In this episode we talk with Attorney Mario Godoy, who successfully launched 2 firms in 2 different practice areas.
Hello, hello, and welcome to the Thursday edition, the original edition of Maximum Growth Live. I’m your host, Jay Ruane, CEO of Firm Flex, your Social Media Marketing company for lawyers, as well as Ruane Attorneys, a Criminal Defense and Civil Rights firm here in Connecticut. And with me, of course, flipped this week, flip this week, I’ve got Seth Price. Seth, I flipped up the cameras and now I had to figure out which hand I can point with to point at you, but over there, my man down in DC, Maryland, Virginia, Seth Price of BluShark Digital, as well as Price Benowitz, the mega, the mother, 40 lawyer firm down in DC. I can’t imagine having 40 lawyers, I can barely handle my, my 13, but, Seth, how you doing this week? It’s been another crazy week here in the world, but one thing is consistent, it’s Maximum Growth Live for all of our fans out there.
I got to tell you a little inside the beltway. It’s been a surreal last couple of weeks, but at least I got this, I get that that was the whole purpose. I get to hang out with you and create something cool.
Yeah, and it’s, it’s been really cool. You know, we’ve gotten a lot of great feedback. Of course, if you ever want to give us feedback, you can give us some feedback down below. If you want to listen on the go, you can download this on the Maximum Growth Live podcast available on all the major podcasting platforms, but we’re also syndicated through Maximum Lawyer Media, Maximumlawyer.com and the Maximum Lawyer Podcast, even Tyson does a phenomenal thing, and you could always catch our show, as well as their shows in their podcast feed. But, Seth, we’ve got somebody this week in our interview, who we both know, who actually helped me out with the issue I had last week as my group leader in John Fisher’s mastermind experience, and that is Mario Godoy. Tell, tell everybody a little bit about Mario.
Mario is an amazing guy. You know, he has an immigration firm, he pivoted and started a second firm that, you know, that second firm was someone, we talked about Sarah Khaki a few weeks ago, clearly that concept is resonating in the comments. A lot of people are doing that, as an SEO, I always cringe because opening a second firm, so much more effort, but if there’s anybody that can do it, it’s Mario. He had good reasons behind it, you know, there are lots of positive reasons, it’s just a lot more effort. So, I can’t wait, let’s get him out here, and because I want to spend as much time as possible digging deep with him, and for those of you don’t know him, he is just one of those business legal minds that is just awesome to be around because you just feel like you’re inspired, and you want to do new creative things every time you’re near them.
Yeah, you know, this, this topic that keeps coming up about Seth starting a second firm is something that I’ve had, you know, in the back of my mind for years, and I’ve always said, why would I do that if I haven’t maximized revenue from the firm I already have? Isn’t that a better place for me to focus my money? But what I do is I build these brands internally, and that sort of scratches that itch, but there’s…
I’ll give you an ironic inside baseball issue, where they are smarter having started two firms, and that’s to tax ID numbers, and with the LSAs, those tax ID numbers have come back to bite us of that. So, while I love the idea of building with a firm like you have and I have, even if they’re different brands within the firm, those tax ID numbers have come back to be a central factor of getting your LSAS authenticated. So, again, not so more to deal with today, but I really think for most people the question is, is there a business imperative, whether it’s the market, perceiving you? Or is there a future sale or a new business partner? What is the reason that you want a second firm versus just another vertical within the same firm?
Well, I think Mario is the perfect person to talk about it. So, let’s take a quick break, we’ll hear from our sponsors and then we’ll come back. We’ll have Mario up and we’ll be able to get really deep into the weeds on this topic with him, and I’m really looking forward to this conversation. Sounds good, Seth?
Sounds great.
Awesome. We’ll be right back with the interview. Mario Godoy here on Maximum Growth Live.
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 14,100%. They truly understand where we’re headed and how we want to get there. I have a team in BluShark Digital that I feel like has my back.
Mario, great to have you here, I’m so excited. Every time I speak to you, I feel like I’m energized, and I’ve learned a ton. You know, there’s been a lot of buzz in the Maximum lawyer feed about people starting two law firms, so who better to have this week than a guy who has both the Godoy Law offices, as well as the Estate and Probate Legal Group, very similar in a lot of ways to what we saw talking to Sarah Khaki, opening a second firm with a branded name. Talk to me, your logic in doing that versus just expanding your primary firm.
Yeah, absolutely. First, I just want to say, Jay and Seth, thank you so much for having me on here, on this platform. I love the idea of being able to just speak out to other attorneys, and been watching some of your shows, and I think just such great knowledge learn so much just from watching other folks talk about what it is to run a law firm like a business in some instances. So, great question. What, so what was it like to start two firms? What was my…
Why? Why that? Why not? Because you easily could have just added, I mean, look, we talk SAL all the time, easily could have just added a folder on your existing site and be done. You know, what was the logic?
Right. Well, you know, really, the main part of it was I was looking to create a separate entity. I wanted to, so many times I think that as lawyers you build out your business, and then, there’s lots of them that jump into maybe real estate speculation or a number of other types of…
Or start a digital marketing company, like Seth did, like I did.
Start a company out of the blue, right? And so, and by the way, you guys have done awesome services for us. Thank you, Seth, for what BluShark does for both firms. And so, for me, it was more of like, I was looking at it as almost kind of like a passive investment that I was going to get into, something that I would lead, I would shepherd, I would take my experience of hitting every tree branch of what to do wrong in the first firm, and not make those same mistakes again. And so, for me, I looked at it, I think, as an investment of my time, where I could also take another attorney who really loves this area, and then help them be the best that they can be at that, without having to worry about the business side of it, right? Because I know that that’s, that’s a struggle for a lot of us practitioners who really love the, love the area of the law but the business side not so much.
Right, so…
Right, and in this case, you had an advantage and we talked to Sarah, breaking into family law, no joke, that’s going to take a massive SEO build up, trust and estates is at the lowest end of competitiveness in the b2c space. So that by starting one and the brand was genius, because you’re getting your exact match in the Google My Business in a legitimate way, which if you tried to just add that as a nap, you know, as your, as your Google My Business within the firm, it probably got slapped down as spam, but by branding a trade, naming it, you’ve given yourself like a secret sauce in a way where people know what you do, It says what it does. And for now, at least, that’s a huge advantage in that three-pack ranking.
Right. And, you know, so, I know you look at everything with the SEO point of view. I look at things now as I’m trying to fire myself actively from different positions. And so, in Godoy Law Office, you know, we focus on helping immigrants, navigate the pitfalls of the immigration process, but they’re looking for Mario Godoy, right? The name itself doesn’t really tell you that we do immigration work. The estate and probate legal group, in the name says it itself, right? And I’ll walk through and, you know, some folks don’t even know who I am, right? And I’m perfectly being, like, okay being that backstage supporter of the people on the front line.
Why not change the name of the immigration firm for that reason and just have you as the face of it?
Yeah, so, the SEO, right? I think the SEO, the, the fact that… So, the first firm I founded, by out of almost necessity, right? In 2010, I found myself getting out of law school, and I kind of just called around a number of attorneys, got some feedback and then I named it what, you know, right after myself just like any other attorney and most of us do, right? Not thinking about the, the game afterwards. So, one of the areas that we actually decided to develop kind of like mister speeding ticket, we started kind of pushing a brand called immigration simplified. And so, we have that website, that’s up, and so, that’s really, ideally speaking to a different type of consumer of immigration services, and so that’s kind of taken that brand outside.
You know, I was gonna find out how that is going. So, the immigration simplified was a sort of a no frills, low dollar, something maybe a step above Legal Zoom type of option for people between no help and full help. I’ve sort of been cynical of that concept, that without scale it couldn’t get there, curious to know, and was not alone in that you’ve, you’ve pushed back against a lot of industry experts saying, no, I see a vision. Tell me about that vision to date, how have you been? How has that been sort of swimming with that sort of intermediate step between full service and no service?
Yeah. So, that’s a good question, and, absolutely, you’re, you’re forcing that on, right? It’s tough to, you know, take another site, and I’ve heard you guys talk about this on the show about, you know, every time you build a different brand, then you got to build everything that goes around that brand, and that website and get it up there. And so, we’ve kind of taken the point of view of when you come to the Godoy Law Office, you can pick one of two scenarios, you can either go with the Godoy law, like platinum type service, we’re with it all the way to the end, but we’ve also got some very savvy consumers that they just want some help with getting the forms done, maybe they’ve gone through this already once, and they just want to get to make sure that the forms are right going out, and at some helps available for them if they have questions along the way.
I’m smiling, partially because we went through the same thing at BluShark, we saw this need for, essentially, this simple immigration simplified, you know, SEO simplified and didn’t want to confuse our main brand of BluShark, and created the Silver shark product. I never realized that the parallels between the stories till you started talking about it right here.
Yeah, yeah. And so, so we actually, at one point, were trying three different lines, and we saw that people either gravitated to the simplest version of it, or they wanted the full version of it, and so, we just laid that out. Okay, these are two product lines, right? Let’s make it easy for folks, like, that story brand, book that story brand, like keep it simple. Do you want it simple? Or do you want someone to hold your hand all the way through and do all the work for you?
So, I got a question before we flipped to Jay. You know, one of the things I think that you’ve done particularly well, and love to hear more about what you’re doing and where you see it going, is you have done your intake using non-attorney salespeople and done it probably as well as anybody that I’ve seen up close, want to get some details about, you know, your philosophy on that and how you’ve handled it. So, for as a practicing, as a lawyer, you know, with a law firm, we really try to get, in most instances, a touch with a lawyer to make sure there’s a meeting of the minds. I don’t know what you do, but we’d love to hear how you set this up in order to layer people, you know, that, in a way, I wouldn’t say nontraditional but a pretty innovative way to approach intake?
Yeah, absolutely. So, I think for anyone that is out there, and you are contemplating this, you’re going to need to come to terms with the fact that you can’t please everyone, all right, I think you guys know that, right? You guys have been around long enough to know you certainly can’t please everyone, and he kind of got a wave, whatever your kind of freak flag is, you got to weave it all the way to the end, because then you’re going to attract people that are attracted to that black, right? And so, the system that I’m running is not for everyone, right? Certainly not for every lawyer, and certainly not for every consumer, right? But what I’ve kind of done is I’ve taken non-attorneys to almost filter, in essence, a case before it lands on my attorneys’ desk. And so, someone would call in, at this point, we’ve actually up leveled that sales system that I had originally talked about, and we’re working with a client coordinator, that, new resources coordinator that’s helping to shepherd the person and set up expectations and get up some like actual work, FedExing people, materials on us and materials that can help them make a buying decision as to whether we’re the right firm for them. And when they come in, they ended up meeting with one of our client relationship managers, so one of the non-attorneys’ salespeople, and there’s no advice that happens during that, and honestly, that, that took a number of years for me to come to terms with it. As you guys know, I’ve been working with how to manage a small law firm, I have attended masterminds, I’ve met with other successful attorneys that are two, three or four levels ahead of me, and what I’ve come to learn is that when someone’s coming in, they’re kind of already just checking you out, and they want to make a decision, like on an emotional level, and then they use logic to substantiate it. They want to make a decision on the emotional level, whether you’re the right firm for them, they want to work with you and take the next step. And you don’t have to be an attorney to get to that, you don’t need to be an attorney to figure out what brought you off the lot. Let’s face it, guys, no one wants to visit a lawyer’s office, right? Like, we’re not, we’re not coming in there because of, you know, we’re there because there’s an obstacle in our way and we see it as this is what we need to do to kind of get around that obstacle. So, that’s really, in essence, what the non-attorney salesperson does, it helps them make a decision as to, are you going to keep things the same? Are you going to try this yourself? In which case, you know, we have immigration simplified available for you? Or do you really want to hire a firm to see it all the way through? In which case, hopefully, it’s us, right? The question everyone’s going to be asking is, well, don’t you get the objection of I didn’t get to meet with an attorney, right? So, I think, on that end, it just comes down to giving them a 100% money back guarantee, like we’re already doing it, like if you sit with a client at the beginning and this person turns out to be not the right fit for your firm, as attorneys, even if you don’t use the non-attorney, salesperson, ideally, you’re going to give them their money back, tear up the agreement, thank them for their time and help connect them to the type of attorney that they’re looking for, right? It’s, it’s something that we’re doing for the person, and hopefully, we’re the right Sherpa to take them up the mountain, and I tell folks that all the time, especially in immigration, and then, even in some of the probate cases that we’re dealing with, you know, that’s, that comes down to, we’ve been up the mountain, we can’t tell you it’s going to be the same trail every time, we’ve been up that mountain a number of times, and we’re the right guide for you, and when we explain it that way, we can get folks from meeting with that non-attorney salesperson, that client relationship manager and get them to the attorney strategy session.
And I’d want to follow up, which is just when, when doing that, when you get somebody coming in. I live in DC where lawyers are everywhere, neither side of me their lawyers living, you know, we, you know, it is the expectation, do you have an escape? I understand, they can write, you can fill out a retainer pay and get your money back, but is there X percent, will you know the person’s walking out? If they don’t have an attorney, where there’s an extent, like, do you have an exception? Or you do literally burn the ships and say, no, this is our model, If you don’t want to be part of it, you’re not our client?
Yeah. And so, I think that’s the one thing, there’s never a 100% rule in life, right? And I think it’s the same thing when it comes to business. I, so the only way that I was able to be into law firms is to build out systems, right? And a system just comes down to what you want to happen 80 to 90% of the time, there’s always going to be a percentage of that where the system’s not going to work, right? And then, it just comes down to enabling your staff to make some decisions, right? So, that’s one huge thing that we hit here over and over again, is here’s a decision-making tree as to how you can make the decision, and if you make the decision and it’s the wrong decision, as long as you use the decision tree, will correct. We’ll correct it and we’ll move on. It’s not…
We got the king of all systems here. Jay, what do you have to say?
No, I mean, I am in full agreement with Mario when it comes to, when it comes to not having non attorneys, you know, quote the fees and collect the fees. I mean, I don’t talk money with my physician. I don’t, you know, they have systems in place there, and I talk medicine, and so, when people come to our office, they talk law with their lawyers and they talk business with the business manager, the Money people in the office. You know, that’s the way we approach it. We do have a sales lawyer.
Well, Jay, in your office, somebody comes in their screen, they get to a lawyer, and then, only after they’ve met with the lawyer, do they sit with down something, with somebody to talk money? The lawyer doesn’t talk money.
Lawyer doesn’t talk money, lawyer doesn’t talk money. And we’ve, we, and one of the reasons why we did that is, you know, we’re, no, I guess in a low dollar space in the criminal, in the criminal practice, right? And oftentimes, you get the client sitting across the table from you and you quote a fee, you say, it’s $10,000 for us to represent you because we did flat fees, and they come back and they say, can I pay you 7,500? And you know that if you take 7500 that’s covering your cost, there’s really no profit there. And it made it very uncomfortable for the lawyers to be, like, well, I guess, maybe, but if you send in a staffer whose job it is to quote the fee, the client, the prospective client knows they don’t set the fees, and so, they’re just coming in here and they’re not going to try to negotiate the fee with the non-lawyer as if they would try it, in the same way, they would try to negotiate the fee with the lawyer. And we found a lot more success in that respect, and we’ve been doing it that way for years. Now, we do have a sales lawyer whose job it is to do all of those intakes, but then after the lawyer says, okay, are you ready to talk to somebody about money? Yes, they’ll slack, or email, or message the person who’s going to talk money, and get them on the phone with the money person who can talk about payment plans and all that stuff.
One designated money person or them…?
We do, we have one designated money person whose job it is to get the credit card, get the payment plan set up, get all this agreement, and that person does the follow up If a credit card is declined. You’re talking to one person in the office about money. That’s the way we have it set up.
Mario, you find that with your non-attorney salespeople compared to when you didn’t have them? I don’t know if you remember that far back, but do you get less negotiation on price when it’s not the practitioner?
No, there’s negotiation, I think on pricing. I think what we’ve done to kind of counteract that is that we actually have a rate sheet, and so, every year, and so, this is something that, hopefully, someone can take something from this, this meeting. Every year, we pull our cases for the last two years, even on flat fee cases we always track our time spent on a case control, you know, I can tell you more or less, how many hours, you know, an adjustment of status or a particular case might take me on the average, and then, that allows me to go back and then see, well, are there any inefficiencies in the system to fix? Or, you know, this is what it is, right? And then you take a look at that, and then you look at, well, how much do you want to make, right? Or how much do you want to pay your attorneys and other costs, and then you factor that up. And so, when you do that you end up with a, that’s why when folks ask me, what do you charge for something? I’m like, well, it depends on what your goal is, right? It really, like, the, the solo practitioner may get away with charging a lot less, right? Because their overhead will be less, but they’re also wearing multiple hats, right? And so, you’re, you’re wearing every hat that’s in the firm there. So, to answer your question, you have folks come back and they do sometimes want to talk about pricing, and then that’s just a question of sitting down there and discussing that with your client relationship manager as far as how do you handle that objection, right? Because the…
And there’s, there’s a conversation to have of price versus value, right? And that’s, and that’s really what, you know, your client relations person should be having that conversation before you even get a price, you know, so that they can, so that the consumer understands the value that they’re getting for whatever it is that they pay.
And sometimes it’s just compared to what? Right? Compared to, that’s expensive, but compared to what, right? And…
I have that conversation all the, all the time, but I got a question because Jim, Jim and I come out of the criminal defense space. So, if you take, if you’re in the non-contingency world, in the fee for service world, we’re, both your practices are something that, you know, I have looked at, which I think that Jim Hacking has been talking about this a lot. We in the criminal defense space generally don’t have a barrier. There’s no consultation fee, the idea is free consultation. It’s pretty ubiquitous. Very few criminal lawyers do it, some do, but our attitude has been, hey, if we know that there’s a charge, there are only two choices, either a public defender or us, you know, or a private attorney. We don’t want like, if we sign one out of three, hopefully it’s better than that, God bless, it’s 3, 3, 5-minute consultations and you’re on your way. But Jim has been talking a lot but I’ve been sort of game theory a lot with our Immigration practice, and I’m curious, trust is safe to a lesser extent, which is you don’t really want consultations, you know, I looked at our numbers and I saw all these two hundred dollar consultations in there, and I’m like, it’s not profitable, would you really want to sign cases? And the question is, do you feel that by using the non-attorney sales technique that you are actually, without leveraging lawyer time, vetting to viable clients faster than the traditional selling of a consultation? Which all you really want is the sign in case, you don’t, if it’s four to one, those three, if you could somehow skip them, and now, magic know which ones they were, but the idea is, is the mousetrap you’ve built getting rid of the paid consultation, because everybody gets a consultation with non-lawyer time and only the right one becomes the client. Is that, is that part of the method to the madness?
Yeah, I mean, those are great questions, as far as laying that out. I think it comes down to… I’ve done both, I, you know, I’ve, I’ve flipped flopped in between, I’ve done where we charge, and right now we’re on a space where we’re not charging, and we’ll just switch it up. So, I think the theory behind that isn’t necessarily that you’re trying to make money off the consultation.
Agree. Agree. Agree.
Yeah, we’re trying to make sure that the person who’s there is serious about their case, right? And so, that’s kind of what I’ve done with this mousetrap, right? Or the system that we’ve kind of created is that if the person is sitting in front of one of our attorneys, there’s money sitting in the IOLTA, right? For their case, and they’ve signed an engagement agreement, hold different balls can’t be more like serious about moving forward.
They’re not moving forward unless there’s a not a meeting of the minds.
And sometimes, you know what? Sometimes there are instances where we’ve initiated the refund, and there are times when they’ve initiated the refund, right? But it happens on such a little basis that you actually ended up winning more, and getting more clients through the door by doing it that way.
I use the dating analogy a lot in, in business, the recruiting side, the client side, there are a lot of that. I almost trying to like put, put this in the dating thing, it’s almost like you’re going on a first date, instead of going for drinks before determines you wanna go for dinner. Each, you and the other person are each paying half the meal, and while you decide, at any point, you know, it’s over. I just had my drink; I want to get out of here, give me my money back, i’m leaving. But you’re essentially saying, we presume we’re moving forward, and that presumption means a lot because you’re moving in that direction. What are some of the obstacles you found for people that might be interested in putting this into place? Because it’s not easy, it’s a mindset shift, there’s a getting a step above. What did you have to do to get from A to Z to make that, that complete shift?
Yeah, you’ve got a, you’ve got to micromanage the experience, right? And I think that there’s, you can’t abdicate this role, right? You got to check in, you’ve got to ideally, have, sit in on some of these sales calls, ask them if they got permission to record the calls, so that you could listen in on it later. And so, you’ve got to, you got to do your homework on it, if you’re gonna run with it, right? Because you want to make sure that the non-attorneys are not giving legal advice, and then you want to make sure that they’re hitting every part of the sales process as you’re going through. And so, ideally, when you get done with that, you’ll have a system that can kind of turn out, if you have five people coming in, you know, you’re going to close one or two of them on a very consistent basis running the, running the system, right? And so, I think the, someone who’s contemplating this one, you got to learn how to sell right on your own. You can’t just, I think you can’t just hire someone to do it, and so, you should study how to sell legal services, ideally, in learn that on your own and set up like a system that you’re going to follow every time. You know, for us, we talked about setting an agenda, talking about, you know, confidentiality, and then kind of diving into the reasons for coming, and then hitting it up with, you know, how is that going to help you followed by an analysis at the end has, what, what do you want to do next, right? And then, ideally, they’ll move forward with us from that. And so, that’s for us, other, you know, other types of law firms may set up a different system.
But Mario, I really liked the fact that you’re able to sort of jump in there and walk me through your process. And I know that, you know, during COVID, when we had some people sick and that type of thing, I had to jump on the phones and do some phone sales, at least the beginning part of the phone sales process, and it’s like riding a bike, right? You know, you’ve got sort of those mental waypoints in your head, and, and you hit those, and then you, you know, they put the person on hold, and I pick up I say, okay, they’re ready to, they’re ready to pay, and people are like, wait, you just picked up that phone seven minutes ago? And I’m like, yeah, but I got the skills, you know, I’ve been doing this for 20 years, you know, I can close, like, the best of them, you know, just give me, give me, you know, give me a lead and give me a phone and I’ll do it. Just because I don’t do it every day doesn’t mean I still don’t have that skill set, you know, but that’s…
You know, Jay, it’s funny, because you used to do this more, and I feel like a lot of old school guys do this now, which is there are people that’s their whole business, they sit and answer the phone and close, and then everybody else can do whatever they want, but they know that they have that, that Jay twinkle where they know how to get people comfortable and bring them in.
Yeah, I mean, that’s, that’s really something that you got that sort of have to figure out. I liked the daily grind of closing new business, it was always something that I found enjoyable. I hate to admit it, but there was a little bit of, you know, dirty, dastardly, sort of every client I closed meant that another lawyer wasn’t getting the case, and I, you know, you know, and I can remember coming out of law school, and, you know, and, and being hungry. And I put up a billboard, you know, about two years into my practice and I was getting such snide comments from judges, and prosecutors and other lawyers, how could you do that? It’s, it brings us down, blah, blah, and I’m like, but none of you are paying my student loans, and I got to, I got bills to pay, you know, so I sort of took this mental attitude of if you’re going to talk down to me because I’m trying to hustle and make a living, well, I’m going to show you, I’m going to steal all your clients, I’m going to eat your lunch, you know, and there were opportunities that came my way to sort of grab market share, and I took every single one of them because, you know, at the end of the day, I’m taking care of my family, you know, as people who are out here know, my, my partner, my partner’s my father, and, you know, my, my other partners, my sister’s best friend, we’re a family firm in that respect. So, you know, it’s, I got to take care of those people.
That’s a great point, I think that you raise as far as with the mindset is, right? I can still remember when I started my firm, I didn’t have any contacts, right? I’m, I’m a first-generation immigrant here, and that was part of like the probate scenario and the estate planning that, you know, not everyone in the first generation really takes advantage of those laws that are here, and so, that was kind of my mission in starting that other firm as well, but yeah, just that mindset of I picked up the phone, I looked at the phonebook, and I started dialing, dialing for dollars, ground for dollars and dollars, calling folks and getting all kinds of advice from different attorneys, and every once in a while, you’d hit someone that, that would be willing to share, and that’s why like, I’ll always do shows like this wherever I can pay it forward because it was paid forward to me as well, but that mindset, that mindset is key. And that’s why I don’t have the attorneys always jump in on the appointments, because I think there’s a lot going on in that sales call.
Well, look, one thing, I’ll throw this to both you guys because I’m in awe of the systems and the discipline that you guys have, as Jay knows, more loosey-goosey, and I pushed very hard for our intake to be able to have some flexibility in where they go, and with the non-attorney salesperson, we just did an internal call during COVID. It’s great, because we’re getting these amazing zoom calls. We had like, you know, of our 40 lawyers, two thirds on a call discussing best practices of intake, and because a lot of the attorneys are touching clients that point, and I was amazed at how interpersonal they got. And how do you scale that? How do you, how do you systematize that when you have, you, know, this… That’s what I’m throwing back to you. You have the system? Is there a place in your system where you’re like, you know, talk about confidentiality, find something in common and talk about, how granular do you get, or do you give more leeway to your people to form those bonds naturally?
Well, that’s the whole sales process, right? That’s how it works, because, you know, certainly the, the non-attorney salesperson is not there to give advice, right? I bet the attorneys that were forming those bonds, if you go back and take a look at your role of attorneys, they barely gave advice and really helped the person just make a decision and they probably closed at a higher rate than, than anyone else. Like, we always talk about, you know, everyone wants to eat the hot dog, but no one wants to walk the sausage factory, right? And that’s what we do often as attorneys is like we try to hide behind what we know or sometimes, or that we could resolve that problem. And it really comes to making, you make the person who’s sitting across from you the star, right? They’re the star of their own life, they get to decide what they want to do and you’re just there to kind of help them make that decision. And so, that’s, that’s the main thing, that’s how we scale it, that’s how I’ve been able to do it, is that these conversations are more of what brought you in? How’s that affecting you, right? What would life be like if that wasn’t in your way anymore?
You’re doing the emotive like, imagine… Jay, what are your thoughts on that?
Well, you know, one of the things that, you know, jumps out at me is that there is a level of honesty that a non-attorney salesperson, or these non-attorney staff, that’s talking to the lead will get out of potential clients that the lawyer won’t get. Talking to a lawyer, we’ve all said it, is intimidating, and people want to put their best foot forward, I mean, you know, Seth, I know you haven’t done it in a long time but you handled some criminal cases back in the day, how many times did you have a police report, you say, this isn’t what you told me you did it, because people want to shade everything to their benefit, and, you know, that’s just the nature, human nature, you know, you’re going to, you’re going to give the best perspective. So, you may have that conversation with, with an attorney, and I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that, I’m going to do this, and then they get on the phone with the, with the non-attorney salesperson, and they say, I’m not doing any of that stuff. So, so, the non-attorney salesman allows them to let down their guard a little bit, and I think that helps people convert and it also allows the non-attorney salesperson to understand why they’re not converting so you can change the messaging that you’re sending to them, perhaps in your follow ups, because you’ve gotten more information, and I think that’s, that’s certainly something, that’s the way we would have we have been approaching it and it has been successful for us by not having the attorney make the sales.
I know that my model is not as efficient as the ones you described, you know, I want my cake and eat it too. I want the attorney to bond, but I also know that if I’m going head-to-head on a more expensive case, that we’re putting our best foot forward and that this is the guy who is going to solve your problem and he’s going to be able to tell you firsthand what he would do. Again, its Apple, that’s why when I looked at it, I don’t love the non-attorney salesperson and, Jay, you’re talking, you have an attorney meet with them, it may be different in how they price it. That’s why I’m looking at some of these other areas, can we put people on a pedestal, I have never been able to make that leap. I liked the idea, and I feel like we’ve scaled to a pretty decent degree, that there’s a risk at every point. Now, you’re, you know, when you do have somebody else promising you, again, your model is just the order in which they’re getting there, right? You’re basically saying, hey, we’re going to dinner, and you’re going to be here for the next number of hours. If you want to leave, it’s up to you, but assume you’re here for dinner, it’s my own…
And so, here’s the…
Well, if I can jump on it before you do that, no one goes to a restaurant to then decide if they’re hungry, you’re at a restaurant to eat. People call a lawyer because they need a lawyer. So, Mario, take over. I just, I had to jump in there on that analogy.
No, no, but I’ll follow the analogy. You’re hungry, you have to eat, but is this the person you want to be dining with? That’d be that, again, it’s an analogy. It’s faulty by definition, but Mario, go ahead, we, Jay, I, can just ignore us.
So, I’m at the restaurant. I get done with the host. They take me to the back meet the waiter, right? There, here’s the one honest part that I actually like about this model better, because we actually used Jays model for a number of years. That was my model. I’d go in for 15 minutes, glad hand, answer a couple of softball questions and then let the non-attorney salesperson finish up the size of…
The dental, the Dentist Hygienist Model, right?
The Dentist Hygienist Model. Yeah, that’s what we used to do, and that’s great, but you know, then your kind of almost have to have an attorney on call just for sales all the time. All right, and one of the things that, as I’ve been going through that have been kind of taught, is to make every system very simple and get them to the next step. It’s, you know, your marketing, the only step there is you want to get the phone ring, right? Or even as far as like maybe your Facebook, right? Your Facebook posts, the only thing you want there is for them to click through, and so, you are just this design is to get them to click through and once they’ve clicked through, you want them to pick, you know, pick up the phone and call you. Once they call, the receptionist is only supposed to get them to the next step, and then, the client relationship manager gets them in front of the attorney, right? Every step is just a very simple scenario, and what I found incredibly honest about this is that I, I was there, you know, I started my practice from the ground up, and, you know, speaking to those folks that are out there watching this, I get it, I get the idea of like, needing that next client, you know, on your roster so that you can continue to have a thriving practice, but what can you really learn from someone in a 15 to 30 minute, like, initial meeting, right? To be able to say, I really gave him a good consultation, the system that I’ve created allows my attorneys to spend about an hour to like two hours with that person at that attorney strategy session, and really hammer out a plan of action.
It’s a first meet, it’s not a consultation, they’re clients. They meet back, you have a client, by the grace of God.
And so, then we’ve got, we’ve got a plan at the beginning of the case as to who’s going to do what and by when, and we can really get a good, like first step, but like I said before, and I think this kind of talks about, you know, set the side, like, you know, I really want to compete and get these higher level cases, it just comes from having to, I think, like, I had to mature in a sense and say, not every person is going to be right for me. And, you know what, some of my referral sources are going to get turned off by this process, and…
It’s a good follow up. Are you using this for a referral situation? If it’s a referral, or do any cases go straight to you or other attorneys? Or does everything go through this model?
We try to make everything go through the model, but that’s what I, you know, that’s what I kind of said at the beginning of the call is that there’s, in nature, there’s no one rule, like, for everything every time, right? And so, I think it’s the same thing as, you will use this for 80%, 90% of the time, it’s a complete Pareto Principal scenario. There’s going to be a small percentage where you’re going to have to stray a little bit out of the system, and that’s okay, if you want to empower your people to do it, but if you, it really comes down to do you want to work in the business or do you want to be the person working on the business? Right? And at this point, you know, it’s not, folks always think that the answer is marketing or more sales, sometimes it’s just a cleaning up the holes in your bucket.
Absolutely.
You know, and you also need to like, hey, listen, one of the nice things about planning out how many hours a case is going to take, you could look at all the cases you signed up and look at how many hours, because I look at it as, it is a big question for you guys, when does the sale end? This is something that took me a while to figure out. When does the sale end?
Jay, I’ll let you go.
I don’t think the sale ever really ends because you want to get those referrals coming in off of that well served client, and I mean…
Amen.
They’re always, you know…
By definition, I’ll play the stooge, you know, there, if you have a sales team it, for at least, from my world, the sale end, by definition, like you’re right, the attorney has to carry it, but happens essentially once there’s a sign on retainer, it moves into the dating world now, we’re now going for like a, you know, a walk in the pumpkin patch, and we’re going for a hayride, like, there’s more stuff, so, you may still like if you if like any relationship, if you stop caring and giving effort, the relationship will fall apart, but that you now are no longer hoping to get dinner with somebody, there is some sort of a back and forth and so the relationship has changed. But, you know, your point is well taken, the sale may continue, but I think it’s like anything else, you’re at a different, you’re at a different point on that continuum.
So, my answer to that question, and then I got a question towards the end for you.
Okay, all right. In some folks like so in, what was the name of this?… But Mike McAllister just wrote a book, in really, in essence, he kind of talked about it as the sale ends when you’re done delivering the legal service, right? Or you’re done delivering the service, right? Which is, the liability is still there for the firm to execute on that promise.
But that’s after the review, not, not when the search service ends.
Yeah. And so, yeah, it could go both ways, you could either look at the sale ending at the review, right? And attorneys, like if you guys aren’t doing this at the end of your case, even if it’s a win, invite the client back a couple of weeks later and just do a final, a final case review and you may find that you’ll get extra work out of that or that’s how you get positive reviews, or get people to agree to do videos for you. But the whole idea is that if, if you’re stuck, was doing the sale, you can’t be doing these other parts that you need to run successfully, right? You need to be auditing the legal files as they’re going through or, you know, working on the case, you might be finding yourself going to court, someone’s got to be running the marketing, someone’s got to be converting people into clients, someone’s got to be looking at the books, you got to do future planning. Jay or Seth talked about recruitment, you got to do recruitment, and so, this is why I think people need to look at, at least an adaption of this system. Maybe you don’t have to adopt the full thing, but you can, you can take parts of it and see if you can kind of systemize a little bit.
Jay, you got a final question?
So, I got a final question, and it may open up the need to have you back on the show, and tell me if it does, because if it is, we’ll end it and we won’t even get into it, but the question really comes down to, so you’ve got your firm, you’ve got the Godoy firm, it’s firing, you say to yourself, I want to open another firm. Do you fund it fully with your revenue that you’ve taken out of your existing firms? You open up a bank account and dumping $100,000 or $250,000, and say, I’m renting space, I’m going to put in the systems? Are you bootstrapping it like you build your original firm? What’s the way to approach having, having the Genesis and bringing up a brand-new firm? I mean, you could do it a million different ways, but what do you feel is the right way to do it? And if it’s too much to answer, please say stop and we’ll get you back on a show when we can, and this will be a tease for Mario.02, because I think it’s something that a lot of people need to understand that there’s different ways to approach this thing.
Absolutely, I think you hit it right on the head, there’s so many different ways to approach it. Always love to come back. To give you a quick tidbit, you know, we decided to bootstrap it, I took on an awesome partner named Steven Novak, loves, lives and breathes Probate and Estate Planning, and I’m learning through osmosis rather quickly, but, you know, we, we kind of grew it from, from a spill, this is almost like we added a little bit, we were able to use some of the DOJ like resources to kind of get started, we added in some of our own resources, and then that’s really kind of been building as we’ve been going through, I think this should ideally be a growth year for us, as well in the midst of COVID for both firms. And so, we’re, we’re pushing through, pushing through, but we decided to bootstrap it, right? But someone could decide to go a different route, someone could decide to fund it completely and then you could just add that entire departments, you know, you could add in those people right away and run it, right? So, there’s really, it just depends on what your business plan is and…
And manage have some resources that could bleed over until you, until they weren’t needed until you could afford your own.
Right. So, we had a little bit of an advantage there, but, you know, having bootstrapped my own firm at the beginning, like I started off with beating people in the library, like you know, in a services business, outside of our license, the barrier to entry is rather low.
Something not be like that anymore.
Right now, even be that in some, in some states, which I see as an opportunity, but, you know, I think that’s going to really depend on the eye of the beholder there. Yeah, I’d love to sit down and chat about how we went about doing that at some point.
I have questions for part two, are going to be what do you, how do you train the non-attorney salesperson? What do you do when they quit? We haven’t even gotten into the genius behind your monthly lunches. So, we got a lot for, for 2.0.
Awesome. It sounds good. Let’s get that on the calendar then.
Very good. Thanks so much for your time. We really love having you.
Alright. Thanks, guys.
Thanks so much. Great talking to you.
Wow, Seth, I got to tell you, you know, spending some time with Mario, I realized I got a lot out of it, but I didn’t get enough. I definitely think that there’s room for a whole another segment, it actually would be interesting to have a panel sort of discussion, including Mario Serra about, is it bootstrapping, is it, is it VC funding yourself? You said, you know, there’s so many questions running around in my mind right now that we can answer, and I think our audience would love to get the answers to these things. What do you say?
No, absolutely. I’ll give you one other, you know, sort of tangent or panel is what Mario has done as far his monthly meetings, and now he’s done them to Zoom’s the way that he’s connected locally, in the b2c space, so hard to make meaningful contacts and he has created a tribe, not unlike what John Fisher’s done nationally, would, you know, dig deeper on how people can do that in their own regions, i think it’s definitely worth some time.
Yeah, that could be a whole subject for a whole week of shows, both on Tuesday and Thursday, you know, how to build your tribe. I mean, that’s something that I think a lot of people, you know, are struggling trying to get the answers for. We’ve had a phenomenal week, we had, you know, is SEO dead on Tuesday, we had that great review by Chris and David, who we want to get on the show, then today with Mario, I got to tell you a lot of great content and if you haven’t subscribed to our podcast, if you haven’t followed the show, please make sure you follow the show. Get involved, drop us some notes in the comment if there’s something you want to ask somebody, if there’s people that you want to see, if there’s somebody that you know that you think it’d be a great guest, please let us know about it because we’re here to give to you guys. We want to make Max growth live your resource for growing your law firm. But with that said, I think we got it, I think we got to end it. Now. look, I’m pointing the wrong way, I did it again. I’m trying to but they’re Seth over there. Seth of BluShark and Price Benowitz, me Firm Flexing, Ruane Attorneys. Thank you also for being with us. Seth, you got anything in store for the weekend?
No, just, you know, basically the homeschool is kicking our butt and we just need to take a break from it over the weekend.
Yeah, I’m taking tomorrow off from work to pack up my kitchen, because for some reason, including homeschooling, my wife decided that now’s the right time to do a kitchen renovation. So, we’re about to go kitchen list for the next two months. So, I, but now I want to work out some stress right now, for that I’m going to go jump on my peloton. If anybody wants to follow me on get firm flex on peloton.
If you get rid of the kitchen, maybe that’s the greatest diet plan ever.
Yeah, I’ll take out food, great diet plan. Great diet plan. Alright, folks, thanks so much for being with us. We’ll see you next week on Tuesday for the Tuesday edition of Maximum Growth Live. Bye for now, folks.
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