S4:E18: Scaling and Management

S4:E18: Scaling and Management

Join Seth and Jay as they talk about scaling a firm and the need for middle management, how to take advice about scale with a grain of salt, what to do when an employee only does half of their job, but does that really well, and discuss Jay and Seth’s individual talks at the Law Firm Growth Summit!

Transcript

Jay Ruane

Hello, hello and welcome to another edition of the law firm blueprint. I want your host, Jay reweighting, CEO of the criminal mastermind firm, flex, ruining attorneys finalized, I got a ton of things. But over the years, my man Seth price, who’s just got a couple. He’s got blue shark digital powerhouse, SEO for lawyers, all across the country, hundreds and hundreds of clients managing it. So definitely as well as managing partner of Price Benowitz, DC, Maryland, Virginia, South Carolina, Arizona, Louisiana, Tallahassee and Timbuktu. Seth, how’s your week going? This week?

Seth Price

It’s going well. But you know, I’m really excited. I’m fired up about this discussion today. Because, you know, you and I have been sort of like, you talk about having two things to run. And people often ask me, Hey, where do you spend your time to do it? And at this point, it’s managing right? I don’t have a caseload. I’m not building links. But the question is, how do you effectively create and scale a business so that it’s balanced? It’s smart growth? It is, it has a foundation it has, you know, how do you pyramid and the topic du jour talking today about mid level management? And like, how do you take yourself and allow the organization to grow in a stable way, while making sure that what you need gets done all the way down the line.

Jay Ruane

So this is something that I’ve hinted at. And I’m going to be honest with everybody in the audience. We’ve had our own troubles, here in my firm dealing with this issue. And about a year ago, I talked about the need for us to bring in someone in a auditor role, I guess we called it, which essentially, is middle management. And and one of the problems that I found myself, and I’m gonna give you a little bit of background about my situation, I’m going to try to get your input on it, because I’m going to ask you to sort of be be constantly airing to me, you know, and you can be my Tom Hagen. Here’s the situation. Middle management essentially, is expensive, right? Because they’re not contributing to bottom line revenue. And you need them to sort of make sure that the legal operations get accomplished, right. So they’re seen as somewhat of a revenue drain. And I have been reticent to bring them in. Because of that mindset that

Seth Price

understood, but this isn’t you’re not special. This is all business. No, no, I’m just saying, like, when you start out, I remember when I started out with like a real estate, I was doing some rental properties, right? If you go and you collect the rent, and you put the person it’s very profitable, right? So now you have let’s say, 10 doors. Well, now you have a guy doing it, right. So okay, you pay him a salary, you budget that you have your 10 doors, let’s say you get to it, I got several 100 doors at 1.4 100 door, then you have not only people doing work, but you have people overseeing it. And I think you’ve hit on something. Two things. One is the expense, which means it’s not just hiring another person. But for every X number of people, which I’m just using round numbers, let’s say for every 650 $1,000 people, whether it be prelit, paralegals, whether it be intake, you need a person for them to report to which good means that you’re not just paying their salary, but now you’re paying the salary of the person managing them. And that that it starts to blow your mind. Because when you do a pro forma, and you’re thinking about where you’re going, you don’t necessarily feel that but if you don’t have it as you don’t,

Jay Ruane

yeah, it’s almost like you have this sort of dip where like, everyone’s reporting to you and you’re scaling and you’re growing. And then you bring in these people and your revenue dips, and you almost need to scale even more grow even more to really get the money out of those people in that middle management role. And here’s so here’s the situation that I’m running into that I need some advice on. We are we are in a good spot. We are happy where our revenues are we are growing we’re growing intentionally we’re not growing exponentially I mean there was I can remember you know in my past there was a year where I hired six lawyers at once like I was just like give me all your god I have more business than I know what to do with let and I didn’t do it well I you know I had I hired some great people they’ve all left me to go on to different better things for the for their own careers. And I didn’t have any that middle management in place. So we didn’t hold them accountable to the to the metrics, the KPIs that we need to do I didn’t even know about KPIs at the time and that type of thing. And so I’m, I’m trying to get to a place where I build in those sort of managers, auditors, whatever you want to call them, I don’t want them to be any. I say auditors because I want the person in management, looking at the files, making sure things are getting done, so that we can move the files down the line and close them as quickly as possible. For the staff, they don’t like to be audited. So maybe we call the managers in that in that respect. But here’s the here’s the, here’s the thing. There’s almost a point where you have to bring these people in, but you haven’t scaled enough that you need. You need to spend as much as it’s necessary to spend to hire somebody who’s competent. So you’re at a point where it’s like, all of a sudden your revenues take a massive hit. And the only way to really get beyond that is to scale further, right? But what if that’s not my intent?

Seth Price

You’re stuck in that middle, right? So there’s always decisions I speak to people push back, like, Hey, I’m a solo. Well, I’m like, unless you want to scale, spending a lot on marketing, when you have a nice referral practice, why do it? Right? You might as well stay solo. That said, but once you do spend money, then if you don’t hire those additional attorneys, you can’t justify the marketing expense and get that ROI to make it worth it. The the example I’ll give you was a solo who’s doing like 400,000 themselves? Who thinks, hey, I’m gonna start marketing. And if I mark it, I can get an associate and do 550. I’m like, that’s just not that exciting. You’re better off without the headaches? Yes, maybe maybe maybe you could make an extra $50,000 marketing for 50 and extra associate is amusing, a very low dollar 50. And then you make 50. That’s not that that’s, you know, it was the juice worth the squeeze.

Jay Ruane

Yeah. Well, and this and this leads me to another question. There’s a lot of people in our communities online in the blueprint Facebook group, that are like, I want to scale I want to scale. And I hear it a lot. And this is I’m gonna, I’m gonna, I’m gonna veer left right now before I bring it up. And I hear it a lot from from men and women that I interact with at seminars, people who call me people who send me DMS, I hear constantly, I want to step back and just run the marketing, and have somebody else do the legal work. I hear a lot of times from lawyers that are, say 45 to 50 plus, and they say I’m sick of going to court, I’m sick of taking depositions, I don’t want to do that anymore. I just want to I just want to run the marketing and, and let somebody else do the work. And I’m going to ask you a question. And I’d like to get you know, an honest answer. In fact, I got this call this week, I talked to a lawyer who’s who’s who’s a friend of mine, who says, I want to move to you know, I want to move from where I have my practice to another state, where they I find it’s more fun to live. You know, I don’t like where I live. Now, there’s not a lot of social opportunity for me. And so I’m going to move to this other state, and I’m going to run the marketing. For my firm. This guy has zero experience, running marketing, doesn’t know how to code, a page that you have to know how to do that doesn’t know how to write compelling copy doesn’t know how to set up a pay per click campaign, doesn’t know how to do AV tests, like, but but believes I can run the marketing.

Seth Price

There’s so many issues there, right? The first is, they’re not necessarily best suited to do it. Right? You just identify the litany of that second, you better if you’re taking yourself out of the sausage making and you are right now a component, you have to find somebody to replace that which is not free. So you have the cost of that? And are they what percentage of you are they going to be sometimes they’re as good or better, but often the person you’re willing to pay for will not be do they care the way you do if it’s a j ob versus a piece of the company and then your remote manager which comes with a whole nother set of your absentee owner which comes to a whole other set of issues

Jay Ruane

right and what I said to this person who called in was you know it you may say oh, I want to run the marketing because you like interacting with the marketing vendors and exciting it’s exciting to bring in new business but you can really be hurting your business. If you just take over the marketing with no knowledge of the core things you need to know in this role. And you know, you could

Seth Price

be getting there Jay let’s assume they do nothing. That’s sometimes that’s what’s going on right? They’re gonna we have people clients, a blue shark, who we do that and they are the middleman they’ve stepped out your friends with some some have done it successfully, but they also We are well aware of the fact that they’re going to be making a smaller percentage because they are not, if they’re not doing the sausage making somebody else’s a third of revenue, whatever percentage it is, needs to go to somebody who’s going to do that work. And when they fall out of place, you may have to step back in, it’s not, you know, there’s a reason that it is much, much harder to say, Hey, I’m just gonna be a marketing guy and send everything out, because obviously, you don’t get the repeat business. But you know, Will everybody paid for it? What’s the quality of being done, if they’re paying you, they’re paying you a percentage, will your cases come after somebody else’s, all those different issues are mixed up in that, but if you have enough volume, if your marketing is good enough, you can do it, as long as you’re okay with what those net economics are, which are not going to be one for one, you’re not pulling yourself out of something where you’re essential, you know, the odds of that being doing well is small, and then the net revenue to you is going to be much, much less. Right. And we’re there because you just removed the entire operation for a smaller firm.

Jay Ruane

Yeah, and so. So it causes a lot of questions, it causes a lot of, I think what it does is, you know, I don’t want to speak ill of people that I’m friendly with, but we had a colleague that essentially was running a practice and wasn’t involved, didn’t know where the checking accounts were. And that whole thing blew up on him. And he’s no longer practicing law, he’s now teaching at a school. But you know, he just wasn’t involved in his business whatsoever. And he had sort of, you know, abdicated any responsibility. But I’m not saying that,

Seth Price

you know, something came up this week along those lines, you know, Michael Gerber, friend of the show guest on our show, you know, he wrote one of the best books on how to run a business, right? I mean, work on your business, not in your business. But you know, and he takes this to the nth degree, but he came to a legal conference a number of years ago, and it was just a, it was an icy reception is being kind, he almost got booed off stage, he was so out of touch with, if you did pure E Myth and an existing law firm, and said, it’s E Myth, you would be in a lot of trouble, you could, you would know, your check, you know, there are all these things that would be out of sight, out of mind, and it can leave you like history is read by the vector, if nobody steals from you in the bar doesn’t complain. And, you know, there’s no issues, maybe, maybe, maybe, but a lot of, there’s a lot of tumultuous waters out there.

Jay Ruane

Well, so this leads me to my next issue that’s come up in my office, and I wonder how you deal with it. You know, we have a number of lawyers, and it’s not just lawyers, it’s even staff members were, you know, according to their KPIs, they have, you know, five tasks they that they need to is their core function within our firm, you know, go to court and, you know, counsel clients, or, you know, my my office administrators, make sure that the checks get get paid on time, that type of thing. And what I have found is in a number of situations, and I don’t know, maybe this goes, this goes back to something that you that you’ve said earlier. So I’ll give you a lot of credit for you do what you love. But I’ve got staffers who have five tasks, and they’ll do three, four of them. But that fifth task, that is part of their job, is always getting, you know, is always getting set aside, it’s not getting accomplished. And I you know, they’re hired to do that job, they shouldn’t be doing that job. It’s in, you know, you know, it’s something it’s in my, in my marketing department, we have somebody who’s supposed to accomplish something, they’re not accomplishing it. And they’re saying that they’re, you know, well, we’re, I’m working, and I could see that they are working, but they’re also supposed to accomplish this one part of outreach that they’re not doing, and that’s hampering some of my plants. So look, it’s

Seth Price

over and over again. I saw it back in the day, when I decided I wanted reviews, to be point the point person to us through intake, and it wasn’t originally part of their job, I brought it to the intake team. And four months later, I said, How many reviews do we get? And it was almost nothing. And then we got busy, but it wasn’t ever internalized? I think there are two issues that I see. One is is it do they is it perceived as part of their job because when you add a task very often that to me has been the biggest issue when a task is added in and somebody doesn’t internalize it and buy into it, which they don’t always tell you, it just doesn’t get done. And the second is when there are two different types of tasks that are need to be done. One of which might be let’s say project management wise and one might be creative, and the person isn’t short of suited for one, you’ll find out that the one that they’re not suited for will just be ignored. Now, in a built out firm you have k PI’s, everything’s being measured and is great. But many of the listeners of our show are in growth mode, and gern. Right? It’s very often harder to catch that because you’re building things. And as you’re building them, it’s much, it’s easy to say you must have KPIs for everything. But in growth mode, you don’t even know what to set as KPIs, you just want to make sure you’re creating things that will build into them. So I think that in growth mode, that’s where it can be most treacherous, because you get somebody and you see a lot that you like, and then you have the question, which let’s go back to my intake from years ago, you know, I had this amazing intake manager, one of my favorite people who ever worked at the firm, he laid it out, it was, it was not, that was the worst look that he ever had. This is years and years ago, you know, but I’m not going to like, I want him to focus on it my answer. And we, you know, when we first started talking about this stuff, before we even had a podcast was, okay, go hire somebody to focus on, you know, you know, cultivating reviews, make that separate, and let intake be there, because for whatever reason, your intake team isn’t buying it, I had a junior manager on that team that thought that asking for reviews was crass, it wasn’t professional, like, I couldn’t convince him of it. That was it was his mishegoss. It wasn’t like this was in a super a player yet other issues clearly. But that permeated my team, I couldn’t get that team to ask for reviews at the end of the case. So I’m like, okay, as my law partner, say, round peg square hole. That’s his favorite saying, but like, you know, it’s not going to keep if it’s not happening, and they can monetize their intake team, and they’re doing a good job, and you’re paying X amount, and they’re answering your calls, and they’re doing what you need. Great. You just do you take tasks away from people, which is sort of rewarding, give them less work, because that’s

Jay Ruane

that’s the question I have is because that is just oh, I can keep my job and not do half of it, and have no suffer no consequences.

Seth Price

Right. And what I what I would say is when a job is being done, well, if you if you need the corpus of it is is that ever the point where like, as a manager, let’s go back, because you as our firms grow, you’re made up this is a bring it back to this, which is we may not have all the managers all the skill sets we need, which means us as owners end up back in those positions. But if you could sort of say, Hey, I see that this person is doing these four things I love well, they’re not they’re ignoring this. I don’t want to reward bad behavior, which is our first reaction. Can we get ourselves over that to say, you know, what, if they do these four things, and they just focus on that, and there’s not a negativity towards the thing they don’t like, okay, and can we build and grow with that? Is that something that you’re told that auditors as you as the Super auditor need to be aware of? And it’s jarring because I remember, this was a an amazing guy, double purple heart recipient of my favorite people that have been through the firm, they didn’t look at reviews, this wasn’t the same person who didn’t think we should be asking them. But that when you have those life moments, you’re like, you don’t want Intex pretty important. Let’s have them do that. I’m gonna go and it was you who said go hire somebody originally was domestic now International, like, what can we do? Because as we know, if you send a text or an email to somebody, you get x number of views, if you call up and thank them for you know, your their patronage. And would you leave it that number goes up, but if you if you have people that don’t like it, and I see that even within my own staff, currently, there are people that love getting reviews, and there are people that it’s just not in their DNA, they may be great at what they do. But they’re that’s not what drives them. Even with money incentivize, it doesn’t happen. You know, am I should I complain about it? Or should I just met now with international labor for a few dollars an hour? Is it worth having somebody else take that would be better if it was the same person I wish it was. But I also have somebody who’s amazing at running a case and getting the maximum value for somebody in the PR department. Like, I don’t want to, I want to take, I want to get rid of the this and have the love fest for the stuff. That’s right.

Jay Ruane

But it would seem to me, then, really, you’re almost at a point where you are always hiring because no matter what I mean, it’s no matter if I have an intake person who’s got four jobs, they’re gonna like one or two of them better than the other two. And I mean, we can get to come down to a point where it’s literally like, assembly line. You only do one thing and you do it all day. But then But then here’s

Seth Price

the problem with that sound laughing maybe Gerber was onto something.

Jay Ruane

But here’s the problem with that. You know, we’re not selling widgets that I know. But listen, but listen, listen, listen out. We a lot of what we do is we sell relationships. We maintain our client base for you know, nine months to 18 months, most of us sometimes much longer. You know, and you know Having long standing relationships is important. And people get burned out if they do one thing and only one thing over and over and over again. And then you want to, you don’t even know that they’re burned out until you get them knocking on your door saying, guess what? I’m quitting. I’m going to do something else.

Seth Price

J And look, yes. But you can’t even get to that long term relationship if they’re being tasked with stuff they hate. So yes, do exactly. I’m not saying you should do one thing over and over again, it may be three, four or five things. But if if, if sixth, and seventh or sixth, seventh and eighth are important to them, they’re not going to tell you that nobody says, Hey, so how do we find out what’s important to them? When you find out, it’s not being done? When you find out a review is not being generated. And that it’s not a time thing. It’s the it’s the ethos of the person that they they love talking to people, when they call in, they don’t want to call and ask for something, I’m just making, you know, whatever, whatever the situation is, what if it’s somebody who loves filing and doing you know, loves a certain piece of their job, but there’s a piece of it, what I’m saying is, as you look at it, and again, hopefully as you get bigger, you’re in, you have more oversight, or your managers come to you and say this isn’t being done. You know, and you you have your comp you have your your correction meeting, you have your come to Jesus, at some point, you have your come to Jesus meeting, and something isn’t being done by the team, by somebody on the team is can you salvage the person and say, hey, look, you’re really great at these these things, let that that be done? Is that something that that would, you know, is that a because your taught you keeps the person and keeps them there longer, you know, longer term, it keeps them happy? Assuming but there’s a reason I have a ton of employees. You know, when you see these things, you’re then needing somebody else to do it. Now, there are situations where if it’s a piece of a job, not a whole job, you can shift that to somebody who does love it. I always say, going back to reviews, for example, I wish every firm had a hugger, I wish I had a hugger, the person when the person comes in, they get their check, they get their hug, that person is getting a review more than anybody else. Nobody’s saying no to the hugger, especially by the time their phone is the phone is handed to the hugger to type the review in themselves. I’m being facetious, but I’ve seen that in other firms. So, you know, I think the question is, you know, when we talk, let’s bring it back to our first topic, which was those managers, part of the job of that manager is to figure out what is being done and what isn’t being done, if they can stop entire things from that are not being done, figure that out, and bring that to you. Because the average manager is not going to have be able to say, You know what, I’m good with this person doing 80% of this. And they’ll just spend their entire time on that 80% Are you ever at a point where because if you don’t do that, and you keep pushing, you have your come to Jesus meeting, and then you’re like, Okay, now what that person is going to break, forget about long term, because they’re bored of doing the same thing over and over again, you’re not even going to get to long term, because they don’t have it, I haven’t right now, I’ll give you an example with one of my favorite lawyers at the firm, we are, we have been continuously trying to be ahead of the curve on the ethics of how money is earned by the firm. And we’ve we’ve put in there, you know, a big ahead of the curve milestones for everything within a case. And, you know, there are lawyers that are like, you know, what, I’m just gonna wait till the end of my case, I’ll just earn everything then. But as a larger firm that can really hurt you with cash flow. Right. And theoretically, it’s not supposed to be done that way you’re supposed to earn as you go along. And we have one lawyer who he has a mental block. He he can’t conceptualize this. It’s pretty, it would make him more easy with less work, but he has to take a step of learning. And again, it’s one of my favorite people at the firm. And my answer is, okay, how can I solve this problem? Let’s get somebody on our accounting team to sit with him for 30 minutes on the phone, we’ll just say yes, no, for each of his 50 to 80 cases, is that, you know, have we hit a milestone. And hopefully after two or three sessions of this, he’s like, you know, I get it, I’ll do it myself. But if you have a block, and you do something, because I don’t want to, I’m not losing this person. He’s one of my favorite lawyers very, you know, a great, great, a great lawyer does well for the firm, if there’s a piece of the job that somebody hates, can you remove it and allow them to love the rest that that is where and again, if you don’t have mid level manager, you very often aren’t going to catch that you’re just going to have like stuff falling on the floor, you get upset and the person is going to be gone. Can a manager to help you figure that out soon.

Jay Ruane

So there’s there’s so this brings me back a little you know, sort of full circle to our topic at the top of the show and and I want to I want to conclude our our show this week talking a little bit about something. And that is just where you are at on the journey. And I bring this up because I just happened this week to finish my five chapters for Tiger tactics two, that’ll be coming out. I sent it out, Seth, I know you’re going to be one of the co authors, a lot of a lot of great co authors are going to be on that if you haven’t read the first book. It’s five of us who went through our journeys to becoming the law firms that we have today. Me myself, Ryan McKean, Billy Mansky, the literal CEO, Teresa gray. But now coming up, I think we’ve got like 15 lawyers, who have made the transition from owning a law firm to be the CEO. And so we’re going to do the CEO edition. But really, what I want to talk a little bit about is all the advice that’s out there. And I recognized while I was writing, and going back and reading the stuff that I had written, you know, I’m at a definite different place in my firm, where I am now than I was even five years ago, right before COVID, definitely 10 and 15 years ago, as I started on this entrepreneurial journey journey, and I see people online, proselytizing, and saying, This is the way to do it. And I just want the audience to know like, I am, you know, I had my journey, I’m where I’m at, and I give you my advice, from my life experiences. But there are some people out there who have virtually no scale, but have have deigned themselves to be knowledgeable, and are basically saying, this is the way to do things. And they, they’ve never even considered any alternatives. They haven’t lived through any structure. Do you see that there are some people out there, and I’m not trying to like, pick out certain people. That’s not my my intention on this. But it’s more about getting the message across to our listeners about, you know, know where you are, and be confident in that, before you take the advice of people who don’t know your practice area, don’t know your community don’t know where you’re coming from, and, and don’t go chasing ideas that other may have worked for other people until you know, they’re going to work for you.

Seth Price

Right? I mean, I think it’s a balance, like anything else, right? Depends meaning first, first and foremost, you have to look through the economic lens, does somebody have an agenda, selling you a certain format, if social is their mantra, and they happen to sell a course on social is that, you know, it may work, it may not, but there’s an economic incentive. And I always want to filter out where that is present company included, right? I’m a big believer in digital, I also have a way of making, you know, the business that does that. So I believe in it, there’s something behind it. But understanding that like what works for one person may not work for another a. And then I think be the piece that I think that the root of where this is coming from, I believe with what you’re talking about is the issues when you’re a solo are different than when you’re a three personal law firms are different than when you’re a 10 lawyer law firm are different than when you’re 100 person, and that who you who you’re listening to, and where they are in that journey is definitely one and that there are times present company included, where there are people so far ahead of the curve, they can’t remember to where I am more or less where somebody who’s a solo is. And that I think that you need to, you know that there are things that they have overcome to get there, that in each of those stages, there are certain things that are true no matter what that you want to aspire to. But there are points where you don’t have an industry, we talked earlier today, where if you don’t have an individual person for each of these things, that isn’t that’s normal. And if you did, you’d you’d be unprofitable because you’d spend all the money filling out. So to me, it’s understanding we’re thinking critically about who’s who you’re hearing from, where they are in their journey, what you know, what, whether there’s an economic incentive, and then finally, are their values the same as yours. There are people that would be like fire, everybody could say, somebody didn’t do too with their things, iron buyer, and by the way, people like that. And so I think that as you take an advice, it’s as opposed to just writing stuff down aimlessly. It’s thinking critically, you don’t want to you don’t want to be dismissive out of hand. At the same time. I think that it’s important to understand and look at the source of who that person is. You see every once in a while. Facebook ads for people we’ve never First of all, who are popped out of nowhere and want to tell you how to run your law firm? You know, maybe they’re right, maybe what they’re doing. But there’s a good chance that somebody just said, Hey, there are a bunch of lawyers with a lot of money. And if I throw this much money to social media, I’ll be able to have an audience. And I’ll pivot and figure it out. But there are a bunch of guys I’ve never heard of, and, you know, never met have no idea who these people are, who have popped out of nowhere, usually young with like a wife in their, their videos, I’m sure you’ve seen them from time to time. Like, why, you know, so goes to your point, which is, you know, why should I be listening to this?

Jay Ruane

Yeah, so just the Okay, so that’s gonna take it to the end of our show, I do want to talk about one thing that’s coming up next week. And if you haven’t had a chance to register, you can do so down below or in our show notes. If you’re listening on the podcast, and that is the law firm growth Summit. Seth, tell us a little bit about your presentation that you’re going to be giving to the law firm growth Summit, because I think it’s something that a lot of people will get something out of.

Seth Price

Sure. So like, what we have seen is that with local search, I was trying to get to the three pack, there’s just been an explosion every day, different nuances are being added to any of these nuances by themselves, like moving to maybe maybe not, but together, we’re seeing significant impact to what Google is allowing you to do. And I’m seeing more and more with Google wanting to control the three pack and maybe at some point, a five pack experience. But the idea that they want to limit what’s going on, I’m now seeing this is tangent, but on hotel searches, when searching on mobile devices, you don’t even get beyond their local searches that I’ve been showing you there are places like that. So you know what we’re going to be focused on that and then secondarily, for those in the plane of space, the LSAT is obviously your essential, every little piece that you can do to get your spend up on the LSAT is important. So we’ll be talking about that, you know, just you know, so excited motion is creating a virtual conference, which I know you love, the idea of not having to travel to, but be able to network with all these people really excited about?

Jay Ruane

Well, it’s interesting, I was looking last night and I ran it by my wife, and I think I will be traveling in the new year, I think I’m going to come watch you in Austin, and at the end of February at PubCon, where you’re going to be talking about local searches really is become your area, I’m going to be talking a little bit about social media, and next week on Tuesday for the law firm growth Summit, all about what lawyers do wrong. And there are some simple fixes. Because obviously, what you want to do is if you’re going to put any attention towards social media, you want to do it the right way. So I would encourage anybody who’s watching who’s listening, if you haven’t signed up yet, please be sure to sign up down below, make sure that you are that you are going to sign up to attend I mean, it’s a great thing, it’s a couple of days of basically back to back presentations, you can identify the ones that you want to see set up on your calendar and pop in for those. And obviously stay for as much as you can. But if you need to work around your schedule, you can do that. And of course, I’m sure there’ll be opportunity to buy the recordings if you register for the free conference. So it’s Win win if you if you miss something that you really liked, you can get that as well. So I highly recommend the law firm growth Summit. If that’s something that you could do. So said, I want to tease a little bit about next week, when we’re doing it, I discovered something, I was talking to a friend of mine, Justin McShane out of Pennsylvania, who’s very scientific in his approaches, and I actually found a niche vertical that’s generated $200,000, or actually more than that off of about a 20% $20,000 marketing spend, and nothing else. So I want to know, and talk a little bit about this more in depth next week about how to 10x this because if, if this is, you know, calm seas and open waters, and there is no other market maker, maybe I should go all in and invest $100,000 and see if I can turn it into a million dollar business. And you

Seth Price

know, me I’m gonna be Hey, can we incrementally increase that knowing that paid search is not one you know, is not one for one and that there are diminishing margins that said, grilled you found this let’s find a way to maximize whatever it is just don’t want to see you, you know, Spike money away and learn what we all know, which is that if you can X you know, paid spend in the legal niches generally there’s not enough inventory, particularly in a statewide practice to be able to support it. Yeah, so

Jay Ruane

that’s where I’m going to do some more research and when I have some more numbers and we’re going to talk about this as we go I’m not going to talk about the vertical yet because I do I want to see if I have some first mover advantage but who knows, you know, I live my life as an open book I you know, I’ve never gotten poor from from giving stuff away. So I like to keep that as my mantra. But that’s going to do it for us folks this week here on the law firm blueprint. As always, please invite your friends to join us in the Facebook group and follow us along every Thursday. 3pm Eastern 12pm Pacific. And of course you can catch us as as well on our podcast replay which is available wherever podcasts are available. We’re now on Amazon podcast. I didn’t even know Amazon had podcasts. But we’re up on Amazon and of course, Apple. We’re on Google download, take it on the go and listen to it when you’re traveling or out for a walk, do whatever you need, says Any final words for words, the

Seth Price

best news of the day, and the fact that you will be in Austin and although I’ve cut down on me, I’m gonna save my red meat for some brisket with you in Austin.

Jay Ruane

Oh, yeah. Listen, I was there. I spoke for the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers Association in September, this year, dy, DLA Texas. And I forget the name of the barbecue joint that we went to. But I basically convinced myself to go back there for PubCon. So I could have this barbecue again. There’s basically three things I want. In Austin three, I’m gonna go to, I’m gonna go to Perry’s and get the pork chop again, I’m gonna go to this barbecue joint, and then I’m going to get some tacos. And so basically, I’m going for four things. Seth, you’re number four on the list.

Seth Price

I can take it as long as long as I’m along for the ride for one through three.

Jay Ruane

You’re on the list. You’re on the list. You know what I’m a I’m a blue shark customer so maybe I’ll make you buy. So

Seth Price

I gotta tell you Jacob put it away that we have to we have to go to my CFO. Okay.

Jay Ruane

Alright folks, that’s gonna do it for us. Have a great week we’ll see at the law firm growth summit and then hear live again next week on the law firm blueprint. Bye for now. Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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