S5:E15: Back from Summer Break!

S5:E15: Back from Summer Break!

Let’s talk about the storm Jay has just weathered in his office and how a strong culture helped it thrive afterwards!

Transcript

Jay Ruane

Hello, hello and welcome to this edition of the law firm blueprint. Voice F. It’s been a while, I’m Jay Ruane and that guy over there is Seth Price. He is down in DC. He’s done with his travels. I’m done with mine. We are here at the end of July. And we are back live with you for another wonderful edition of this show. Seth, it’s been a while. So, what’s new man? How’s your, how’s your month going?

Seth Price

It is, it has been a great run. It’s getting out of the office getting away from kids, took the wife, we made it to Australia for a couple of weeks, stopped in Dubai for a few days, it’s going…

Jay Ruane

Stopped in Dubai?

Seth Price

Stopped in Dubai. And this is the piece, headline out of Dubai, right? So, go there. And you’ve seen the tech talks. And, you know, if Jay Ruane were in charge of the state of Connecticut, and there was no environmental, no permitting, not that it could have to be safe but you decided we’re a building went, how it would be, who would get the money to do it. It is unbelievable. When you have one person in charge of a country what you can get done. I mean, they have neighborhoods, there’s a neighborhood of the Marina business neighborhood where they have like seven buildings the size of the World Trade Center, like, and they’re built in three years of peace.

Jay Ruane

Yeah, and like, like 1400 people die for each one that’s built.

Seth Price

I mean, there it is, essentially, you don’t want to see the sausage making but they have stayed needed, we need to a train line in DC purple line, which is going to connect the spokes of our metro system, it’s on light rail, they can’t do anything, they can’t possibly do that, in a light rail along a bike trail, it’s going to be 10 years and billions of dollars. They built 70 kilometers of beachfront in the islands, you see the Palm Islands, they’re sort of a very pretty, like they built that in six years soup to nuts. Yes, I’m sure that it was, you know, not to say I’m sure environmental issues, although they talk environmental a ton. But when you have a person that says we’re going to do this, and it gets done, it is amazing. And it’s sort of, it’s obviously your right to talk about negatives. But it is unbelievable, like when there is focus and a single voice, what can be accomplished.

Jay Ruane

Well, I think that goes, you know, right to the heart of what we’re talking about here in the show, right in the law firm blueprint, because you really need to have one person making the decisions and moving your business forward. And, you know, that can be a problem. I gotta tell you, you know, the last six weeks for me have been tumultuous at best, stressful, without a doubt I have, I have undergone the biggest turnover. In my firm. Since we started. We have had five lawyers, ranging from three to eight years with us all leave in different things, including the person who was sort of my Director of Legal ops. And, you know, while that has been going on, I have stepped back more into the business necessarily, just because of manpower or woman power, lawyer power…

Seth Price

Now the idea that you’re taking off is not on the table, like…

Jay Ruane

There’s no way, I mean, it’s funny, there’s no way that I was taking off anything this summer, as of June 27, right? So, about a month ago, when the final pieces fell into place, you know, but it’s funny, and I’m gonna shout out our friend of the show, Mike mogul. I had had a very, very shitty day with stuff just breaking wrong break and just breaking. And he posted something on Facebook. And he said, you know, just the time when things something, something to the fire, I’m gonna paraphrase it was while things may be falling apart, they may be really falling into place. And that gave me a little hope. In fact, I meant to send him a note card about his posts. And I haven’t, I need to do that. Because, man, we are a month away from that. And I have never been happier and feeling better about the direction of our firm. I revamped everything. And yeah, you know, yeah, turnover sucks. Especially when it’s people who know what they’re doing and you have to bring in new people. But boy, you know, I’m in a lucky spot. I’m still understaffed by two lawyers. I need to hire two more. I still have a lawyer who’s out on FMLA. We’ll be back until October. But I talked to him and he’s getting healthy and he’s feeling confident and he actually wants to move to be closer to a love interest into a courthouse that we don’t service, but we always get calls for so we might be able to to bring in new business at the latter half of the year. So like things are starting to like, flow, and I feeling I’m feeling happier that I’m back in a little bit. So for all those people who are like, I can’t wait to get out, I can’t wait to get out, then you get out and you see, hey, you know, I may like to actually be in the game like a hammer in search of a nail.

Seth Price

Well, if there’s two things, it doesn’t matter, it’s moot right now. Because you don’t have the ability to get out right now, your labor’s needed, your leadership is needed, you can’t just…

Jay Ruane

Leadership is that you buy, labor in the courts is not needed anymore. But my leadership is definitely needed and I’m enjoying being more actively leading.

Seth Price

Right, but you’re not fireproof right now. Right. And so, the question, you know, something that that I’ve seen over time, we’ve talked to friends of the show, no, we have been running, we’ve been, you know, we’ve talked a lot about the turnover, the first and third years and the risks of people during that time. It’s awesome, because they’re cheap, and they’re new, and you can mold them. But you know, very often lots of things happen, whether it be interpersonal with love interest, whether it be deciding a different area of law, public versus private sector. And then when you get that third to eighth year, that historically, I’ve loved that as a sweet spot, because then people know what they’re doing, hopefully not trained badly. And yet, they’re not so experienced, they’re burned out and or sort of set for a career. And I feel like the scary part of what you’re talking about here is that third to eighth your turnover, right? Well, I always I always judge my turnover based on is this, how many people have I lost and I used to be able to say it was almost zero, but a couple over the years of people you really didn’t want to lose versus you didn’t want to lose them. But like what, and I think the piece that I have seen, and I can speak to it from the criminal point of view, because we’ve scaled that and I’ve seen it in volume. I mean, on the PI side, there’s always an upgrading. And I’ve seen that as the firm is more established, we have our numbers better so that we can pay more accurately based on the labor done. But what I’ve seen on the criminal side, and I think this is probably true for family and other areas, is that you get people that can do the job, because what you’re dealing with none of those people were being fired by you. They’re all there. But I don’t know how many of them were plodding along. And some of them, maybe people you really didn’t want to lose. And it’s devastating. And that’s the ones we care about the most. But something we’ve seen is Dave always talks about it like somebody who might be a unionized teacher, who does just the minimum, right, you know, there are great teachers, and then there are people who sort of just check the box to whatever the union contract requires. And I think that one of the things that I’ve seen is that when we those things move on whether our choice or their choice, that that is where we went from one guy who was doing literally, to a tee $240,000 Gross a year as a single widget, right? Not very impressive. Doing the bare minimum not to get himself fired to the next guy who came in with the same caseload, was doing seven figures. Now, right? What does that mean? It means like you need better, you need better tracking of what’s going on. But when you have, don’t have critical mass, when you have somebody at a courthouse, you can’t tell whether those leads are converting because of the person or because of this, the everything around it. So that what I’m hoping for you and it’s not good to have it in maths, obviously, is that if you have people that aren’t there and into it, and if either burped out, we’re never into it in the first place. You know, whatever that whatever the defect is, that when you get that turnover, whether yours or theirs, that there’s an opportunity, which I think is why you’re excited to bring in fresh blood who can take children $40,000 worth of grows to 600. That’s a big difference to your bottom line. And especially you know that my philosophy has been a percentage of gross so that when you have somebody who’s okay with, you know, an $80,000 salary, like no, you want the guy who wants 250 or 300,000 and share the wealth and really give them that platform. I feel like I hope for you that this is the opportunity. Downside, as you said, is that it’s slimmer and slimmer picking of great motivated talent based on the restrictions and what’s coming out of law school.

Jay Ruane

Yeah, so actually one of the one of the new hires, it was interesting because the last person who resigned two weeks ago, I think resigned because that lawyer was aligned with our former Director of Legal ops who had also resigned a month before and you know, took the FMLA but clearly that was a ruse, and was planning on building I found out actually on my vacation that they had applied for a job and another for the state. That gets into a whole nother area that’s not worthy of a wasting anybody’s time on but you know, the good thing about this people that I have now is, I’m in charge, they know I’m in charge. And there’s no more fracturing of teams and interesting, interesting. You know, I had heart to hearts with my, my staff, my, you know, I have for, you know, solid paralegals who’ve been with me anywhere ranging from 10 to 20 years, right? And so, when all this stuff went down about a month ago, I said, I want to do a zoom with y’all, and we’re gonna sit down, we’re gonna talk. And without a beat, all of them said, “We’re so glad that you’re back. The only reason we stayed was because of you. The last six to nine months have been torture, with the management style of the person who’s left, we couldn’t be happier and we’re willing to do whatever it takes to get this because you’ve been so loyal to us, we are loyal to you.” And they all came together. And that number one, it was really exciting to me about that. Number two, I think it speaks to culture, that these people knew the culture prior to the changes. And I’m want to get back to that, which I think is going to be great. But number three, it also talks about how I decided to sort of flip up and change everything. And I went with a pod style breakdown. Now, whereas before we it was sort of like you were assigned your courthouses, but there wasn’t a team that goes around with it. And this pod system that we that I learned more about it the fireproof weekend with, with John and Mike Morris has really sort of taken off, like to the point where they love each other. It’s like…

Seth Price

I get it, and I’ll let me be cynical for a minute. Right. Great. I love the fact you have the pods, nobody’s gotten rich betting against Mike Morris. So, if you’re using his methodologies, assuming they play and great, but I feel like this is a bigger tail of caution for everybody present company included, which is that as you go through the process of scaling, right, not everybody’s gonna find a knock Hazel as that first hire, or pay enough to get that person. And that when you do that, there are real issues. You know, I can speak personally, I brought in, you know, we lost our guy off the motorcycle, we were in the desert for quite a while we brought somebody in who’s good, but in a place where they were moving up through the ranks, and that there were issues early on, like management style, like this is somebody who was in a number two position, other firm, amazing talent, and we’ll get there and Bill Biggs is coaching is going to be an incredible talent long term. But there were definitely bumps along the way. And that the idea that, hey, I’ve found a person and I’m good, like, you don’t want to micromanage. At the same time, if you don’t have a finger on the pulse of what’s going on, it’s it’s buyer beware on your part, which is if you put an ass in place, and say, hey, I’m gonna, I’m going off to the beach, I don’t need to be here anymore. Like that person represents you. And that if you, if that person’s effing up, it’s you. It’s not them.

Jay Ruane

Absolutely. And I think, you know, you know, your people, they do look to you, and how you run things. And at the end of the day, you’re always going to be, you know, the boss, boss, right? And people with relationships with you may want to come to you. And when you’ve gone for, you know, 20 years of having an open door, come in, let’s talk to me, let’s solve this. We’re all on the same team. And then somebody comes in and tries to manage, say, these are the clear lines of communication, you shouldn’t talk to another team member, because they’re not, you know, you’re independent of them. And it just changes things. It’s just, you know…

Seth Price

What you hear that, you know, there are lines of direct reports and stuff. But isn’t that just one of those weird as you’re saying it to me, and just in a vacuum, when you hear those words, don’t like you shouldn’t speak to like, again, there may be a place for that at some level. But when you hear those, you’re here just like sounds like nails on a chalkboard, like, it really isn’t right when you’re hearing directions, like don’t do that. Now, very often, it wasn’t actually said that way, and somebody took it that way, or wanted to take it that way to create conflict. But that, to me is one of those moments, whether it’s the delivery, whether it’s the person saying at the receiver, or somewhere in between something clearly isn’t right.

Jay Ruane

Well, and unfortunately for me, that sort of stuff was hidden from me. And so it was, you know, I was getting the everything’s great speech. And I was being, you know, kept, I guess, in some respects away from the frontline people who would speak the truth to me.

Seth Price

And I’ve heard that over the years, like multiple things, like, you know, you don’t really like that. I think the truth is always somewhere in between, but I’ve heard and as you say those words, I can think of over 20 years situations where somebody who’s between me and employees would say You’re not You’re, they they’re telling you; they’re sort of sugarcoating it to you and kissing your ass. While they run things the way they run it. And part of it is, like there’s managing people is really, really tough. We’re hiring people. Historically, none of us have paid, you know, multiple, six figures for any of the talent that we’ve had leading those people. And so, all of a sudden, you’re putting people without formal training in a position where, you know, it’s like, you’ve gotten this far not that like, by any means. I’m a great leader. But I know that I’ve heard those words back about people that I’ve liked in leadership, that, oh, you’re hearing one thing, but what’s their ability to lead and how they’re messaging things down? It is not nearly where you’d want it to be. But then again, if you are those two, if I video keep you in leadership, would it be perfect? Would it be perfect, somebody, you know, like, that’s the problem, people, everybody.

Jay Ruane

And my thing is, I don’t need to be perfect in my role, and this is, and this is my philosophy, because I bear all the risk here. And so, if I’m imperfect, and I screw something up, well, I screwed it up. And I got to deal with the consequences, because I take on that risk.

Seth Price

You know, it’s a lazy man’s approach, because you have all those, I know you feel you can’t, you can’t screw up. But these people that you’re paying, you’re only paying so much, they can only do so much. And it’s sort of like, if you can’t do it, and you’re Jay Ruane, how do you expect some guy or girl woman who you’re paying like a buck 22 to carry that mantra?

Jay Ruane

Well, and that’s one of the things you know, you talked about how, you know, as you start to grow and scale, a firm that’s other than PI, PI is such an outlier. Because you’re gonna have one case that you, you know, every December…

Seth Price

There’s nowhere in order to be in business, you got to run a lot of cases, gentleman.

Jay Ruane

Sure, no, but the revenue hits you get in PI come after the work has been done. So, in that respect, like you’re financing yourself, you’re bootstrapping this stuff with the people like fee for service, criminal, trespass, states family, you know, bankruptcy, that type of thing, they’re getting paid up front, and that’s going to pay the lights this week, and then you got to do the work afterwards. So, you don’t necessarily have…

Seth Price

A bit of a theoretic that’s why, again, why it’s so important not to do that. That’s a debt, that’s the business model that fails, right? You got to be planning it in such a way, both ethically depending on jurisdiction, as well as practically, if you take that as earned money, and then you have to run cases. Yeah, that’s, that’s a pretty debit not…

Jay Ruane

And my, the main point that I want to make is that it’s only when you get to a certain level of revenue. And I don’t know if it’s, you know, if it’s two or three or four, maybe million, but you’re at that point, you’re going to get to a point where you’re going to have the ability to a little pay over market, hire better talent, that’s going to allow you to then accelerate even more. So, it’s like one of these things where it’s like, you know, I really feel I remember those days, well, that, you know, when you’re under seven figures, and you’re like, stalled, I can remember three years in a row where like, our gross revenue hit 990, and didn’t make it over, right? And you’re stalled. Because there’s limits the talent that you can hire. That’s limits the opportunity, you know, the resources you can put out. I mean, I think now people are starting to see, man, if we can, you know, go to remote workers, overseas workers, we can do things at a scale, and that type of thing.

Seth Price

You know, it’s funny, because like you like, going on a tangent, tangent alert. You know, we just had our quarterly for, for blue shark, which was amazing seeing a non-law firm do its quarterly with motivated people that are all in sync. It was, you know, used Cesar and Ross and this guy, friend of the front of the show. And basically, one of the things that struck me as it was there, one of our one of our issues that we’re sort of struggling with is hey, thanks to Jay Ruane kick in the ass both BluShark and Price Benowitz, it’s have a Latin American workforce, probably about 35 people each. And that’s great. Until again, this isn’t one or two. This isn’t like, hey, I hired somebody from get staffed up and I’m managing as you scale that’s like, oh, well, if you have a weakish employee managing them, all of a sudden, they’re not that efficient. And while you know, it sounds like it’s a panacea to overseas people all in is now like what? You know, you know, that may be $25,000 a year. And all of a sudden, if you’re not managing $25,000 a year, well, you start to see margin issues. Yeah. So, you know, it’s again, this is not the $2 an hour Philippine person who we talked about years ago. So anyway, I go to that each of these things that we do comes with additional issues that we layer on top, sorry for the tangent.

Jay Ruane

Rock tangents or find somebody that what this shows about, we kind of go off on these things. I mean, you know, so speaking of tangents, I want to, interesting thing that I did over the last couple of weeks is I watched the second season of the bear on Hulu. I don’t know if you’ve seen this show.

Seth Price

I’m struggling through the first. I hear now, every year, the fourth person who said it’s amazing, I got to struggle through it and get myself to the point where you are so excited about it.

Jay Ruane

Alright, so I will probably watch at least one episode on my flight. You know, tomorrow, I’m going out to Los Angeles for a couple of days with my eldest daughter. So, I’m going to load up the iPad, episode seven of season two, one of the characters, he goes and becomes a star at what is supposed to be I think, a Chicago version of 11, Madison Park, just the top high-end restaurant and that type of thing. And it’s all about delighting the customer. In fact, he’s reading the book from the guy from 11, Madison Park, and unreasonable whenever we don’t, it’s a kind of yellow cover. And in one of the it’s interesting, one of the one of the throwaway lines, is it when he asked the question, he’s like, so how do you find out about your butt about your customers here, your restaurant diners, and the throwaway as well, we have a person dedicated to just stop their social media. Right. And I saw I sent a quick message out, and I said, why don’t we have somebody remote overseas, just stalking social media of our clientele for you know, stress marks or things to celebrate, so that we can wow them and surprise them. So now we have somebody you know, we’re gonna pay him like $1,000 a month, and their job is merely to to, you know, because we’re doing 2000 clients, 2500 clients this year, why are we not paying attention to those social signals, you know, not to necessarily friend requests them. But if they’re putting it out publicly, let’s, let’s follow that stuff and see if they’re on tick tock, or if they’re on, or if they’re on Instagram, like most people are, and we can start to see what they’re saying and posting and, oh, they got a new job. So, you know, for a modest investment, I’m honest, right now, on my bottom line of $12,000 a year, I now have somebody overseas, Croisette. And Croisette, that’s going to be looking at everybody’s social media and checking, and that, you know, it’s, I’m gonna see what happens.

Seth Price

Well, it actually sounds like an AI future project. Oh, like only, you know, like, you know, because thing about the other thing is, we, you know, when you get that you have to find the profile, which for unusual names, easy, not unusual names harder, then in, which is again, I, I’m just going through this, like, where’s this going to be in three weeks when you get this sort of first update? Second, they have to be public, which is not everybody knew, and I don’t care. But and so the question is, what do you actually learn, versus at 11, Madison, where these are, you know, public figures, for the most part at some level to the public or the lowercase p. So, you know, I think that is what I love about hanging out…

Jay Ruane

With a $1,000 flyer, flyer basically, you know, but, you know, you can get through like something like Lexus, Acura, and you can do a social media locator for people. So there, there are resources to…

Seth Price

Understand that, but those are not free. And next thing, you know, you’re, you know, and so it just a fascinating, you know, I smile that I feel like handle sitting in the corner, we’re having one of these discussions with, how are you going to take it on? And, you know, to a certain extent, you’re gonna find, like, is that usable? Or monetizable? Is it?

Jay Ruane

Yeah, it’s totally not be but I have I have done things, crazy things in my, in my firm, for years to just take flyers. And I will actually, that brings me let’s talk about this at the end of the show, because this is something that I think, you know, since the beginning of the year, we’ve really followed the profit first model, right? And so, here’s the question I have for you. And I know the model is every quarter, you take out the money, you know, and take it as your profit, right? And that’s what you should do. I have not done that yet. So now I am, two quarters in and the money is just sitting in my profit first account, I have made the quarterly tax payments that I have to make as if I took so it’s not like I’m hurting myself. But I kind of just keep the money there for things like this for ideas for fliers and reinvested in my business. But at what point do you say okay, I’m gonna pull it out of the fridge because I’m like, oh, I’d rather invest in real estate or invest in my friend of my firm has a bare upside.

Seth Price

Well, a couple things. First, I don’t I don’t fully follow because if you’re doing the Profit First Fowler frickin mantra. And then the question is, if it’s sitting in your home bank account, do you want to spend that $1,000? Or do you want to have an adventure in LA with your daughter for $1,000? Like, which one makes which so the first and then second is if you’re going to do it, I assume the question is, do you have an r&d budget and why is it not just coming out of that?

Jay Ruane

That’s a great question I have. Does Price Benowitz have an r&d budget?

Seth Price

Not specifically, we were probably not the people to follow because we are less disciplined in the sense that if something comes up where we, you know, for instance, I knew that Bill Biggs would be valuable in helping to build up the person I was talking about earlier on the show. And that was like…

Jay Ruane

Okay, we’re gonna talk about Blue Bill Biggs is for our listeners.

Seth Price

This is a guy who ran a very prestigious Texas PI shop. He’s now a consultant on culture and processes in the PI space, primarily, amazing speaker spoke at fisher’s events not too long ago, every time he speaks, he’s just a wild guy. And I was like, look, that, to me it is one of those investments. You know, coaching means a lot of things to a lot of people there plenty of different opportunities, different tribes, and fiefdoms, you know, from VISTA crisp to, you know, you know, the good boy mastermind official, all these different people are out there doing different things. You know, to me, some of the r&d that I’ve sort of pushed my expendable money to it’s a write off, meaning it’s coming, it’s coming pretax, is the idea of how do I empower people more with tools and training and again, early, early on, when we first met, there was always that truism, you know, train your people, they might leave, don’t train them, they might stay, you know, that was sort of one of those Maxim’s and I feel that as I’ve scaled, you know, the piece that is hardest, and I’ve seen this across two different businesses, is the mid-level management, or management in general, that’s not you. And that anything that you can do in those places, I think, is incredibly valuable. And there are other areas of r&d, like social and you’re always doing paid video and getting great CPM and finding ways to brand. But you know, there’s a certain amount I just had it. At our law firm, quarterly, there was some pushback to lead gen sources that I was testing, and there’s no panacea. There’s no way to go here and do this. But there was there was sort of, you know, hey, why are you spending money on this, and I’m not doing this about not making any money from it. But if I with education, and with somebody who hasn’t hurt anybody, I know, there’s a possibility that something may work, we test things and we see what goes on. And the question is, don’t let it go on too long. By $10,000 worth of leads, if it works, great. It’s not going to meet the markable number. And there was a lot of sorts of, like, hey, you’re gonna High five me if it works, if one doesn’t work, you know, that’s that you don’t want to punish the person who’s trying stuff. So, to answer your question, not specifically an r&d budget, but there is a real push to look for opportunities of things that will help us move things forward.

Jay Ruane

Yeah, I mean, for me, I always, you know, I brought this up years ago to my father, when we were building this practice, I said, How come we don’t have an r&d? He goes, all those seminars you go do to get better as a lawyer, that’s part of your r&d budget, he’s like you’re getting you’re learning about breath testing, or field tests or chemical testing, or, or drugs, he’s like, you know, that’s, that’s part of your r&d budget. And then, and then he’s like, so you need to have an r&d budget to be better as a business owner. And that’s listening to things like heart podcast and going to seminars, you also need if you’re still in the business, you need some, learn some stuff and develop yourself as a better person to provide the product. And I think the great thing about it is if you go to either of those, you can learn something about the other one, which is kind of cool. You know, it’s interesting, there’s a ton of stuff online, there’s a ton of zoom. There’s a lot of conferences out there, but there’s really something missing in the how to you know, how to run your business better. You know, overall, which is unfortunate.

Seth Price

I, you know, pieces of it, you see the Profit First, you see the business law tracks and NTL, you see all those different things, even the masterminds in each of those things. And it’s tough because I think that there’s no one size fits all you saw this right? fireproof pretty good roadmap for pie firms. There’s a lot of positives in it. But like, it’s really not that applicable until they do modules outside. You know, I’d say within blue shark the great thing and that’s sort of something I pride myself on is they can use sites like a Price Benowitz testing, hey, do these links work before we it’s almost like a guy comedian who goes into try stuff out somewhere else? Because if you aren’t, if you aren’t encouraging your people to file that random motion that isn’t part of your normal procedure, but like, hey, is it possible to get better discovery if we do it this way? Like it’s I think part of that is cultural in having your team members and again, whether it’s budget you call the very formally or whether it’s allowing people that freedom, you know, when you look at the stuff from Starbucks, like the Frappuccino coming out of some guy screwing around in the in the store that you’re in, have a Culture of experiment of experimentation in order to allow that, because if everybody’s looking at, hey, what is my margin for my department, and not allowed and not high five when they try stuff? Because you learn a lot from failing as much as you do from succeeding?

Jay Ruane

Oh, absolutely. I mean, if you know, I definitely have learned a ton from my failures. One of the things that I’m really jazzed about is some of these AI tools that are allowing you to start doing video using AI to dynamically insert client names. So, you can have mass scaled, personalized stuff. I mean, that’s one of the things that that I think really made Starbucks, Starbucks, right. It’s mass customization. Everybody gets exactly the drink they want. But they’re able to do it at such scale, because they have, you know, a base of coffee and then all your mix ins in the different way you put…

Seth Price

The name on the, the name on the comments, right? It’s also very different. The handwritten name, which I don’t get as much anymore, cuz everything’s electronic versus the typed-out name that comes from your account.

Jay Ruane

Yeah, totally, totally. You know, what I used to do, I’m gonna tell you something that I used to do. When I first started going into Starbucks, my buddy Marty, I don’t know if you’ve ever met him when we’ve been around. So, Marty was working as a manager at a local Starbucks. So, I used to go in and I would give my name as shift feed. And I would spell S h i t h e a d. Which, if you Yeah, so I would say like your name, I’d like shifty, and they were like, okay, and so they’d write it on the thing. And then they would put it up there and be like, you know, I see for sure. And they would not have it like that to me. Just to just to get a laugh out of people. I do that also, when I’m doing the you know, the Costanza at the restaurant, and I put it in my name, I’ll put it into theme, just to see if people call it out. You know, caught, right. Caught, right. That one. I’ve been watching a lot of Seinfeld lately. So, I’m kind of…

Seth Price

Joined that with my kids. It compared to friends a lot less a lot, a lot fewer cringe moment. There’s no outward hate of trans people and stuff like that. So, they seem to…

Jay Ruane

Seinfeld. I mean, it’s amazing. Those episodes are like 35 years old now. And they’re holding up. But, you know, so okay, so here’s the interesting thing. If you guys, are you people in the audience are watching Seinfeld and you also watch Curb Your Enthusiasm. Okay, so in one of the first two seasons of Seinfeld episode is, episode it was but clearly it was a Larry David episode. Kramer comes in and talks about a car Periscope. And, and Larry David brings that up, like last season in a Curb Your Enthusiasm. He talks about his car needing a periscope. I’m like, this guy is so neurotic and fixated that third, probably 40 years later, he’s still writing a script, bring up the same topic.

Seth Price

And I would say that I took some time away from Seinfeld, because once you get into curb and you’re into it, you realize that middle America was not ready for Larry David. And it was so watered down. Yeah. Like it’s Larry David. But it’s a watered-down sanitized version that depravity is so extreme that when you watch curve, you’re like, oh, that’s the, you know, the full test.

Jay Ruane

That’s everything. All right, boy, we’ve been talking nonstop. We could probably do this for another two hours. But I don’t want to make the people listen to us for so long. So, I think we should wrap it up. What do you say, Seth?

Seth Price

Absolutely. It’s good to be back.

Jay Ruane

It is good to be back. Thank you so much for being with us. That brings us to the end of another episode of the law firm blueprint. Of course, you can catch us on the go on any of the podcasting platforms. You can find us on Apple and Spotify, Google podcasts and bus, blah, blah, blah, all the different ones that are out there. But of course, if you are watching, please give us a five-star review so that you can follow us and make sure that you also subscribe so that you get new episodes as soon as they are released. That’s going to do it for me. Jay Ruane up here in Connecticut and Seth Price down there in DC. We’ll be with you again soon. We’ll see you every Thursday 3pm Eastern, 12pm Pacific, live in our Facebook group. And if you aren’t a member, please join. It’s called the Law Firm blueprint, of course. Alright, so I’m going to call it now. Have a great one. We’ll see you later. Bye for now.

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