Join Seth and Jay as they talk about giving benefits to overseas workers, how to handle a staffer implosion, and should you be using Call Rail or another tracking service.
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 funnels for lawyers and something new coming in the next two weeks, we’re going to be happy to announce that, as well as managing partner of Ruane attorneys, a civil rights and criminal defense firm here in Connecticut. But in addition to that, I’ve got the Criminal Mastermind now which is growing and growing my passion project where I help coach criminal defense lawyers with the…
I thought that was like my nickname, I’m the “Criminal Mastermind” and the guy comes up with different criminal activities.
You know, it’s kind of funny because I talked to a friend of ours, the Law Man, he was like, you know, I wanted to start a mastermind, and I love the name, I was gonna use the same name. So it’s almost, you know, it’s the perfect trademark mastermind group. But what’s interesting to me is how many people don’t know what a mastermind is. We’ve been going to them for years. But it’s sort of you have to educate the public about it. So I’ve got three, Seth over there, he’s got two, he is one of the founders of Price Benowitz DC, Maryland, Virginia, powerhouse, oh and South Carolina, don’t forget, criminal defense lawyers. You know, I was just talking to our friends, Stephanie Everett from Lawyerist and Ryan McKean. They’re actually down in South Carolina today, doing something for case status, some sort of conference that they have a one day thing. And I’m jealous because they’re in Charleston. And so I said, you got to go to Rodney Scott’s and get some barbecue, the wings he has smoked, just amazing. But then there’s also BluShark Digital, your SEO for law firms all over the country. And BluShark’s name rings out when people talk SEO and quality SEO. Of course, I’m one of your clients. I’m not only a proponent, but I’m also a client of yours. Seth, as always, how’s your week going this week?
It’s going pretty well, lots, you know, lots of ups and downs. I feel like it’s whack a mole, you know, you get one thing fixed, we got our intake is doing amazingly well. I got to make a cool announcement this morning. We for all of our international people, paid time off, which is something that we didn’t start with. But that, you know, I felt was important. I know you started rolling it out. But my goal is to start to simulate as much as we can towards, you know, equality between the international and domestic workers, obviously, the huge, you know, we save a lot by arbitraging internationally. And there are some huge open issues as far as how people are being treated as contractors internationally. But I don’t want just like here, you know, until a Supreme Court case, a lot of people pushed the contractor rules pretty far. And in fact, I looked at and said, Whoa, if FedEx drivers are contractors, why am I… and this is real estate holdings, why am I making anybody an employee? And then the Supreme Court says, in fact they are, you know, they are, in fact, not contractors. So basically, we talk about longevity, opportunities. I, again, we have to figure out this contractor versus non contractor role, which overtime may or may not rear its ugly head internationally. Domestically it’s clearly settled. But the question is, if we can keep people happier, by treating them with what is an extra, what is, you know, like for me, to 10 days of PTO out of 250 days, you’re talking about a single digit percentage increase in pay, I think it’s about 4%. But that if this keeps people happier with you longer, worth every penny.
Absolutely, absolutely. You know, we started back in January, you know, we get most of our remote talent through get staffed up, you know, they factor in a week’s vacation into their thing, but we actually upgraded it to our people to give them two weeks off, we have a number of overseas people who are getting married, and they need some time with their family. And that’s good. We actually also added a benefit. You know, most of these people are in countries where they have universal health care. We don’t have it here in the States. But what they don’t get is mental health care, we actually found a provider that we can actually give them mental health care through through Slack, it’s a Spill doc chat is the organization. I don’t get anything from them, I’m not an affiliate or anything, but I figured put it out there for you. So and we integrated that. And I get the reports monthly. I don’t get the reports of who’s using it, but I get the reports that it’s being used and how many people are using it and my overseas people are using it just because I know statistically, that number of people has to include them. And I’ve actually gotten some DMs from some of my people overseas who are blown away that we would offer mental health treatment, and that it has worked wonders for them. You know, we’ve got some people stateside that are going through family changes that have used it, it’s been a great addition, and it makes them feel really part of the organization, not as a contractor, but part of your team, they’re looking out for you know, and it’s really been, it’s really been a wonderful thing.
So if you could put that in the comments, your Systemizing Facebook group would love that, to make sure people get access to that, including myself, but that sort of pivots to the next topic in very, very nicely, which is, okay, you know, again, awesome, I’m really proud and excited to see what we’re gonna get here. And hopefully, this makes a big difference as far as stickiness, not that we’ve had huge issues internationally, but I like to make sure we have the least possible. But, you know, what do you do that we keep talking about what’s going on, I see it with my own kids, you know, COVID is taking a hard hit on a lot of people, adults are not immune. And that, you know, we recently had a situation where somebody was clearly not right, they raised their hand, we said we’re there for you, we want to support you, and sort of push things along, rather than letting somebody sort of, you know, exit. Try to support them as they objectively were doing decently, but then just completely fell apart to the point where they weren’t returning calls. There’s a non lawyer capacity, but a certain number of vendor relationships were, this is on the Price Benowitz side, were an issue because they just weren’t calling people back. And it came to a head when I gave a finite task that was un-hide-able, where I said, I want these 10 people called, and I found out that they had not happened. And so that is the unraveling. But this is I think, part of something that we all struggle with, which is when something isn’t right, we want to make it better. You and I, I can only speak for myself, have that desire to do that. But that when things aren’t right, and you eventually get out of it, you usually find out it’s much worse, it’s never better than you thought, right? Always worse. And are there, I mean, look, systems are one checks and balance. But what is the pull and tug between, you know, from your point of view of pushing along saving, not having turnover, of somebody in trouble, versus cutting it off, because whatever, you know, it isn’t going to fall down. We’ve had some amazing turnaround. Somebody in my in my intake department went from being like a C player to really becoming a very strong productive member of the team with some coaching and some pushing. So it’s not like you want to throw the baby out the bathwater, at the same time figuring out when somebody really is in trouble, whether it’s leave of absence or, or otherwise, but that balancing tests, I really struggle with sometimes. Your thoughts?
So this is, you know, this is something that’s happened in my firm. And one of the things that I think helps us sort of identify is the fact that, you know, we’re a small operation, there’s about 30 of us, you know, we’re not as large as some firms like yours. So everyone sort of really interacts with each other on the reg. And we know a little bit more about what’s going on in each other’s lives. So last year, yeah, last year, last January. So January 2021, one of the husbands of one of my senior intake people deployed with the National Guard to Africa, he was going to be gone for 11 months. And we altered her schedule, because at that point was going to be a single mom, you know, and we were able to alter her schedule to work around her needs. But by about September, October, the pressure had really gotten to her. Like really like to the point she was snapping at people. She was missing things in her work and that type of thing. And so she had been with us now for probably a decade, you know, she was with us here in Connecticut, actually relocated to Florida during COVID and continued to work. And, you know, we had a talk among the partners and said, you know, she’s got a lot of institutional knowledge. We know this isn’t who she is as a person, but things just are not working right now. And so what we did is we said, we call her in, we’re going to do a reset, take two weeks off, paid, it’s a dish, its bonus vacation, whatever you want to call it, just take two weeks to sort of destress, get all the stuff off your plate. And then when you come back, you’re going to come back in a special project role, where we’re going to take you away from the intake team, which has, you know, as you and I know, intake has a lot of immediate pressure, high stress sort of environment, you know, they’re trying to hit their numbers, they’re, you know, their phones are always ringing and we moved her into a role and I sort of elevated her up, no paycheck change or anything like that into the role of my Systems Auditor for a six month period. And she has flourished in that role and come back to us saying…
But okay, great, but similar playbook, right? We did a week, just take some time, the first go around, the issue is, so what you’re saying is you have to pull them out of that job, great that you found another piece for her. But you essentially are saying, You know what, I have to immediately find a replacement. It wasn’t like it was a week off, that’s sort of the nice, and hey, now I’m putting you back in the potential hire pool and see where else I could use you. And I get that, right. Wonderful, awesome. But you made the strategic decision that you didn’t take a week off and go back to intake, hoping because getting a new person for intake, not easy… right. And that’s the piece that I am pushing for so so hard, goes back to this call. Look, we went from a moment where I saw like 70% being answered to over 90 with 100% of paid search, like, you know, really amazing numbers. We were buying the entire team, domestic, international, you know, a festive dinner, however we can, like really going all out just adding these benefits. But, you know, yes, I think that’s what a lot of this comes down to and look, I see this on all things whether it be BluShark or Price Benowitz, or other other businesses, you know, I landed at BWI the other night, and they have the C concourse, there are four concourses, three are connected ABC, they literally don’t have a single person to watch an exit at C, you literally had to walk a quarter mile to B and then a quarter mile back if you’ve already called for an Uber before you got there. So it’s literally about a half a mile extra, because they don’t have the staffing for that. And I call, like we all have turnover, there’s always turnover. And it sucks. Because if you’re talking to a smaller firm on this, right, they don’t have the wherewithal to have four extra people, you know, each person, but if you don’t have that bench being built, history is written by the victors. If nobody has a mental breakdown, and nobody is sick, and nobody quits, you’re fine. But if any of those things happen, the firm falls so far back. And we, you know, again, I think my law partner summarized this well… If you look at people as an annualized salary, you’ll be frozen and never do anything. But if you’re looking at it for one quarter, or for two months, what does an extra intake person cost you? You know, not that much. What are the odds that you’re fully staffed at the end of that two months?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I am a firm believer that law firms traditionally start off understaffed. I mean, you would never, you know, you would never open up any other business with one person trying to do it all. You know, I talked to a guy, he’s the guy, I answer my phones, you know, it rings to my cell phone. And I’m like, you know, you gotta get somebody to help you with this, though, because you’re losing intakes. Because if you don’t pick up your phone when you’re in the courthouse or on a console with somebody, that person is saying, Nope, not leaving a message, who’s the next person to call?
You know, this was not our topic, but I’ll sort of bring it to this, which is we’re talking about seeing what’s going on potentially, in Arizona and Utah, very likely, things are moving quickly, right? Out of your friends, for instance, in the dermatology space, several of our kids’ friends’ parents are dermatologists. Private equity has brought everybody up in our region. And it’s going out to the hinterlands. So basically they’re saying is, we’ll give you a bunch of money, because we know that even paying you that bunch of money, if we answer the phones, process the insurance claims, staff the office, and you just sit there and pop pimples, sorry, being flippant, not really. But if you just, whatever it is, right, but that if you just do the widget making, the showing up to court, again, I feel like in one sense, what we’ve done well at Price Benowitz is tried to have all those pieces done not by lawyers, right, that we have the accounting, have the marketing, have the intake, all that stuff, but that what we’re seeing is that, and I can’t profess to be amazing at those things. It’s a work in progress every day. See, we had an issue with intake. But that basically, the rest of the world as to Jay Ruane’s point is, you know, doesn’t pretend that the practitioner could configure this out.
Yeah, I mean, I think that’s a huge takeaway right there in that, you know, there are people who, for lack of a better term, specialize in each one of these roles that you’re trying to do as the lawyer and if you can get yourself to a place where you can leverage overseas talent at a lower dollar, because remember, a lot of people we know, they hang a shingle, they have one person, and that person is with them, and that person is the, you know, jack of all trades in the office.
I had that. And when she left, it was months, if not years before we were set, hired four people to replace her. Yeah, I mean, we had paid her. And if she never went to law school, I would have been that much better off. But…
But she does, and that’s one of the things is that, you know, all of our firms are living breathing organisms. And people come and go and it has no, you can have the best working environment, you know, above market wages, a quality of life that is unmatched, people will still leave you, because you are a small percentage of their overall life. You know, families decide to move, the spouse has decided to retire and they decide, I mean, there’s a million reasons why people would leave you. You want to make it so that, I mean I’ve been blessed in that people who have left me have asked to come back.
It’s a whole other conversation for another day. Andrew Finkelstein would say never, you know, a lot of us say, you know, it depends, you know, same thing with clients. You know, if a client fires you and wants to come back, a little different.
Client fires you and wants to come back, I say who got?
Yeah, it really depends on how somebody leaves, I get it. In our remaining moments, just before we were on air, we had a really interesting discussion. We’re in the midst of for the first time in a gazillion years relaunching the Ruane website. And one of the things our team, our checklist was going over with you was Call Rail. To us, it’s a living breathing, and Jay was like woah.
Explain to us what Call Rail is, for the people who don’t know that.
Feel free, but it’s basically a way to track where calls come from, record those conversations, and give you basically the backbone of accountability on several levels, from tracking to quality of calls, etc. So that, for example, if you’re doing paid search, you know which calls come from paid search, how the quality of the intake is assuming that you either are allowed to record or use the whisper to acknowledge that it’s happening, but that we’re essentially giving that and, you know, for myself, I find it invaluable. I’m pushing more and more towards it. Not the tracking is perfect. I’m a firm believer that we we’re not good enough on our best day to truly track where things are coming from. Our biggest case in firm’s history, to this day, I still don’t know where it came from. It was a referral that nobody’s ever taken and a referral on a multimillion dollar case, usually people come out of the woodwork, nothing. So, you know, long story short, the debate happened. You know, Jay Ruane is not a fan of something that a lot of us think of as a best practice, do you want to explain your thinking and we could sort of talk this out.
Okay, so my thinking is this. 50% of my business comes by way of referral… for now. We do a lot to encourage referrals. I actually have a referral budget. We’ve got referral metrics that people have to hit.
Trade shows…
Yeah I set up trade show booths at law firm trade shows, just to introduce myself to more people. I mean, we are aggressive on the referral. My reasoning is…
No reasoning, God bless your…
I don’t want to rely on just one thing. Here’s the problem. I am at court one day, talk to a lawyer, or I’m not at court, but one of my lawyers is at court and they say oh, I work at Ruane attorneys, we’re doing this… And the guy remembers, okay, or the girl remembers, I need to refer a client to Ruane attorneys. So they go in, they do a quick search to get my phone number to give to their client. And they wind up with a call tracking number. They give that to our client, to the potential lead, lead comes in, calls a call tracking number, and now it is inappropriately ascribed to digital and not ascribed to referral. Which is the way that it…
Time out, time out. First, and because we see this not just with your referral but with TV marketers. First, if you actually are using it properly, you would see that as a search for Ruane attorneys. That is not something that a digital agency should take credit for because that’s a direct search. Now, the only overlap would be somebody, I can’t remember, there’s some really nice Irishman I met it was personable can’t remember his name, do a search for Connecticut DUI lawyer. And then oh, that name matches up. So is it perfect? No, because that’s part of it. That’s part of the game. But I think you’re overthinking it in that the great thing about Call Rail if you do know that a search emanated from a Jay Ruane search, then of course that goes to the referral world, or in the case of a TV advertise a TV world, but that you’re overthinking it, and God forbid it’s off by a little bit, I think tracking is one of those things that we aspire to. It’s never perfect. We’re continuing to push but that the more that you push in that direction, the better off that you will be. Again, I know for myself that there’s a point of diminishing returns. And if you look at the legends in the space, like a John Morgan, they don’t use tracking numbers. They’re like F-it, I don’t know what works, what doesn’t work, they have their main number, I get it… You and I are not John Morgan. And if you want to see the differences in how things go, and like, to me, one to be nice to hold somebody accountable. I’m sort of like saying, Yes, this would hold people accountable. You’re saying you might give them too much credit, get rid of the direct searches. Second, I know that Connecticut, like like Maryland, has it if you put your whisperer out, and you’re legally allowed to do it, Gary Falkowitz, big friend of the show and a big fan of, he told me, You got to listen to the recordings, I hope you listen to recordings in some way, shape or form, not one way. If you don’t, you are leaving money on the table. I don’t think we know many things for certain that I have seen myself for many years, I was like, Oh, I’ll listen to one side of a conversation in the office. And we listened and all of a sudden, it was shocking. When you hear the other side of a conversation of somebody who’s broken, we talked about the beginning of the show, somebody has their meltdown. And they’re sitting there and they’re going, Aha, I hear you. And it turns out, the person’s bawling their eyes out about something, and there’s no empathy, no nothing, and all you’re hearing is something that seems fine. All I could say is, every person who’s listened to recorded calls, it’s been an epiphany, and it’s changed their life. And that more you do that, just like you have your systems processors, add to the auditors, add to that listening to recorded calls. Because if you don’t, you’re leaving money on the table, there’s just no other way to put it. And if Call Rail gives you that opportunity, God bless, turn it off when you don’t want to use it. But the idea that something that has so many different positive attributes, and from where I sit, not to mention, I’ll say now I’ll take it from an agency owner perspective. Somebody says, Yeah, we’re just not getting ROI. And we go, let’s do a few phone calls, and they have somebody asleep at the wheel, it happens. It happened to me recently, that, you know, if you’re not doing that, I think it’s just a missed opportunity.
Well, I mean, and that comes down, I think, you know, listening to the phone calls, if you have a good script that people are supposed to follow, you know, to embrace people with empathy when they do call in. And you know, that should be the first thing that they’re trying to do instead of just getting name, address, email address.
But there are different techniques as you get busier, right? One of the things I’m sort of, I’ve got my, like, right now, for a moment of Zen, I have my percentage of answered and revenue and signed PI cases, in the direction I want to be on, right, feeling great. Next thing is, I want to be overstaffed. Like you keep throwing people at it. Or I might be able to say, which is a fine line between empathy and getting it, hey, I know you want to tell me what you had for breakfast that day, and everything that happened along the day before you got arrested or injured in the evening. But before I get there, let me ask you, what are you charged with? Where is it? Oh, it’s, you know, oh, it’s in Illinois. And it’s, you know, actually an immigration case? You know, let’s send that to Mario. You know, my point is, we don’t need to hear the whole story so that they’re scripts, and I am all for scripts. But I challenge you to legally find a way to get your recorded calls, don’t care about Call Rail or whatever. But to not do that, given the world we’re in, just like the person who was with you until she wasn’t, how many weeks or months did you have inferior, especially as people move into the cloud and they’re virtual, how many weeks or months did you have before you realized that she had checked out? And this goes back to what I’m saying on a non intake person, this person checked out months and months before, or weeks and weeks before at the very least we knew it. And we have a vendor saying, Hey, I’m sending you. I’m trying to communicate with you. I don’t want to work with you anymore. Because this guy’s not returning my calls. We have to resurrect that relationship. You know, again, thankfully, it wasn’t a paying client. But there… so anyway, Call Rail, not Call Rail, but listening to recorded calls, to me, non negotiable.
Yeah, I mean, I’ll agree with you on when you have the opportunity, you know, Connecticut obviously we have two way confirmation that you need to have the permission of the person that you’re recording… it needs to be an affirmative, I agree, I agree.
Which is also tough because you then have to go, and there may be a business reason not to do that. Or have your people answer in a state that’s not Connecticut.
Yeah, that’s a gray area though, because if they’re answering for a Connecticut based law firm…
What do you is they have an announcement, you know, A, it’s being recorded, which goes, it’d be, “this call is being recorded”…. wherever it is, but you know, it’s being recorded. And it’s in that, whatever, your…
I’d have to probably get an ethics advisory.
Like, we will jump off that bridge, right, you know, GEICO has figured out how to do it, you’ll figure out how to do it. So, you know, the idea of being assume there’s a will, there’ll be a way, but the idea being, I think that on two levels, short sighted on a Call Rail, again, not a Call Rail advocate, don’t make any money from it. But A, you know, attribution wise, you’re smart enough to get it close. And you can always un-attribute once you find out where somebody got the number. A, it’s not like it’s set in stone. And B, it’s, you know, as you figure out ethically, because I don’t want to see you, I don’t want to visit you in jail. But assuming that you figure out a way to do this, it will be a game changer. If we have to have south woods come on here to sort of reinforce this. I think it’s that important that you need to figure out whatever is ethical in doing it, because I can’t imagine that nobody in Connecticut, the state of Connecticut, has figured out a way to do this.
I’m sure they have, I’m sure they have. The question is diminishing returns, in my opinion, I definitely do believe there’s a value in listening, you know, and we do listen to our people on our side when it’s appropriate.
But I’m just telling you, half the game… anyway, very cool.
All right. So that was a good conversation for this week. Folks, if you want to keep up with this, you can watch us every week live here Thursday, 3pm Eastern, 12pm Pacific on Maximum Growth Live. Of course, if you want to keep up with my man Seth over there, you could do it through any of his BluShark social media accounts, you can follow his Law Firm Insider or the SEO Insider, available on YouTube, great shows if you want to get a really rounded in a knowledge base about how to handle digital marketing. Of course, if you want to keep up with me, you can do that here. You can get me through FirmFlex, or the Criminal Mastermind. And of course, if you do like systems like I like systems, join our Systemizing Your Law Firm for Growth Facebook group, we’ve got 1500 wonderful people. And just to give you an update as to what’s going on, I spent some time last week, and I scheduled out like 40 days straight of all hiring systems. Everything that you need, we’re posting job requirements, questions that you can ask in interviews, and how to fill out an I9, all the things that you need to do when you’re in the hiring process.
So I got a challenge for you, right, out of the box ones are great. Wouldn’t it be cool if the users came back with their tweets? So that like… true and created, say that’s a great system, but you’re, you know, we use the system. And when we did that, we found that our people were getting this, this, and this like at making it, just like we want our own people to improve, and if there was a way to almost take some of these systems and turn them into a Google Doc that could be worked on collaboratively. That’d be pretty cool… for your premium users.
Yeah, that’d be something that I should investigate, figure out how to make that happen. You know, I can always just, I can actually just make it a shareable Google Doc, and just include the link in the post maybe, see I’m thinking through all the ways that I can do it, where it takes it to a Google Doc that everybody can edit in real time.
Very cool, I gotta fly for today. But by next week, I expect an answer and a solution on how to record your calls.
Okay, I’ll figure that out, get a system in place. Thanks, folks. Thanks for being with us. As always, you can follow us on the go. Pick up our podcasts, you can download it, and you can listen to us on the go. That’s gonna be it for now. Bye for now. Cool.
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