firm together. So, talk to us a little about the history, how you’ve done this, and how you you’ve sort of developed this international practice.
Alright, guys, thank you, thank you, both of you, too, for having me. Excited to talk and share, yeah. So, it kind of started, you know, I’m Colombian by birth. So, I was born in Colombia, and came in 2000. I didn’t speak English at the time, but what is wonderful on this, is that I left a lot of family and a lot of people, connections, when I came. I came when I was 17, I just had finished high school. And so what, what, what I started with was, you know, I started to recognize that there was a lot of work that deals have to be done in the States. I mean, it started with a logo, right? And so, I was like, so can somebody do a logo? And then I, I went down here, and, and it was anywhere, I have quotes anywhere from like, you know, 100 bucks to, you know, I had a company who actually gave me a quote for $10,000 back then, to do this logo, right? And I was like, wow, like, I just, I just, I was just thinking about these and so what are some things, you know, at the time, was like, gosh, I should get into marketing because marketing I can, I can get somebody’s logo and I have to know nothing about Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator, right? I don’t have to even know anything about that. And so my first business was a marketing business, which was a website design company, because what I was doing basically, I was a reseller, right? I would just kind of come in, and go “do that,” and that’s kind of when I started to learn that you can shift labor and, and really capitalize on something that we have, and we take for granted, and that’s kind of called the US dollar. You buy milk on dollars; you don’t think about what you’re doing, but for a foreigner, you’re like, you paid how much for that? What, you know. I started, still weird to go and learn that a haircut could be $15 or more, because I know in Colombia, you can get it for like $1, right? Like, you can see the disparity on pricing, and so that’s kind of how this started. And after, you know, when I went to law school, I had a virtual assistant who helped me with my briefing for my cases, right? I was like, you know, I just kind of had enough connections in law school to say, hey, I just, so I know, I got through law school. It’s kind of a long story. I graduated from Gonzaga with an economics degree and I did go to law school right after, right? It took me two, three years to go in. And so in those two, three years I was hired by an insurance company, and I was, I was a personal injury adjuster, right? So, I kind of started with total loss and worked my way to personal injury towards the end and I learned a lot, and so, I learned a lot from what they were doing. One of the things that the company was doing that, I’m not talking about, this is circa 2004 to 2000, actually 2003 to 2006. A., they were really good at distributing the labor. So the adjusters would come in and then we would handle about 10 vehicle wrecks a day, I would take the record, the statement from people calling in, hey, you got to take your recorded statement and do that. I needed to make a liability decision and I needed to know, hey, is there any personal injury exposure, and then report it to the company. It was crazy how incredibly productive we were, I mean, 10 vehicle wrecks? There is two recorded statements, usually, the two drivers, right? Sometimes you got weaknesses, and you gotta get, so there was a lot of things that we were doing. I’m like, what did these guys do, right? I recognized the importance of systems, off-shoring, digital signatures. This was huge, digital signatures, these people were doing digital signatures in 2004, and they had been doing this for a while. So, some of these ideas that I’m like exposing to you and that come to me, this is not original thought, it was just an observation and for lack of a better word, copying, just, just, just looking hey they did it that way, maybe, maybe figure out a way to do that. Through law school, then I’m like, okay, I had, I had them going, and I said, gosh, I really do know a lot about insurance and personal, personal injury type stuff, so, I’d like to do a website. And I, I target website, not to, not to, not to high-degree injuries, I recognized that there was a huge market for the middle injury, right? So, that person who has a, a bone, or they had a sort of a collision, they might need a couple of chiropractor care and that’s it, they get better. But there was a huge market there because the, the Big Shot lawyers are going for big cases, they’re usually not interested in that. And what I started recognizing was that people with, with a, you know, “I don’t feel so good, I’m gonna have to take the day off,” and then the adjuster will call and be like, “Hey, you know, we’re gonna pay you, like 10% of your damage and we’re gonna pay you 50% of your damage,” and then people were, like, upset. And this is when they really like stopped reading, there was that, there was a, it’s almost like there was some retaliation from the consumer back to the company saying, wait a minute, you’re supposed to take care of me and now you’re gonna like shortchange me on the cost of the timeline, right? What it is, is that creates a spiral, spiral situation into the injury world. And there was a lot of cases we were settling for $3,000, $5,000, $15,000, is not enough, I don’t think, for a lot of lawyers to get into, but there was enough, there were a little, you know, injury demand would come in, and you know, there was a nice profit to be made. And also there were some cases that you get, got into it, but they looked like they were really low in the beginning, like they start for low but later, you start discovering, “Whoa, we got nerve damage, we got, we got a big thing, right?” So, I recognize this, this middle bed of consumers, that is the, the people who want the big stuff, and then there is the people who go in and they call a personal injury lawyer and say, “Hey, I was just rear ended but my taillight is broken, and that’s the extent of it,” and the attorneys go in carefully. They will just simply go like, there’s no, “I don’t, I don’t just do personal… I don’t do property damage,” was the answer, “I, there’s got to be an injury or I just don’t want to talk to you.” What happens is, there is, there’s a huge miss there. So, what I did is, I took all of my talk notes, which I was recording, and I turned around and I said to my VA, “I need you to put all of these into article form, I need you to help me these.” And I start using the website, the website can be pretty successful, and I was able to capture a lot of leads and then turn those leads and I was selling them back to Absolute Lawyers. So, you know, I made hundreds of thousands of dollars through law school doing this, right? I was like, you know, this is, you know, I would get a lead, I was selling about $100 a lead and, you know, it was a nice living, but the SEO world was, was getting competitive, then I was hit with like, like, what is it… the Panda update, and some of those updates, and truthfully some of the keyword stuff was kind of like stuffy, I got a little gimmicky. I get that but, but it was, but what I learned was: A. You can offshore a lot of work. B. You can, we can resell a lot of, you can create a lot of value for somebody else, mining the, the knowledge that I had both from, from law school, and then also my experience for a prior employee, right? And then more importantly, I think that just, just learning that, you know, doesn’t, you know, you can scale something a lot, just by putting all the pieces together, right? And then finding that band, and so this is how I come into mediation, right? I recognize that there is a lot of work for bigshot business immigration who want to go on and say, “Hey, we want to do all your Visas”, and they have maybe hundreds of employees and is a huge thing, but I recognize that the market wasn’t being served on lower, you know, cases like, you know, migrant workers and just people who are perceived not to have big, big money to hire a big lawyer, then I’d recognize that the value was on value for me, like if I, if I get really good at this very thing, right? So you get very good about that taillight being broken, I get very good at…, and I can scale the volume, the only way to sustain volume is to have the labor, well, I can achieve that off tour, then I can operate a pretty successful firm. And I think that’s, that’s how this all came about, and it’s just been stumbling through stuff then I figured it out. But being Colombian, and, you know, what I did was very simple. I just put a, I just put out this, it wasn’t an ad, it was a Facebook post, “Hey, guys, anybody wants to help me translate this document?” And, you know, it was, a few people answer, and I said, and at the time, I didn’t know what I was doing. So, so like, okay, how about I pay you, 10 bucks for that, or pay you 20 bucks for that? And then after a while, I was like, why don’t you I just, I’ll just give you a set rate and then I can send work to you, and they liked that. They liked that a lot more, right? And that’s how it all started.
Wow.
I got a rapid fire. I got a bunch of questions. Hopefully these can be like, you know… So you built out a team internationally, lessons learned. What countries do you, have you liked, and what countries have been harder to work with?
For me, I mean, Colombia has been, has been it, right, and I think Colombia has been great. Columbia’s goingthrough a tough, tough time, right as we speak, and that’s been a little difficult, but in terms of infrastructure and stability, I think it’s one of the best places to go. I have people in Argentina, I have people in Mexico, I have people in Salvador, and I have people also in India, I still have people in India, and I have some people in the Philippines. And really, culturally, it’s really interesting. A lot of the India and Philippines, those guys are really, at least my experience has been they’re very, very heavy in policy and procedures, and they will follow it to a tee. And if you follow, if your procedure is incorrect, they will follow you incorrectly to a tee, they will not deviate. They’re very respectful. “”Yes, sir. No, sir. Yes, sir Hector? No, sir Hector,” that’s just the way it is. What I’ve found in some of the Latin American countries is that there is a little bit of more creativity, they don’t tend to follow it quite so much, and then they’ll talk back a little bit more saying like, “I don’t think that’s gonna work,” right? But, but yet, sometimes you can get out and can have a little bit more of a creative thing, right? So, you got a little bit more people who will get out of the box, and so, that does that. Lessons learn, in all this time… Number one, we use it, I did, I will talk about virtual assistants, and actually think that’s, that term should be stricken.
I agree.
Virtual, you’re, you’re virtually there, it almost means that you’re not really there, which is not true, they are there. And an assistant is the person who’s assisting you drive the boss, when in fact they can drive for you. They’re not really an assistant, they’re driving. So, I think it’s a bad, bad term, and it’s a mindset shift that, that, that it took me a while, and I guess I still use it, but if I, as a policy, everyone on the firm, except for very close people who work for me for a very long time, that’s the, that’s the, they know who they are, but it is, and so. The reason why is because you gotta treat them like, just an employee, just an employee. Period. They have lives, goals, aspirations, they like to get perks, they love when we send them pizza. I mean, it’s just normal, normal stuff that we would do. The first thing is get that out of your head, they want, they want to feel that they have a career, they want to feel that they are growing with your team. The minute that you do that, because I see a lot of people are listening corner posts, and I’m sure you guys follow, often your lawyer saying “What will I have my VA do, but what will I have them do?” Right? “Like just check my email?” Like, there is a there’s a pervasive lack of design, you can have them do a lot of things for you. I mean, for me, right? I mean, I have video editors, photographers, copywriters, I have economists, I have analysts, I have coders, I have software developers, I have paralegals, legal assistants. Just, just people who just massively can do, the only thing that you need to separate is, what do you physically need somebody for? Or what do you need a license for? Clearly, lawyers do legal work, the remote work piece, going to court and reviewing the paperwork, you need a lawyer, and typically a lawyer will be in the States, right? Not always. I’ve seen, I’ve seen firms who actually have a US-licensed attorney working in Mexico, right? But you have that. And the other thing is like the physical paper that you file, and in some practices, you can file online, then you no longer move that either, right? So, that’s, that’s the lessons, I think, is just to talk on that.
Have you layered different levels of labor with checks and balances? Is the ultimate check in the US? Or have you gotten to the point where you have a checks and balance where an overseas team is overseeing your overseas team?
We’re kind of transitioning to that, and so, we’re kind of in the middle of a transition. And I have both I have, I have, we have what is called a compliance team. So, I got auditors and compliance teams that check before the actual work product goes out to make sure that nothing was a scheme that, you know, sometimes people are like, you know, my practice is a lot of form filling, is like, oh, half the form is blank, like, what? Somebody’s got to check that out, and before we file that, right? So, there is a compliance thing that does it and that compliance is now mixed, right? It’s mixed, but they are localized here, you know, and is led by the most experienced people on the team to do that. I’d like to try all the way out, but again, because at least USCIS and the Corps, we do still have a paper-based thing. For the most part, a thing, a US-thing, but it’s, but it’s mixed. But I do, to answer question has it been layered, we do have layers, we have, you know, we got what we call leads, some supervisors or managers, and then we have directors, right? There’s, there’s, there’s levels of experience, and pay and rank, right? That people have to get to that level.
Jay?
Hector, thanks so much for being with us. You know, this is a really a fascinating way to sort of scale your firm, but I want to take a step back and talk a little bit about your work in immigration because, you know, four and a half years ago, there was sort of a, “Oh, there’s a new administration, and that’s going to impact how we handle immigration cases.” And then this most recent administration, made some, made some anticipatory changes to that type of thing. How is it that you are able to sort of roll with the punches in an immigration practice, when really so much depends on who’s sitting in the White House every four years? How does that sort of impact your ability to grow as a firm?
It’s beautiful, man, it just exploded. It’s just so awesome. I can’t even tell you. I mean, here’s, here’s, here’s what it really is, there is no downside to this, right? Like, there will always be immigration in the United States and it’s going to be either… So, we have an administration that is really, you know, seen as very anti-immigrant, and, in fact, very anti-immigrant rights and no less, close borders, etc. Well, that made marketing really easy, right? You do the main marketing and people were like, oh my gosh, I better lawyer up, because this is coming in, so made marketing easier, and in that sense, it was easier to market. But then it also made the cases more complex, right? Because that is the, that’s the other side, right, now getting the case through is going to be harder. So, marketing easier, case complex. So, then we have to adjust or, or the way we approach cases or costs, how we’re going to find these cases, so having that pulls on the numbers is very important. And now that we have a more, let’s call it permissive, administration, then what happens is, marketing is maybe not as easy, right? But then the cases are gonna get a little easier. So, there is always a balance, and I don’t think, I think we get into immigration to see all the changes, you know, the obstacle is the way, right? And I think it’s just, we just gotta go through that and say that, you know, we got, we got to, we just got to go through it. It’s just the way I think everybody should look at it, right?
Okay, so now, here’s a question, I want to talk about offshoring your assistance, and, you know, in my firm, we’ve got five now, we’re adding two more. So, we’re not nearly as big as you, we call them teammates, because they are a part of the team. They’re not virtual. They are just part of our team like anybody else. As a lawyer who wants to grow their practice or grow their firm, what do you think the best teammate to bring on to handle should be? So like, if you haven’t had anybody who is outside of your office, and you’re thinking about adding what is called a VA or a teammate, or however you want to do it, what’s the first thing a lawyer should look to bring in to allow them to really get the best kind of growth?
Gosh, just a rough question, right? Because it has different levels, right? Like we got people on finance, and we got people on, you know, like, payables and going over that, making sure that accounts are paid. I got people like, you know, people going over the money piece, making sure that we report that, so, that’s important, right? Truthfully, there was a solid, I was just starting, I think the very first thing you need to do is you need to, you need to work on your forms. How do you get the information into the company, I think it’s probably the biggest impact first, right? I know that there’s a lot of ways to go to different outlets that are cut off by outsourcing and things like that, but I kind of like it myself because then I have control, I can train them to my policies and procedures. Now, when you, were bearing over 400 phone calls a day, right? Between existing clients and prospective new clients. So, what I have is a call center at this point. It’s not, it’s not a call center in the sense of you go somewhere in Colombia, and you find Quirego Law, his call center. It’s in everybody’s home, just working, and it’s actually a lot more cost efficient that way than actually having a location. But I think if you don’t need, you’re not handling that kind of volume, then you can start with one reception, and this is exactly how I did it. I got, I got, “Hey, why don’t you just help us with the phone a little bit.” And then figure out our IP telephony, right, that, the piece of technology that kind of in line with how you do that, and then that’ll help you start going. And then from there, it wasn’t too hard to go into, a legal assistant will be good. So, the assistant will be, maybe not the person who answered the phone, but maybe the person who’s gonna be “Hey, let’s check your address,” and just a little bit more of an intake that is longer than you see. Then you get into like the paralegal work, which is the people who are more strategizing, “Hey, we need a declaration here, we need this.” So, yeah, you, you go that way. That’s how I did it, and I don’t know if it’s the right way, but it’s certainly the way it worked for us.
No, I love it. And something Jay and I talk a lot about, which is delivering the best quality service, part of that is time on task, right? So that if you’re looking at domestic numbers versus the allowing somebody to have it. You have to have the training in place and the checks and balances in place, but it would allow for a lot more touches per client, per case, a lot, many more minutes on, before you… So, I love it. I have, my sort of, sort of final questions for you are twofold. What mistakes did you make early on, that somebody who’s starting this would, you think should try to avoid?
I think, I mentioned one is that you’ve really seen for a long time as, as they are like a parallel universe that you just kind of get the staff that are tedious or like you can do, or they seem to be, and really not recognizing they’re part of a team so that, they are no different than somebody else.
Not assistants, they’re team members, as Jay mentioned.
So, there’s one thing that, I think the second thing is really, you talk about that and it’s called check and balances, and we do have a lot of people, how do you know people are working? But I think COVID can help a little bit on this, because what we’re experiencing here, right? How do you know that the person is actually spending time they say on a translation, for example? Or, and really ensuring that you have some systems to really just be able to make sure that the work is actually being, because they will tell you stories, right? They will say to you, you know, “I worked four hours,” and you don’t have a way or a system to check, and so, one of the ways is just averaging, right? Just the law of averages, we’re gonna, we’re good enough to know interesting, this position should be producing X amount, and you are like 10% of that consistently. We know there is a problem, right? So, so until you start getting some data. So, my mistake, to be clear, was I didn’t gather data until a little bit too late into the process. I should have started that earlier so I knew that that was happening. Now we have a pretty good system, or we can sniff things out and even then, we still see things that are like, “hmm, this isn’t it.” So, because the cost is going up, right? It used to be that, but the cost, we’re talking about this because nobody was doing it. So, everybody’s going, “Ah let’s go to Latin America, go to Columbia.” So, the cost is going up to the point that you really do have to watch it. It’s not, it’s not a free for all, you have this very inexpensive thing. It’s less expensive, but not quite that inexpensive.
You know, why don’t, yeah, you bring up a good point and, you know, from all the forms that we read online, from the conferences that we’re going to, I feel like there are so many lawyers out there who want this magic wand of “I’m going to be able to get a high-quality paralegal that can be bilingual, and do everything for $5 a day and, and I wouldn’t have to supervise, I won’t have to set up systems.” And that’s, I mean, that’s just a figment of imagination, right? I mean, everybody wants free help. I mean there was, there were, you know, hundreds of thousands of people enslaved for generations, because that’s the way, the way certain people wanted to act. You’re not going to get it and you have to treat your, your off-shore talent with, with respect and pay them a commensurate wage with the salary, with the work that they’re doing. I mean, somebody who’s just starting out, might make less than somebody who’s been with you for a number of years, but there has to be room for them to grow, earn more money, get more skills, right? This isn’t something where you can just, you’re not just plugging in people, like, like, like an assembly line here, right?
So, right, and I have people have off-shore that make more money over there than some of the employees here, right? Because they’ve been with me, because they know the thing, they’re hustling for me, they know. Again, they’re people, they want to, that is, that is the reason, they have ambition, they want to do well. And I have some people working over there who have made, they have, I mean, they have a fantastic life working for my firm, and I love it, because they’re bringing in value. So, this idea that, yes, you’ve got to cut costs, but you, but you also have to worry about the systems, the check-in, and when you consider it all into account, you know, you still come ahead, but, but you gotta, you gotta keep an eye on it and you got to make sure that those people really like working with you, and they’re the leader, forsure.
You know, we’ve done, I’ve done a lot with India, some in the Philippines, but Latin America. And I agree with your assessment that there’s a level of creativity that we see from the countries you mentioned that that’s, that’s awesome. And people start at whatever they start at, let’s say it’s somewhere between $5 and $10 an hour, we’ll take somebody at $6.50 an hour, they’re starting at hypothetically. What I don’t know, I’m curious, cuz you’ve been at this for a while, what does that person end up, like in order to retain somebody? In the US you see a cost-of-living adjustment, are there certain numbers that when you get to them, based on the current environment, that you’re able to retain people beyond the newbies who are jumping into the market, who are hiring people fresh? Is there sort of a starting salary? And are you finding are there certain salaries that take them off the market, generally, that gives you some longevity of employment, at least from the financial point of view?
Ideally, depends on the position, right? You do have to kind of look right about, hey, what is, what is this job paying locally? Right? And what, you know, will a person have? I want to pay my people good, too well, right? I don’t want to be necessarily exceptional but I also don’t want to underpay them, because then they’re gonna do find a better position somewhere else, right? So, I want to, I want to do. And so, the thing is, like, you know, because, again, we got programmers, we got people who are paralegals, but they’re actually lawyers in Colombia, but they are paralegal services because they don’t have a law license. But they, and they start at different ranges, and that’s something that’s depending on the culture you want to set up. Now, I want to tell you, here’s my nugget, right? And one huge nugget here is that, number one, he’s talking about an hourly, don’t, don’t talk in terms of hourly, they don’t understand that concept. They talk in terms of monthly salaries because that’s how those cultures work, right? And that they probably think it’s a very US thing. So, if you’ve got a salary that is anywhere from like, you know, $500, to say, $1,500 or even $1,600, depending on the country that may be very good, right? Depending on what level of skill, did they they go to college or not, and they can come in. And sometimes you really need somebody who can help you through an Excel sheet and you don’t need a college graduate to do that, right? And that’s the thing. So, that is, that, but the nugget is really that, they’re looking for a stability, they’re looking for stability, they’re looking for, I know that whatever you say, you’re good for it. So, your word here is huge. So, they, they don’t believe in contracts. They don’t believe, they may see something in writing, but they know they can’t sue you; they don’t have any protection, they don’t really have OSHA or department home, you know, they don’t, they don’t, right? If you, if you, so your work here is more important than ever, right? To say I want to pay you in these days of the month and you are good for your work, you pay them, whatever they need to work, wherever there is dispute, I, look, the money is what it is because I told you. And if you show them that they can have, work with them, because those countries are so up and down, up and down especially with COVID, they are desperately looking for stability to be able to do that. And so, if we can provide that, somebody will take a $500, $600 wage a month, which is about $3.25 an hour, right? More than they might take a $600, $800 if they don’t know that they won’t be here for 60 days, right? So…
Agreed, and we’ve seen that. What do you see long term attrition like? Do you, are you able, if you do what you’re saying, where you continue, you get, you know, you’re stable, you show, you know, increase, you show a career, do you see much breakage or do people stay with you generally?
That’s, that’s a good question. I have a very large team that had to stay with me now for, for that, one to four or five years. So, I think that, that’s good. But we had, had to let a lot of people go for the problems I mentioned, and it’s, it’s kind of hard to mention. Now, people who had gone on and have other opportunities and left, left us. Yeah, I actually did have a few, like three or four people, not in the recent future I can think of who were, one was, she was a stewardess, right? She was and, and so because, I mean she was fantastic, and then when it all reopened, she was like, gotta go. And I was like, oh, gosh, right? So, we gotta be careful of that, you might get a temporary person. But I think if you, if you get the stability, and you’re, and then there are increases, right? I mean, these people are not making the same amount of money they did when they’ve begun. Usually every 90 days, we have a quarter review. Every year, we try to have a significant increase. It’s not, it’s not, you know, 10 cents an hour, it’s a significant increase that, that, that makes the person feel valued, because they want things, they talk, right? They talk and they’re gonna say, hey, these people, are they good for the money? That’s the very first question. They ask the team members, when they joined the team, was like, “Hey, this is all great, everything’s great, but do they pay, do they really pay?” Right? They’re really worried about that, and so, we got to make sure that, that we always do it on time that there is no, no funny excuses, right? And the thing is the team itself, kind of give that. And then second thing, that there is a room to grow. When they see, “Yeah there’s been raises. Yeah, we do this, we may do metrics, this is how we work.” It works, works well, but is the same thing here now. I mean, you will improve your payroll, that would be valuable, and if people don’t see an advancement, then what am I doing here, right?
Yeah. Yeah, Jay, get the last word.
So, I, you know, it’s really interesting, everything that you’ve been able to do here, and as you see your future growing, do you ever see a time where you won’t be relying on team members all across the globe? With the advancement of technology, do you ever think that that’s going to be something that you get away from or is it, is it part and parcel of every good successful growing law firm in this day and age?
I got a big question mark on that one. Here’s the thing, the cost is going higher and higher to the point where I’m like, what is going to be the breaking point? To actually, because a lot easier if I have them right here and I can just walk out and say, don’t bring that up. The question is, now that there is a huge demand for the services and people are going into, I see the price is going up significantly, and there is going to be a point where I want to say, I’m just going to have this person who work out of Spokane, Washington, instead of like out of college, right? Like there is gonna a point. Now, when will that point hit? I don’t know, but it’ll take a while.
I have a question about that, now that you bring that tup. We talked, we just talked a little while ago about how this administration is more accepting of immigrants. Do you see a time when these men and women that are in Colombia, in Mexico, in India, that type of thing, have the opportunity to come to the United States, and now have a resume having worked for one or two other law firms and make themselves really valuable by not only having the experience, but being able to be now local? Do you think that that’s going to be something that these people that are working for American companies in their country are going to see the opportunities to immigrate, and, and maybe give us more talent here? Do you think that’s a possibility?
Yeah, I think so. I think, you know, even, even, even without immigration, is just the fact that say, “Hey, I work for the law firm,” and you can verify employment, is huge to them, even from just the bilingual piece, just, just the fact that it really is like a stamp of law, they really do speak English, right? Like that to them, that’s, that’s huge.
Yeah, absolutely. All right. Well, thank you so much for being with us. This is really just fantastic and, and I think, you know, our, our whole audience is really focused on how they can grow their firm. And over the last year, we’ve seen tremendous, tremendous growth in the area of, of our overseas talent, that you can really sort of explode the growth of your firm by tapping into people that are outside the walls of the United States. And I want to thank you for spending some time with us today, Hector, it’s been really illuminating. So, what we’re gonna do now, folks, is we’re going to take a quick break, and we’ll be back back to wrap up with more Maximum Growth Live.
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Wow, Seth, I mean, just some stuff there. You know, we go back to our interview with Brett Trembley talking about how India and the Philippines have one mindset. Latin America has a lot more nuance. And I’ve learned that myself over the last couple of weeks, talking to some of my intake people that have now been fully trained from Latin America, who are able to sort of bob and weave with some complicated intakes that, you know, maybe somebody else who was following a script, asking question after question, and not really thinking about the answers wouldn’t have been able to do. What were your takeaways?
You know, look, it reinforced certain ideas, which is where to find different types of talent for different types of skills. The thing that I’m focused on is, I’m seeing great early success, and just like we talked about Jay, incubating ideas. Now, I don’t want to be the person who says, hey, this is the panacea, because it’s the long game and right now, the grass is always greener, or the devil you know versus you do. Right now, you know, over recent memory, there have been some issues with personalities clashing in the workplace, we lost some of that during COVID, but we also have had a number of people where I would love to be in a position where what I’m offering is a home run and not a starter job. And one of the things about my intake that we’ve talked about over time, is that I’ve generally been able to get bright innovative people who are sort of on a track between college and law school, and that’s been awesome. But it hasn’t, it takes a toll because we’re always recruiting and that you’re always, you know, having that turnover, and on top of the different idiosyncrasies in a particularly hot job market. So, Hector mentioned we don’t know how long that curve will be there but if, if, if we’re able to keep and retain talent for a longer period of time, will that be a competitive advantage? There are certainly a lot of obstacles as far as culture, as far as communications, etcetera. But I’m cautiously optimistic. My, my bet and the thing that I have struggled with is, particularly in my market, is keeping retained talent over time in administrative roles can be very challenging. You know, we had Andy, Andrew from Jacoby Meyers, Andrew Finkelstein, and you know, he’s, he’s in his, his, his specialty is Newburgh, New York. He’s the king of Newburgh, New York. You know, Keith Givens we’ve had on, right, who’s down in Dothan, Alabama. These are places where you can keep and retain talent. DC, it’s a transient town to begin with, there’s so many opportunities, it’s so hard to keep and retain great talent at reasonable prices. Even transportation, as, you know, just getting into and out of work, I lose people when somebody moves, gets married, moves to the other side of the city, crazy stuff like that, so cautiously optimistic that we’re onto something here, Jay.
You know, it’s interesting, and I’ll bring this up. You know, my buddy, Tim, who lives out in LA, you know, grew up in the Bronx, city boy. And I can remember going to visit him now like 12, 11, 12 years ago, when he first moved out there, and one of the things he remarked about was the help at fast food joints in LA was phenomenal. He was like, you know, because what they’re getting is a systemized talent who can handle a register. Well, they were getting these people from Iowa and Kansas, who were moving to LA to be a star. So, they weren’t, they were okay with taking a gig at McDonald’s for the first six months thinking, “I’m going to be a movie star soon. So, this is just a stepping stone.” So, he was like, they know what they’re doing, they’re retentive, they’re responsive. He’s like, they just have a ton of turnover in those jobs, so you never expect the people to stay. And that’s part of what we we’re seeing is that we would get people in that DC to New York, you know, DC to New York corridor, who would come for a year, and then bounce to, you know, first year of law school, grad school, something else. But imagine if you can keep your intake people for instead of 18 months, three years. I mean, just the ability to then focus on other things is going to be phenomenal. So, I’m really excited about this. You know, I’ve, I thought I was gonna add two overseas team members at the end of last year. We are up to five, we have our sixth starting on, today actually, started this morning, actually, with, with training and we’re going to be a seven day a week law firm with somebody answering the phones live seven days a week, this, this week.
It’s crazy. I’m not sure how much I’m reducing the US force. So much of what’s here is reinforcing, things like answering services, spend three, four or 5000 a month on overflow, hey, if I can get this team doing this and answering with my own people that much better.
Yeah, no, you know, and I’ve got two main paralegals. We’re hiring each of them, an assistant, an overseas assistant, not necessarily to, because they need it desperately, but then we’re thinking, well, that person can be slowly trained as an assistant so that as we continue to grow, we’ve got opportunity there. And this is great because it’s a…
And the US person becomes a senior member talking to the clients, more keeping that, that, that Nordstroms customer service, we all aspire to, that’s so freakin tough, when it’s so hard to… So keeping the people we have happy, growing domestically, but using people so that we can make sure that we support them as best we can, which is so difficult domestically. Jay, great show.
Great show, great show. I know you gotta go. So, what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna end it here, folks. Thanks so much for being with us, of course, always, every Thursday here live, Maximum Growth Life for us. Of course, you can always follow Seth at BluShark Digital, as well as his SEO Insider, which is a great show. If you want to follow me, you can tap into my group Systemising Your Law Firm For Growth here on Facebook. But literally, folks, great stuff that we’ve done so far, but today’s show was phenomenal. So, I want to thank you for being with us. Remember to tune in every Thursday, and we’ll see you here next week for another edition of Maximum Growth Live.
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