Join Seth and Jay as Seth returns from NTL in Miami and they talk about the impact of staff/attorney transitions out of the firm on remaining team members, More about GMB offices and if you should open more and when, and other topics about growing your firm.
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 managing partner, I guess, for Ruane Attorneys, a civil rights and criminal defense firm here in Connecticut. With me, as always, is my man over there, down there in our nation’s capital, Seth Price. Seth, the founder of BluShark Digital, your SEO for law firms, as well as managing partner of Price Benowitz, your DC, Maryland, Virginia, and Louisiana. I’m gonna throw it out there, South Carolina, Louisiana, Iowa, California.
Although, you say that, but the way, two things, the way that Google is moving with location-based pieces, you know, it’s almost incentivizing you to start doing that. And now…
Absolutely.
You know, and that, one of the issues that inside baseball, I know most people in here, don’t care, but one of the issues that the SEO companies are struggling with is when people started with exclusivity and said ¨I want exclusivity for a market.” It was like, oh, well, is it the same as the TV market, but now, the guy who’s running in Connecticut says ¨I want a Manhattan office¨ and the guy in Manhattan wants to have Jersey offices, and all of a sudden, the maps start to blend and we’re, offices are, so, in one sense, they don’t want you to have virtual offices, because then this would become just silly. You call up Regis and have like 2000 offices, but at the other time, it’s becoming much more fluid as to what is a practice area that you cover.
Yeah, that’s a topic we hadn’t really put on our rundown, but let’s talk about that. You know, I’m in a situation where, you know, we’ve got six established offices, and I’m thinking, you know what, it’s probably not a bad idea given everything that Google says that I open six more this year. And now, I gotta figure out, you know, my resources of getting reviews for those offices, because then you’re going to be splitting, right? I mean, even with, if I have six offices now, twelve, right? I’m just going to take, for instance, you know, but I still have the same number of clients. Now I’m diluting my review count across the twelve…
That’s the ugly, so yes. So, it’s all like, oh, yes, I should go open these offices. Yes, great, and then you’re like, oh, yeah, what about reviews? So, you know, that is the great thing. And I had a client early on that five offices, well, that seemed like a lot to people, and they put the same review on all five offices… came down. So, you know, like, can you add, you know, is it, because, look, it’s not inconceivable that somebody goes to two different offices to work, but when you start getting abusive, also doubling your offices, what, you know, you probably get away with it, you probably will, like anything else, nothing that spikes, everything’s got to seem natural, and that’s to me, if it goes along naturally, and you can somehow motivate your team and your staff to get enough reviews, you know, God bless it, it is what Google is pushing us to with this, you know, December local algorithm update.
So, okay, so let’s talk about this a little bit more, because it’s intriguing to me. So, you know, I am a, you know, an established criminal firm in a major market in my state, right? I’ve got an established brand, established thing and, but I’m in a city and there’s a lot of competition in the city. Is it smarter for me to take the next big city that I do work in? You know, I’m like, I’m in Bridgeport, Connecticut, right? That’s traditionally been our home base, right? The Southeastern Connecticut, Southwestern Connecticut, close to New York City. But the next biggest city, you know, 25 minutes, 30 minutes away, is New Haven. I’ve never had a presence in New Haven. Should I be looking to put a presence in New Haven where a lot of other lawyers are? Or should I go to Hamden, which is a suburb community to New Haven, where there aren’t as many lawyers? Rentals are cheaper, I mean, I could probably buy a office condo for $100,000, that’s cheap, but, you know, I could buy something there, have the asset rather than finding office space in New Haven, which would probably cost me, you know, a couple $1,000, you know, probably $10,000, $12,000 a year, you know, so these are all the considerations. So, what’s the smart move? Move to the suburbs?
I’m not sure. Of course, the answer, you know, I’m gonna give you is depends, but put that aside for a second. So, I don’t know how much we talked about it on air, but like the proximity update, December, used to be that if you were the badass Jay Ruane, you put your stake somewhere, you could get a giant radius of influence. And what this proximity update says, you know what, if Jay Ruane is here, but there is a meager but significant competitor between you and the person searching, that person is going to get love, and you won’t if you’re further away, How is assesses out how a larger radius is going to end up being, right now, the radius has shrunk and that’s hurt major players. So, the first thing is thinking about where your quote unquote pin on the map is, your GMB address, and where the people searching are? And how much? As Nalini always talks about, and she was a trooper, we’ll talk about MTL in a minute, goes to MTL over eight months pregnant, how they let her fly I’m still not sure, but did a kick ass job in the Sunday masterclass, you know, used to be able to say, you know, where’s pizza near me? Google’s essentially saying they’re getting rid of near me when you search for DUI attorney, for example, right? So, all of a sudden, how we look at where search comes from changes, your question specifically, you know, I almost say go big or go home, meaning if you’re going into a major area with competition, with people, with dozens or hundreds of reviews, are you going to make that effort? If you’re going to make that effort, it’s not just about buy, it’s not just about renting the space, but you’re going to find a space, are you going to get reviews for it? Are you going to put the SEO effort behind that location, so that Google sees this as a real thing? Because if you just put the pin on the map there, it’s not going to do you a lot of good if they’re established players with age prominence and reviews. However, if you do go to a place that you’re buying your asset for cheap, and there’s not a lot of people, you could pick up geography. The question is, how many eyeballs will that pin on the map bring you? And that’s why I said it depends. We are constantly looking at BluShark, looking at clients and saying, it’s almost like Moneyball, where do you get the most eyeballs for the least resources, and if everybody there has single digit reviews, and there’s decent population, that pin could get you ROI pretty quickly, versus saying, you know what, this is my future, 2022, we’re gonna build this one out and say, even though the guys there have 60, 80 and 90 reviews, we’re going to have 100 reviews in the next 18 months and make a real push there, fine, but you really need to allocate resources appropriately. And you realistically, as I say this, you can hear this, you can’t do six of those in a year, that’s the issue. So, when you say I want to expand, do you want to make yourself feel good with a large number or with more that take less resources to effectuate?
Yeah, and, you know, it’s a challenging idea because, you know, obviously we all want to grow, but when Google does something like their proximity update in December, it really sort of, you know, you and I had talked October, November, what’s our plan for 2022, right? And then, December rolls out, and now things have to change. So, you know, it’s one of these things where you almost can’t predict what is going to happen a year from now, you have to… four month jumps.
Yeah, ironically, Jay, this is something we’ve been preparing for, for a long time. This was why you’ve heard me for as long as we’ve been doing the show, talk about the multis office strategy, like we’ve seen this coming. So, I, this was not one of those, Oh my God, I can’t believe that happened. This kind of made sense based on everything they’ve been pushing towards.
You know, it’s interesting. Speaking of reviews, just quick, before we get to MDL, I had the opportunity to consult with an attorney for some special education stuff for one of my kids this week, because we just had some questions, and I know he’s a leader in the space, in the area. So, I wanted to get some questions answered before we, you know, before we even approached the school and said, hey, we’re thinking about this, what can we do? And his first question is, how do you get so many reviews? So, obviously, he’s number one, he’s following me, and number two, he’s checking up regularly because he sees my review growth and when I told him I have somebody whose sole job it is to get reviews and track my clients, and make sure that they’re done and I got five new reviews yesterday for some closed cases, I realized, boy, that is a heck of an investment, you know. If you can make that investment in somebody whose job it is to get you reviews that is going to be money well spent right now.
Absolutely. We’ve had that as, you know, trials and tribulations talked about on the show, we’ve had our intake group, CMT we call it, do it, they get too busy as they grow, they forget about it. Just talked about this at NCL, we had a mad digital masterclass advice. One of my sections that I spoke on was reviews, and I think one of the things, and you know, NCL, Lowe’s has this amazing property in South Beach, they moved to the Fountain Blue, the iconic Miami location, and my grandparents used to hang out at, you know, I miss the South Beach and the way that conference, national trials, one of my favorite of the year. The smaller hotel, I think makes it easier for little guys, when I showed up there not knowing the scene 11, 12 years ago, whatever it was, you know, in a small venue, everybody talks to you, the biggest players come over and you learn from these guys who have done amazing things, you know, I spent a bunch of time with Chad Dudley, what he’s done at Dudley DuBose down in Baton Rouge, New Orleans is just incredible. And you lose some of that when it’s all over the place. So, the digital masterclass was awesome. We had panels, we had stuff, talking about reviews, you know, one of the things, you know we talked about all the best practices, but it is sweat equity, when, and what my point is, if the owner of the firm, the managing partner, isn’t on that, it’s sort of like intake, if you ignore that, it’s at your peril, because the odds of it being done right and consistently, might be good for a couple of weeks, and then your person falls off the edge. And I have seen, if I’ve seen anything, the people we’ve had doing reviews for us over time, there’s a huge pop at the beginning, but there’s a half life of like, six months of effort, five, six months, if you do that day in and day out, I almost feel like, you know, you want the institutional knowledge of somebody to keep going, but I think there may be something where it’s a four month, five month hire, and then you get the next person because there’s a burnout from it. And we’ve seen that, people start amazing, and then it falls, and the final piece, you know, even BluShark, we’re always looking like, is there a widget? And you see, you know, there’s no shortage of software’s where you put your information in and it texts and emails, and does all that stuff. The problem we’re seeing is that gets 1, if you’re lucky, a 2% yield. So, unless you, you know, with your ticket practice, great, but most people don’t have that. So, okay, what do you do to get that up? And that is the human touch. Which, you know, I’ll go full ADHD on you, Bryan Benavides, who ran Price Benowitz, in the intake…
I was about to make that move. I was gonna ask you about that.
So, he’s made the move, and we are very close, you know, sort of a informational launch talk, you know, friends and family talking NCL about Blackwork and staffing solutions and what the idea of training people intensely from overseas to do things. I think one of the verticals besides intake, that what we saw in MTL, that there’s going to be huge interest on, is somebody that can help get reviews in. And while somebody cheap from the Philippines can make phone calls, there’s a cringe factor as my kids would say, that you really want. If somebody’s going to be reaching out and asking for something that’s pushing the envelope and deals with your firm brand, and how people view you, making sure the person is well enough trained and embedded in your firm culture so that you’re able to not have somebody call and say why is this person bothering me, but rather somebody they want to leave a review for.
Absolutely. And one of the things that I wanted to talk about, about MTL was that I saw, in fact, I saw Bryan, his post on LinkedIn that he was doing that and one of the biggest challenges we had early on with having our review wrangler, we have a whole system for it, and you can find it in my Systemizing Your Law Firm for Growth Facebook group. If you want to have a job posting, I’ve got it there, very easy for you to be able to download that. But one of the things that was interesting about Bryan and that whole thing is that I think it’s really something that is missing in that overseas marketing is people coming in trained because we had somebody trying to be our review wrangler. The first person we hired, and typical in that situation when you’re going randomly and picking people, that we didn’t know to train them on all the different names of the people in the office, because we’re like, they’re just gonna be doing outbound stuff, but then they get on the phone with somebody and they want to talk about Emily, and they don’t even know an Emily exists, and they can’t say, oh, Emily is so sweet, I love her southern accent, you know…
Light bulb just went off, you know, I’m thinking training about software, we’re talking about getting Clio, and Fil Vine and Leap Dog, and all these things, you know, but, you know, it really that is a great, great point, especially as a firm gets larger, like, frankly, you know, when you start getting towards 100 employees, every once in a while, I pride myself on knowing everybody, every once in a while I’m like, who’s that? And that’s just, you know, if I’m saying that imagine somebody who’s completely disassociated overseas, so they don’t know every single person in the firm, but making sure the firm value proposition and unique selling proposition is clearly known and who the team members are so that, oh, that was the great paralegal that helped them out.
Awesome. So, what we’re gonna do right now, folks, we’re gonna take a quick break, when we come back we’re gonna talk a little bit more about NTL, as well as when to cut a potentially profitable business line and that kind of rolls in with my recent need to restructure my firm and how that worked out over the last couple of weeks as we’ve let some people go, you know, in some seats in my office, so why don’t you sit tight, hang tight, come back in a few minutes and we’ll be right back with more Maximum Growth Live.
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And we’re back and, folks, what I want to do right now is talk a little bit about changes in the office, because as you grow your firm, as you sort of, you know, expand your operations, there’s gonna come a time where people come into your team, and then leave your team, and it could be not necessarily, you know, acrimonious, when people leave, it could be, you know, because you’ve outgrown their particular needs or their particular skill set. I remember, you know, that Elon Musk story where his personal assistant, so he told his personal assistant to take a month off, and when he came back, when that personal assistant came back, he let her go, because he needed more. You know, she was like, she could do everything.
I never liked that story, there’s something in that whole story. Like, there are people, we’ve seen people in the legal space write books, and they tell stories, and I’m like, I don’t buy that, but okay.
Okay. So, anyway, in my own operation in the last 10 days we’ve had some turnover, in that we, you know, we’ve had two people exit our firm. And, you know, not, I don’t even want to get into the whole dealing with all of the small smoldering fires that you see after somebody truly exits, that they had been able to keep a lid on, and, you know, they were not major problems, and then you’ve got to go in and sort of put out those fires, because I’ve been dealing with that over the last 10 days. But one of the things that really came up that I hadn’t really given much thought to, because as the, you know, as the owner, as the boss, you’re always charging forward, is that there is a definitely an impact on coworkers that you may not necessarily be aware of, because of existing relationships between coworkers, and if you take this one out of the mix…
It’s a huge, huge issue, and as I’ve grown and sort of thought, and now two companies to, you know, see this from it is, and on the law firm side, I think that with rare exceptions, we’ve just, look, we’ve kicked the can too long on many things, but that, you know, we’ve had, we’ve made those decisions generally is this person, you know, performing and/or a cancer, and made decisions solely on that. Something that I’ve seen David Brennan at BluShark do, again, non-law firms have many issues, but one issue they don’t have are many of the law firm legacy issues. And so, it’s a younger, more homogeneous crowd generally, but that, there have been many times when I saw somebody who was not performing by management’s own explanation. Now, why don’t we just get rid of them, and that the, you know, the culture, the interpersonal workings don’t always allow for that which is such an incredible extra piece to the puzzle, which isn’t just is somebody performing, do they have to come out that, and there are a lot of people in the business world will tell you just rip it out. And they, you know, there is a school of thought for that, but that if everything is culture and culture eats everything for breakfast, and all of these catchphrases that are out there which are true, is that there is a balance between making sure that you’re not upsetting the internal applecart. And we’ve seen stuff where the person is, you know, one of the organizations that was really unstable, doing crazy off the chart, law enforcement should be notified type stuff, and that when the decision was made, there was still not a clear cut, push this person out because of relationships with other people.
Yeah, you know, it’s interesting, and I had to have a conversation with a senior attorney in our office in the last week, who was very upset about a decision that we had made to let somebody go. And, you know, I don’t know if this lawyer came to us saying, I want to know your why, and that opens up a whole other area of… Yeah, exactly. Like, what can you say… or what should you say…
No, understood. And look, how many times over your career have you been, have you terminated people? Hopefully not a lot. And the book, Dan Schwartz, our employment lawyer, friend of the show comes out and say, the answer is nothing, we’re going in a different direction. And it can become, I mean, I’ve seen this where people get very, very upset, but that’s the right way to do it. So, that’s what the person who may be terminated. Now, the question is, how do you deal with the people around them?
Right, like, how much do you let them know as to, you know, the reasons behind it? You know, and I, you know, I have sort of a different approach than many when it comes to running my firm. I think of the firm itself as a living breathing organism and my job is to protect the organism and make sure that it continues to grow and can perform…
That’s not far off with some of these great, Andrew Finkelstein’s been on the show, when he talks about having a fire, I think it was a daughter or a sister, but you know, bringing to the team and if the team sees this person’s pulling it down, then that family member was actually supportive of his decision. But no, you know, you’ve gone even further over the years saying, hey, this is my kid’s ability to eat, I don’t, quite, to me, there’s a bigger picture piece, which is, I wish that it was just, is this human being performing and helping us build that organism, but as you just use that analogy, there are times, and it may be about a good analogy, because we’re, if you take something out, it could have repercussions on other pieces of that organism, right? So, it sucks, because you want to intuitively think cancer should just be removed immediately, but if there’s other healthy parts, or if that cell was feeding, energy, blood, whatever the, follow the analogy how you want, to other parts of that organism, and that comes out, you’re getting rid of the cancer, but you also may be then hurting other parts of the organism.
And it reminds me about a decade ago, I had a lawyer who had complained to me about the commute, because at that point, you know, we weren’t really remote office. And I went out, I leased space, 20 minutes from his house, and it was gonna allow us to establish a beachhead in another area of the state, and he was all excited about that. And I said, look, we’re gonna get you set up, you’re gonna be all set. And then, two weeks later, he, you know, gave his notice, and I’m like, dude, I just signed a year long lease, and…
So note to the viewers, I apologize for the awful analogy on the organism a minute ago, but I will tell you that one thing that could really, action item that will help you, when I sign remote leases, I always have a clause that if that lawyer leaves the firm, the lease is null and void. So, to me, I literally have this right now, I have a guy right now, once we assign a multi-year lease on a satellite office, have an amazing partner there, but I don’t want to be in a position to be paying rent if that person leaves. And so, we actually can now think of three leases at least, maybe four, that I have where I’m not obligated. So, anyway.
I love that. I’m gonna get that language from you. And…
There’s no special language. It’s like, you know, señora exit, exit. You know, we’re out.
Oh, that’s great stuff. That right there, folks, that right there is something that you should think about, because I’ve been on the tail end of some lease obligations that I really wish I wasn’t on. And boy, that could have saved me some bucks a decade ago. And you know, God, I think about all the money that I’ve lost over the years. In just bad decisions and bad timing, and then that type of thing.
There’re no bad decisions, you the best decision at the time, right?
Yeah, hindsight is 2020, I mean, that’s what I’m saying. I’m saying, boy, I wish I, if I knew then what I know now, I wouldn’t have made that decision.
So, next week, I know we got to go, but next week, I want to talk a little bit about practice areas, we talked about, you know, curtailing things during COVID, less is more. And I want to talk about when is profitable not enough? When is it, Hey, I should be focusing and getting economies of scale in the areas that are getting traction. You know, for me, I was, you know, I like the example of throwing spaghetti at the wall, you know, you throw spaghetti at the wall, but once you see some sticks, but much, much more is sticking over there, is it a time for some consolidation.
Yeah. And I think that really comes down to sort of our own egos. In that, you know, I can’t be a master of every type of case law, every type of case that could possibly come in. So, let’s talk about that. Let’s dig deep into that, because I think, you know, when we start to talk to people who’ve cut out practice areas, you know, it may initially feel like you’re losing something, but, you know, 18 months, 36 months down the line, you may feel that you’ve gained a lot more, and especially in our audience of people who are looking to, you know, run it like a business so that they can exit or have the personal life that they want. I think that’s a great conversation. Okay, folks, so, that’s gonna do it for us this week here on Maximum Growth Live. Of course, if you want to catch up with us, you can catch up with us wherever podcasts are heard, on Apple podcasts, on Google podcasts. I’m not going to talk about any other podcasting platform because that’s all in the news right now. But if you want to catch up with us, you can take us on the go every week live here, you can watch us at 3pm Eastern, 12pm Pacific, on our Facebook pages, as well as streamed into many of the professional groups that lawyers have online on Facebook. One of the other things that you can do is you can catch up with Seth’s Law Firm Insider, and that’s on his YouTube channel. We didn’t really talk about my YouTube, but for the people who don’t know, I got my channel suspended. I was, seven and a half days later, I was able to get it restored and now we’ve downloaded every single video that I’ve ever created so I have that as a backup.
I hate to use this as this wrap up on a non, the audience will not be as excited but that breast cancer nonprofit Facebook suspended sent you a ping, can you put your team on that? See if we get those guys back?
Absolutely, absolutely, we will get on that. So, and then if you want to join my systems, if you want to know a little bit more about how to post a job for a review wrangler, is what we call it in our office, one of those job postings is actually in my Systemizing Your Law Firm for Growth Facebook group, so you can join the group. We’re up to like 1100 members in a year, which is pretty impressive if you ask me. I’m posting stuff and the BluShark team actually gave us a four-part video series that’s posting every day over the next four days about how to optimize your Google Business Profile listing and how to set one up, optimize it, and then how to interpret the insights, which that’s the last video that’s coming, but then that is some really, really good stuff, Seth. So, kudos to your team who put that together, they did a kick ass job. But for that, it’s gonna do it for us now. As always tune in next week and bye for now.
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