Seth and Jay discuss recent GMB/GBP changes and the ability to get into new geographic locations. People want to have a local lawyer, but what does that really mean? Each potential client has a different idea of what close is to them, so what’s important is making your location as central as possible. The recent changes make it so that a firm is not able to have a pin on the map for an entire city anymore, and only businesses that are closer to the person searching are actually seen. The local three pack is also something that can be observed to see the top businesses in the area. They continue the podcast with talking about how to react to departing employees (who gave notice) and other problems for a scaling law 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 funnels for lawyers’ company, as well as managing partner of Ruane Attorneys, a civil rights and criminal defense firm here in Connecticut. With me, as always, this beautiful Thursday afternoon, is my man, Seth Price, Seth down there, DC, Maryland, Virginia, South Carolina. I’m surprised not Delaware yet but who knows, he probably has something under his sleeve. Seth, how are you doing this week?
Doing well, just got back from AAJ. It is good to be back, Palm Springs is something else, but good to be home.
I can only imagine. Of course, Seth’s wearing that BluShark hat. He is also one of the founders of BluShark Digital, your SEO for law firms, of which I am actually one of the clients. And before we get started, Seth, I just want to let people know, you might see something here, it looks like I got stabbed, I got stabbed by a scalpel last week, I had to have a little skin cancer removed. I’m all fine now, a little touchy at the end of the year, weren’t really sure how deep it would go but things worked out so, I’m kind of happy about that. So, my week is good. You got to travel, which is your thing, so, it sounds like everyone’s sort of rising up and having good this, you know, middle of February 2022.
But, by the way, you’re the only guy I know that goes under the knife like, yeah, we got it, it’s gone, don’t worry about it. I’d be like, that’s just, you know, God bless, and thank God.
Well, it’s my people, right? The Irish, aah cut off my arm, you know, let’s just keep it going, you know. Your people, although I would say I was very happy that a member of your tribe, I think I texted you from the surgical suite being like, hey, it’s one of your guys here, I’m pretty comfortable. So, yeah, so that’s the story.
That reminds me of law school, when I was at this law clinic and you’d go into represent, it was primarily minority, indigent clients, 18 to 25, and it was “oh good, my Jew here”, that was how I was greeted. And I remember saying, are you sure you want me as your free attorney? Like, you don’t want, like, one of these guys who gets paid? No, I know you’re gonna go fight for me. They were right, like, you know, it was, to us, this was, you know, this was, you know, our everything and spent, you know, dozens, if not hundreds of hours, on a single misdemeanor, whereas normal court appointed with a flat rate and they’re just, you know, going to squeeze it out, move on. So, it was fascinating.
Oh, I remember my criminal clinic days, those are some, some of the best days, you know, work, and I’m just, I can go on and on, but I don’t want to take up all our time just us reminiscing because I don’t think people tuned in for that. But, you know, there’s one of the things that has popped into my mind recently, now that I’ve sort of stepped back from the day to day ops, and I’m more sort of what they call the visionary type thing, I’m looking to see where we could gain market share in my state, and I wanted to get your opinion from sort of a digital marketing SEO perspective, because, you know, and this is something we’ve talked a little bit offline, but not really to this point, is the idea of opening up multiple offices and what you can do with that. Now Billy talked a little bit about when you want to expand, you can go to, you know, you can go to your Google Maps and identify the areas where you want to expand to. And, you know, my state, we’re not county based. We’re, you know, we’re a small state to begin with, so, people want to have the quote unquote local lawyer, but I’m wondering, do I need to have, with everything going on with Google Business Profile, my own office? Does it need to be staffed? Does it need to be an office share? You know, what’s the best practices for something like that? And do I, and here’s the follow up question for you, is, you know, my office is based here, do I open one up 50 miles away or 15 miles away, and expand slowly out? Or do I shoot the moon and go to a whole another area? Because I think that’s, you know, if you’re gonna grow your firm, that’s a consideration you have to take. So, what’s your opinion?
Okay, so, there’s eight things to unpack here. First, I’ll take a little mini victory lap. We’ve been predicting what happened with Google, with their proximity update. What happened in December, late November to December, was basically making your location central to what was going on. So, the first thing is, for those people who have listened, we have been putting these satellite offices out there knowing that this was getting market share. What the update did was sort of say, hey, you cannot own a city anymore. People in Chicago that owned a city or Houston, now, all of a sudden, they have all these different neighborhoods outside of the city, even within a city, and that what used to be a pin on the map are now, and we can put the graphic up on a future episode, there are regions, or what we call neighborhoods, right? Because you know that somebody on the east side of Wichita is likely not going to want to drive to the west side of Wichita to find a lawyer. They may go downtown, but if it’s too far, they’re not going to pass other great lawyers to get to another one. So, it goes back to your question. First thing is, yes, additional offices, while there are areas where you can add additional content, and that you might have a shot if they’re not offices in that place. If there are offices, when it comes to the three pack, you’re likely not to show even if you use service areas, competing service area over that physical office. Do you go closer or do you go to the other side of the state? You know, I look at this, and we’ve been talking about this long before the presentation at Max Law this year on, you know, I look at it almost like money balling, you know the book, you know the movie, right? So, where’s the most population with the least competition where you can get a fair number of reviews, build up the gravitas, and at the same time, have a lawyer who’s going to service it if it’s in a non, if it’s in something where somebody physically asked to go. So criminal defense, other side of the state, unless you’re gonna get some lawyer to schlep there from your part of the state, it may be that you need somebody there, that’s a whole another cost structure. Whereas 15 miles away, you may just be bringing more traffic into the funnel for your existing office.
Let me interrupt you, so my question is when I moved to my current location, I moved to my location of Shelton, Connecticut, it is 20 minutes from New Haven, 20 minutes from Yale, 20 minutes from the biggest city, Bridgeport, 20 minutes from Waterbury. And I said, I want to be in the middle here because I can get to all three of these major cities quickly, but now I’m afraid I’m going to be pigeonholed as the Shelton guy and I’m not going to be getting search, you know, visibility in those bigger cities.
No, no, and look, I, our good friend, the law man, he has had a rough time with this update because he had a single office with FU reviews as the mayor of a GEO. And so, you know, yes, I think, you know, again, there’s the Jay Ruane, I want to be everywhere, but I’m like, hey, if there are three places you want to be, you’ve answered your question. Now, those places are FU competitive, even Connecticut, right? So, it’s not like you’re just gonna walk in and win them, so you may not want to like attack them all at once, but Jay Ruane is pretty persistent and my sense is, if you start picking them off, one by one, looking at which ones are there, yes, that would be the way to go, because, yes, you’re not going to control the local maps from Shelton, particularly after this last update.
Now, let me ask you a question, because this is something that I’m throwing at you, I didn’t prep you for this question, but I want to get your opinion on it. Google and Google business profile allows lawyers and law firms that not only have your law firm listed, but they also allow to have an attorney listed as its own profile. Would I be wise to take my business, my firm profile, which is currently based at my home office in Shelton, and that’s one thing, and then, since I have them for my partners and the attorneys that work for me, make one of my attorneys have their service area be in those other cities so that maybe they pop rather than having to establish an office in that location?
I think it’s almost a distinction without a difference, let me get the analogy right, in the sense that you still need to put somebody there, whether it’s attorneys, whether it’s, you know, Sally, Joe, your partner associate. So, you’re still need to do that, you still need to get reviews, so I don’t think that that’s a huge advantage one way or the other, where it would be, and you’ve done this a good way, is if for, two things, one, if you want your people findable for referral business, right? But you don’t want to cannibalize your own piece. So, we’re very, we’re sort of torn, because we want the search all to go to firm or a lawyer, whoever you pick, but we don’t want Google confused as to which is the expert for DUI or PI, or whatever it is. And then, secondly, putting those there, you know, I think that that is, you know, we’ve historically had some success competing against ourselves in a heavily trafficked area. You talk about not going across the state because we want to own an area and be able to have the lawyers in one office and go to court there, which creates certain economies of scale, like Northern Virginia has so much traffic, it’s hard to travel far, people do it but it’s not ideal. So, you want to try to concentrate, but for you, you also have the issue of somebody leaves you, that that name is now a jump ball, and that’s not ideal either.
Right, right. It’s a, there’s, I mean, as you grow your firm, there’s a lot of competing sort of things you need to take into consideration, and something that you could, you know, it’s something that could make you grow may actually hurt you down the line if you grow this area and it’s all branded under the name of someone who leaves your office, and now they take it with him, right?
Right, and it will, look, you can contract for whatever you want, right? And we even do that in our employment agreements. The website you control, Google, you’re not the judge and jury, as you know. And therefore, we really are in a position where we need to, you know, you need to protect that a little bit greater.
I wonder what the Bar Association would say about the reviews and that type of thing. I’d be curious.
I mean, it’s one of those things, you don’t want to be dealing with it. It’s not an area you want to be in. Meaning when it goes south, and I think we’re going to talk about, you know, what a bunch of employment issues, it’s a risk factor. And just anything you can do to reduce… or in fact, somebody, I was at AAJ, had been listening to our podcast, and somebody was telling me they loved it, the episode when you were under the knife, where, you were, your quote was, I have no risk factors, and I was, stop it, Jay. So, you know, we have so many of them, and that being one, if you can eliminate that as a risk factor, because it is branded by the firm, that’s a positive, I have a mixture of that. And for the most part I have never been brushed, I shouldn’t say that, hadn’t been burned too badly. Nothing vital, but some certain things that were not super positive.
Well, yeah, and I mean, not for nothing if you want to be Icarus, you have to sort of, you know, fly closer to the sun. You know, there’s a lot of people who never take any, never put it out there. I mean, I woke up this morning to see somebody had posted on Facebook that, hey, if you got engaged yesterday, you should think about a prenup today, and I’m thinking, boy, if that lawyer is thinking that that’s going to drive them business, you know, it’s just, it boggles my mind because nobody who got engaged yesterday is thinking about their prenup today, their parents might be but not the person who just got the ring.
I mean, look, it depends on who the person is. You know what I mean? Let’s put it this way…
It depends. I’m gonna buy you a package of depends. Every time you say it depends, I’m gonna hold them up.
Correct. And I say that too much. I wasn’t sure where you were going with that, if it was a middle-aged slight, but it sort of is, but I’m not… Okay, you’re in the prenup game, Jay, when do you want to hit somebody? I’m not, look, it’s no different than an ambulance chase, you need a lawyer after you’ve been hit by a car. You know, if you sell prenups that says good, you know, if you’re a trust fund kid, you’re looking at it like everybody’s in it for love, you know what, you know, that person needs your services at some time between then and when they get married, that’s the window. So, if you don’t tie it to that when you know somebody is there, that to me is like, in and then drip from there. Again, if you’re being maniacal about hitting that audience, I get that that’s not what they’re thinking about, but at the same time, it very well may be, not every engagement is, you know, roses and perfume. You know, there’s a lot of complications to families coming together. You feel it, you breathe it, you tell the parents it’s happening, and all of a sudden, dad’s like, you know, your grandfather has a fair bit of money saved for you. You’ve known this guy six months, so you know, God bless getting married, but let’s make sure we protect the assets.
Oh, absolutely. I can remember, like a week before our wedding, my wife was like, my family says I should get a prenup, but I’m like, alright, let’s do it. I don’t, go ahead, I’ll sign whatever you want me to sign, it’s no big deal. You know, but that’s just, you know, that’s not the attitude most people take. I figured, you want everything, take it, I’ll build something else. That’s, I’ll build something else, probably…
Well you know look, it’s, when you look at the statistics on divorce, especially what I’m seeing as I, look, one of the things I bemoan, if I could find Virginia, if there’s a Virginia family law lawyer, I could king or queen make somebody, we have so much business without lawyers in Northern Virginia, that it’s unbelievable. There’s so many people getting out of marriages, COVID, you know, cracked so many people. So, that whereas you look at it like hey, this is it, forever. Statistically, it’s not, so like anything else, you know, in one sense, I didn’t do a prenup, but, look, I have friend’s dad, who was dean of a major law school, passed away without a will, I mean, people, it’s do as I say, not as I do.
Oh, I know. I have a good friend whose father passed away on a business trip without a will and it threw the whole family into disarray. But let’s talk a little bit about departures, because that was the second topic that we wanted to have. And now, I am about two and a half weeks out from having some departures in my office, I know you’ve had some departures over the years. And what we, what we’re starting to find is a pattern after departure that, it usually takes a couple of weeks for some of the things that had sort of bubbled below the surface to pop up and become issues. The client that was thinking things were being done, and they’ve been put off for a couple of months, as people were prepping to leave. If it’s an intentional departure or, you know, and maybe they didn’t necessarily do some things over a three month period while they were interviewing.
I’ve had every one, like, every time you think it’s bad, it’s worse. We talk often, you know, hire slow, fire fast. At the same time, you know, there are times where you have somebody in a house, you know that it’s not ideal, and you are sort of stuck, and to say to people you got, you know, having a body better than not. So, it’s not like, it’s very often 100% wrong, it’s 50% wrong, but when you find out there’s a lot going beneath the surface. And I think that the sooner, I think the only thing that can be done, as I think a lot about this, having made this mistake dozens of times over the last 15 years, is when you do that, having your eyes open both before the person and leaves after, my MO when I’ve been busy and growing has always been, okay, you gave your notice, let’s make sure that your manual is up to date, you know, we don’t really need you to do much, you know, before we had good manuals, go create it, go fix it. And, you know, rather than a real, you know, sitting down and having a, you know, the exit interview almost when the person gives notice, there’s a lot of emotion going on and things like that, and just sort of getting through the day and focusing your energy on getting somebody new, but I really believe that there is some like, as you’re saying, and again, everybody listening has seen this at some point or another, that whatever you think is there, there’s more muck right beneath the surface.
So, let me tell you what we did with somebody who was going to be leaving our office, who now, she left about six months ago. And this was a woman who came to us, she’s had been practicing in California, came to Connecticut, and, but we knew that she wanted to go and be actually down in your neck of the woods, she was trying to get into a public defender’s office down in Maryland. But she had said, you know, I was gonna be here for two or three years, because my family was here, then her father passed away, she had really no ties to the area, and the writing was on the wall. So, she gave her notice and she, you know, rightfully was generous and said, look, I’m going to give you a month’s notice, because… Yeah, and she didn’t, she was phenomenal. So, what we did was we, instead of having her sort of roll out and take care of all of her files for the next month, I decided to immediately transition her to the marketing team. And I, so I put her on the marketing teams to write content for a month, and actually got us ahead, we’ve got blogs through the end of this year, a bunch of content for areas that we wanted to get into, that type of thing, but we kept her work, I said, look, you’re gonna work nine to five, you have no, you know, no client responsibilities and nothing like that. But we were able to number one, get our content game straight, but then the lawyers who took over the files had her to check in with and see where they are with files, what’s up with the client, so it wasn’t like, see you later. And I just thought that that was a good, it was the first time that I ever put that into play and I think that’s gonna go into my playbook on a departure that’s agreed upon.
So, the good news is the Jay Ruane theorem, I just did this, and we talked about it; you waited six months to talk about it, so I applaud you on that. That said, look, I see that as not replicable because part of the reason they give the great notice is generally because they know there’s work and they want to take care of those clients. I love the fact you did it here, but generally when, you know, for many of the people that give you four weeks’ notice, it’s upper-level person where there’s a lot of transition going on. So, yes, best practice to, like you should be ready for somebody to leave on a moment’s notice, because she could have said, you know what, I got the job, starts tomorrow, goodbye. So, you want to be able to do the handoff, which is great, but the idea that somebody’s going to sit there, this was a great doobie. When somebody’s not a great doobie, they may be like, yeah, I don’t really want to sit and write content for the next month, thanks but no thanks. You know, and you end up paying out the money and they transition. So, but the concepts, what you’re trying to say is, don’t rely upon the work, focus on the transition, right? Make sure that the person is there. You know, we’ve seen that time and again, where and, you know, the piece that I think we both aspire to, which this is an example or maybe it sort of is, is when you’re upgrading somebody, right? Whether they’re bad, medium, or okay, and occasionally we get the okay to great, right? When somebody has transitioned out and you’re the one doing the, hey, it’s time to move on. Let me ask you that, how do you handle that? You know you want to make a move, you sort of want to soft out, there are two schools, right? One is you walk somebody out the door and pay severance. And the other is, hey, it’s time to get another job, but using your philosophy of let’s take those day-to-day responsibilities off. It may not be ideal for culture and other things, this person still there and it’s iffy, etc., but is there a way that you could transition work away, but have somebody around essentially as a consultant, your version of writing content, do something that makes money or not, right? But make sure that you’re paying them the severance with you’re essentially still there to make sure that those things happen. What are your thoughts on that?
Well, I mean, I think it kind of depends on the person themselves, and I think 99 times out of 100, if you’re moving somebody out, you’re moving somebody out for a reason and it’s better for the culture that they are gone. Because this dangling, you know, just, you know, it’s somebody’s clinging to life support in the hospital, and you got four weeks of misery, sitting by the bed side.
The only good thing is that people are, again, Old World pre COVID. Yes, now, the person used to be a consultant is sitting at home. It’s a little bit different.
Yeah, I guess I can see that.
I’m just, look, I’m trying to push the needle anyway you can. Like pre covid was cancer, is there a way to keep somebody around, is the new where I, look, the other thing is nobody ever wants to be fired, right? That’s not a, it’s not a pleasant experience. If you’re able to sort of say, hey, we’re making a move, we, you know, you have a month, but taking away all day-to-day responsibilities, messaging it that way, making them a consultant that works on your version of a project, right? I mean, you got value out of it, but it may be updating manuals, doing whatever away from people. Is there, is that something, I’m saying this out of, there’s no good way, we both have been there. Where you fire somebody and you find out all sorts of stuff that’s going on right beneath the surface, or they give notice and you find stuff right beneath the surface, right? But, you know, are there things that can be done as a best practice during the offboarding to make sure that you almost, a checklist? Hopefully, we see something on the Systemizing Your Law Firm for Growth. Is there something that can be done that at least squeezes out some of the turds so that you have that before you’re just sitting there by yourself, you know, staring at the other people?
Yeah, I could. You know, it’s one of the things that we’ve been talking about, you know, as your firm grows as, as you scale, you’re going to run into these issues with people coming and people leaving. I got a question for you, what was the shortest tenure? What was the shortest amount of time you had a lawyer in your office? I think you’re gonna be blown away by mine.
That’s a really good question. We’ve, I’m trying to think what the, which was. We had, there was the, I think it was the firm administrator, when we were sort of in this midst of this me-too thing, and we’re trying to get somebody new who signed on the dotted line, had a welcome lunch on Friday, postponed for a day for childcare reasons, and then never showed and never called. So, that would be, that would be my worst experience. It was a high-level person through a recruiter that never showed on the first day, and to this day, the recruiter doesn’t know what happened.
Well, that’s kind of crazy. Yeah, I had hired a lawyer, who was a prosecutor, who was looking to get into private practice, came in on a Monday said ¨this is great, this is exactly what I was looking for. I am so excited to be here¨. Tuesday, on his way back from court, called into the office and said, ¨Well, I, you know, I also applied for this insurance defense job, and they just called me and it’s $50,000 more, so I’ll drop off my files, but I’m out.”
So, we haven’t seen it as much with lawyers, we interview pretty well for that, you know, I get the PI lawyers defense that like nine months to a year later says, this isn’t really for me. I get that, but we get that on the staff side a lot. Oh, this application was in before I came to you. That to me, I wish there was a way with a magic wand, Men in Black, you could eliminate all applications that are in when somebody starts, that to me is the only place that we really lose meaningful people.
I’ve actually made that part of my offer letter to attorneys. We have to, they have to disclose if they have any applications in and send us a copy of their withdrawal of their applications for state employment here. There’s a lot of lawyers in Connecticut that aspire to the state prosecutor and public defender, and Attorney General jobs. And so, we require them to if they’re going to take a job with us to withdraw them.
All you’re doing then is letting them know, hey, I’m serious about this, this is not an option job. Interesting.
You know, so, that brings me up to my last topic that I want to talk briefly a little bit about, and that’s something that we talked about back in December, we said that we should bring it up on a future episode. So, I want to bring it up now, and that is intentionally overstaffing. And I think that’s something that, you know, as people start to grow, it’s something that we need to think about as attorneys because, you know, a lot has been said, to me and other, you know, other networking groups that, you know, no restaurant would start the way a law firm starts, undercapitalized, understaffed, but now we’re getting to a point where…
To be fair, most restaurants fail. So, I’m not sure.
That’s true, but in reality, I think we need to identify that there are going to be points of breakage and opportunities for people to grow with your firm.
A lot of things, this may be the most important topic of today, and Orion McCain’s been talking a lot about this. And I, in my mind, I see so many positives with it, I wish that my intake department, I aspire to a 15-person intake department. We usually have around 13 or 14. I wish we could get to 20, just like the restaurant, for several reasons. We may never get there, but there’s so many positives of it. If you have a larger team or even a medium sized team, that means once you have four paralegals, you have a fourth worst paralegal, you can’t even begin to think about that. But when you hire, then you’re able to say, you know what, this person is not carrying their weight, and you can push up. That whole GE concept of bottom 10% out per year. First, I think for that it’s brilliant, and secondly…two parts, A, we’re in the great resignation, whatever you want to call it, there’s clearly a lot of flux, knowing that that’s happening, secures you a bit by having some extra bandwidth, but more importantly, I would argue that when you’re thinner, it doesn’t cost you as much as you think in that, when you’re thinner, those people have to get salaries that give you a certain amount of protection. If you were to staff slightly more, again, it’s tough when you’re really small to double a person, let’s say you’re at like six, seven people, and you go to like eight, nine, that means that no one person can kill you, which means that you don’t need to overpay each of those people. When I say overpay, above market number to give yourself some protection, it gives you the option of saying, hey, let me make sure I have a deeper bench invest in that. So, it’s not a dollar for dollar extra because if you have the smaller number, you would, really, if you don’t want to end up completely upside down, you have to pay a premium on those people, whereas if you have extra talent, like the restaurant, if something gets out of whack, you know, they paid $2 an hour, but if you quit, they just had more people that from their depth chart, they bring them in.
Right. I think, you know, identify, I mean, you know, we’ve had for the longest time two people as our receptionist, and we’ve got up to four now, because that is a position that does turnover frequently. And so, I’d rather have four people trained in how to do it…
As soon as we could get the front desk of two, and we keep one of the paralegals. That is one of the harder things. It’s a lower-level position, but there’s so much they need to know. And for the first time in a long time, we had pulled back big time at one point in our growth on interns. We were not managing them well, they were not getting trained well and they were slipping into Oh, they’ll answer the phone because nobody was there, and that led to major issues. As we restricted what could be done, we brought them back, and it’s, you know, when managed right, it’s now an onboarding into it. I saw it through BluShark. BluShark has its fellowship program, and it went from 1 or 2 to 10, I’m hoping it’s up to 15, almost like a law firm summer associate class, bring people in, you get a free look, you’re paying them, there’s no free interns the way there used to be. And then, you’re on ramping in. Now a law firm, you don’t need as many, but if you have a two-person front desk, and you bring on two interns and one is employable, that means you can promote one of your front desk people to something else, and that’s the ultimate win. You can have your own, you know, sort of path to talent and allowing others to be promoted.
I’ll be, I’m going to, I’m going to say something here as we wrap up just so you know. Now, you and I both have a lot of friends that grew up in, you grew up in the city, New York City that is, and I have a lot of friends who went to go work for Ralph Lauren. And even if you started working in Ralph Lauren graphic design, Ralph Lauren accounting, you spent your first couple of weeks on the floor of a store, selling, seeing how people touch the clothes and that type of thing. And so, I’ve decided to take that approach and everybody who starts here starts as a receptionist passing calls. So, I’ve actually had a lawyer… doing that for a day so that they can appreciate the volume of calls that come in, and how quickly those things need to turn and, because I just, they need to recognize what our people that are below them are doing to make it up. I mean, I’m here in my office in Shelton, I haven’t heard the phone ring once, because these people, either overseas or remote in the United States, are answering it, passing it to the right person. And so, when you have an office, and this is how I want to wrap it up, when you have an office that has remote workers, that has people not necessarily all in the same place, it becomes very easy for someone to be sitting at their desk saying, I’m working my butt off, and nobody else is here working because they don’t see the person at the next desk working, but if you, you know, if you get them an opportunity to see what’s going on, they can appreciate all the moving parts that are a firm and, because you and I have firms that have a lot of moving parts, 30, 40, 60 people, all of them rowing in the same direction, it’s difficult, and so, you want to give the new people that opportunity to see that. I’m not asking for a lot, one day, sit with them and just observe and say…
Look, we have a shadow period where people, but let me, I’m gonna leave this for next time, but when we’re looking at these situations, you know, one of the things that as you go through those shadows, what are some of the things that we go through that we should be putting in place that, I wish there was more of a feedback. We have our processes, but as you see what works and what doesn’t work. I’ll give you an example, something I’ve tried multiple times, but have not been successful, is I would love to follow your point of feeling isolated, to have a video link between the different offices where they can see each other up there. I’ve gotten so much pushback on that. It starts, it doesn’t go, they don’t, people are annoyed, you know, to me, like part of the quid pro quo of working from home is, is there something we could do, you know, there issue is people are remote overseas, you don’t want to have too much bandwidth with the camera, but like, there’s got to be in a perfect world, I would think that if it was a big monitor, like you see in the movies, with all the offices on it, even if it’s not your main monitor, and you see that everybody’s there, it would give you a sense of inclusion.
I agree with this. I know you’ve, you bootstrapped a couple of things with Google Meets over the years. I can remember being in your basement and seeing people, but this is a software as a service product that I think is right for the market. You know, and if anybody’s out there who wants to, you know, just give me and Seth 50% each and you can keep 0% of this idea once you get a program, but I think that’s certainly something because we haven’t already…
It’s like a Brady Bunch concept. It’s sitting there, and you have it, I just, I wish that there was or at least, you know, I don’t know, it’s to be continued.
Yeah, I know. I think it’s a genius idea. I’ve always wanted to show my people at their desks to web visitors so that they can wave and say, Hi, Mr. Smith. Yeah, it’s me, I’m waving at you right now. See, I’m gonna put my arm up and down so that they get that personal connection with the people that are inside the firm.
You had to, before the zoom, you had that links that could be a one-way view. You know, it’s, you know, we’re two steps forward one step back on that.
It is what it is. Alright, folks, that’s gonna do it for us here at Maximum Growth Live. Thank you all for being with us this week, and every week here Thursdays, 3pm Eastern, 12pm Pacific Coast. If you want to catch up with Seth and BluShark, you can do so by following his Law Firm Insider, follow him, and when he interviews and gives you updates on all types of things regarding digital marketing.
You can make it a trifecta, we’re gonna have a Law Firm Insider, we’ll keep the SEO for the geeks, but we’ll try to segment it a little bit so that we can give everybody a little bit of everything.
Let’s see, I like that because I’m a geek. And I like to watch the SEO Insider.
Too many people come to me and say, I just binged your SEO, you know, one, and the people want the SEO are very often a different group that wants some of the interviews.
Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, it’s amazing to me, you know, and speaking of stuff, if you’re into systems like I’m into systems, please join my Systemizing Your Law Firm for Growth Facebook group, we’ve got over 1000 people in the group right now. But it’s really interesting as you see people join it. All of a sudden, you’re getting comments on posts that were a year ago, six months ago, and all of a sudden that comment pops up in there asking your question, I’m like, I don’t even remember typing that six months ago.
But you know what, Jay? Let’s conclude what I, that is a well-formed group. What annoys me about many groups, is that the moment somebody pops in, there’s no expectation that they look for an answer from before. And so, you end up with these crazy strains on it, you know, what’s the best…
What’s the best software? Every group I’m in.
Look, and this is, we got to get out of here, but I remember trying to pick a software 10 years ago, and the problem was, there was almost no objective feedback, in the sense that there was an evangelist for each of the software’s, but like, you don’t even know who’s getting paid, who’s not, you know, it is really… something that we’ve tried to launch, Nalini has tried on this, is something where each person sort of presents their piece but it’s still missing from the market, which is so tough because you don’t want to make enemies, is strengths and weaknesses because nobody’s gonna acknowledge a weakness.
Right, exactly, exactly. Alright, that’s gonna do it for us this week, folks, thank you also for being with us. If you want to catch us, obviously catch us every week here live, if you don’t want to catch us live and take us on the go, you can download our Maximum Growth Live podcast wherever you get your podcasts. But for now, he is Seth Price, I am Jay Ruane, and we’re gonna say bye for now.
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