Welcome to another episode of The Law Firm Blueprint! In this episode, your hosts Jay Ruane and Seth Price are thrilled to have Charley Mann, the Founder of Law Firm Alchemy, who shares his invaluable insights on intentional growth, building effective business systems, and the importance of balancing scalable and unscalable efforts. Charley emphasizes the significance of consistency, referral marketing, and the delicate art of managing a growing team. Whether you’re a seasoned law firm owner or just starting, this episode is packed with actionable strategies to elevate your practice. Charley Mann brings a wealth of knowledge from his extensive experience in the legal coaching industry. Jay and Seth also share their personal experiences and challenges in managing and scaling their practices. From handling team dynamics to ensuring the right incentives, this episode covers it all.
Don’t miss out on this engaging conversation that not only explores the technical aspects of running a law firm but also delves into the human elements that make a practice successful. Charley discusses how to implement successful referral marketing strategies for intentional growth, the power of handwritten notes, and the importance of establishing a culture of evolution within your firm. Remember to like, subscribe, and leave a review if you enjoyed the episode. Your feedback helps us bring more valuable content to you every week!
#LawFirmGrowth # #Coaching #SummerSeries #LawFirmBlueprint #CharleyMann
Hello, hello, and welcome to this edition of The Law Firm Blueprint. I’m one of your hosts Jay Ruane and with me as always, back there in the resort. I don’t know where he is, but it’s certainly not in the BluShark and Price Benowitz headquarters. It’s my man Seth Price. But we are joined today by another in our summer of Seth, or the “it depends podcast,” whatever you want to call us. We’re talking to coaches all across the country. And we have a great one with us today. The owner, operator, CEO of Law Firm Alchemy, and our friend Charley Mann, Charley, thank you so much for being with us. We are so happy that we get to spend some time with you today.
I am absolutely thrilled. I mean, Jay, I had mentioned this to you earlier that I’ve been watching what you do from afar and so been looking forward, like when Seth, when Seth opened up this invitation. I was like, yeah, awesome, cool. I get to talk with Seth. But really, I’m excited to really talk with Jay, finally meet him. I’m lucky enough that Seth and I have had the opportunity to chat a lot over the last several years. And he’s been a good friend and mentor over that time. And now I get to worm my way into Jays world as well.
Yeah, well, it’s gonna be awesome. I mean, my reality is, I really haven’t traveled much since COVID hit, you know, as you know, I got locked down like the rest of us, but then as my kids aged up, part of my why of why I do my business my way is, so I can spend more time at home, I, you know, I don’t mind traveling. But I want to spend the next, you know, the last five years and the next five being more present at home. And so that’s why I built my business that way. So it’s great because I didn’t get to run into you at a seminar, I get to run into your right here today. So thank you for being with us. But Seth is the one who starts these questions off. So let’s throw to Seth [inaudible].
As you know, kind of a life moment, you know, through COVID, we did this from the tiki hut. And while tiki huts in the Maryland, snowbelt are not quite the same as the tiki hut in Florida. It is now a back, backyard oasis. So I figured I do my, the show today. from there.
Seth, here’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna challenge you, take off the shirt and get in the hot tub, that’s behind you. Let’s do it live from the hot tub. That’s a much, much better thing.
I think that our viewership would go way, way down.
I think at the end of the show, you gotta, you just gotta go and launch yourself and jump in.
And get like, sponsored by Ozempic. And so,
What you got for us Seth?
Charley, great to have you here. Look, I felt like one of the positives of COVID is that I got to sort of, got to network with people I otherwise no- would not have gotten to spend time with it was really during that time, I got to know, you know, I needed a passport, but went across the bridge to Virginia. [Inaudible]. But one of the things I think that you need, like I’ve loved watching what you’re building from afar, but I think to a lot of us, Jay and I sit here and the podcast is all about law, firm growth. But a lot of the stuff we’re dealing with is we built legacy systems, some of them good, some bad, some drama, some muck, and, and we’re always trying to fix and then build, and you have a unique, unique opportunity, if nothing else, where you were within the belly of the beast of one of the larger, or legacy coaching organizations for better part of a decade. And all of a sudden, you’re like, okay, this is my own show. What do, you know? And what do you do when it’s sort of like, hey, you’ve seen what’s out there, you now, nobody’s telling you what to do, or, you don’t have to listen to anybody else, you could sort of go your own way, talk to us a little bit about how you go about setting up this system, which has been getting really, really rave reviews in the legal community.
You know, one of the most important things I’ve taken with me, that I’ve seen, because I’ve had the opportunity to learn from so many folks who are farther down the journey than I am, and I think the one thing that hopefully I’ve been smart enough to do is to be dumb enough to trust the advice of those who have more experience than me, and trying to implement it a little bit earlier. And that goes with a big theme that I like to talk about, which is not being absolutist in thinking. I find a lot of times, folks are really absolutist in that it has be done this very specific way. And what you end up, hap- seeing, is over time, a business gets built on these competing absolutes because the absolutes keep changing over time rather than from the beginning, saying, I’m running an evolving business that will be different, every step of the way. And I can prepare for adaptation early on, and I can start thinking about when’s an appropriate reinvestment cycle. When do I really need to hammer home on profit coming out so that way there are reserves in my personal life that make running the business really fun? And then when is it the time to put the pedal to the metal? What are the types of people that you should be hiring you know, it’s funny I was listening to I think you guys were talking with John Fisher recently, and you’re talking about scaling, I really appreciate the conversations you guys are having about this because you were saying, it’s not possible in a gigantic organization, for example, to have all A players right, you are going to have some people who do the job, they need to do it within the, the structure, the system and the KPIs that are assigned to them. But maybe not everyone is going to elevate the game to the next level, you have your role players. And I think about okay, I, if I’m advising a firm owner, who has a mid six figure business, I’m going to tell them hey, right now, you probably do want to focus on a few key players who are really, are excellent, and wear multiple hats in the business. But I also know that as the business gets near a million dollars, we’re going to need more specialists in the business. And I need to have that conversation now with my team members to say, Look, over time, what you’re going to see is I’m going to take responsibilities away from you. It’s not because you’re bad at the job, it’s because we’re getting better as a business, and you’re going to become more valuable in the process. So my hope is, I’m going to take all of these systems and strategies that I’ve seen up close, that often compete with each other, and evolve the business rather than try and drive from one absolute to the next.
I want to follow up on that Seth. Because something just jumps out at me. That’s a really delicate conversation to have with employees who are not entrepreneurs, and don’t have that sort of entrepreneurial drive. Because a lot of times employees, if they see that their you know, their tasks list of 10 is now seven or five, because you brought on somebody else who’s going to handle that stuff. They start to get nervous. I’m going through this right now I have somebody who’s been with me for 24 years. And she’s like, wait, you’re taking away stuff? I’m like, yeah, but that’s okay, because now we have somebody who’s just doing this across six different pods. And she’s freaking out. And she’s throwing up barriers, and we actually had to have a conversation about that. It’s a really, and for introverted lawyers who don’t like one on ones. That’s, that’s tough to navigate, isn’t it?
And I’ll throw the two words that I hear. It’s not the way it used to be. And or it wasn’t what I was hired for. How do you navigate those two elements to Jay’s point?
Probably the best thing that happens is early on, you’ve established a culture of we are evolving, right? Like you’ve had that early on. Jay, you’re talking about a 24 year team member, if I were a betting man, I would place my chips on that conversation wasn’t happening 24 years ago. Right?
Right.
So if because I have some of this experience. And again, I’m listening to people seeing what’s going on trying to track the patterns, and trying to stay ahead. Now, first to admit I will be imperfect at it, I will absolutely flub this at times, I’ll make a hire that I’m trying to make really fast, we’ll skip that part of the training. And then we have problems two years later, right? It’s gonna happen. But as best as possible, early on, can I work with people and ingrain them with this idea to improve the odds? Because that’s the other thing that I’ll say is, I tell this to my coaching clients openly, I’m not going to be right 100% of the time, that’s actually, that, it’s a fallacy to think that anyone’s right 100% of the time, especially in coaching. What I want to do is improve our odds on anything, by looking at the patterns and saying, can we get ahead of this, can we make higher percentage outcome choices. So if the person ends up having that type of, you hear about about the fixed in growth mindset. If they really have a fixed mindset, they could hear me say early on, this is going to evolve. And intellectually, they will understand that and they will hear the words, but perhaps when the rubber meets the road, the intersection of the, what we’ve talked about, and who they are at their core may ultimately come into conflict and there’s no resolving that I’ll just have to find a way to move on to the next team member. The hope is though, I’ve taken someone who’s in the middle on that fixed in growth mindset and hopefully push them 10, 15, 20% farther into the growth mindset space so there’ll be ready for that moment.
And one of the things, we just had Tim for Vista on, right, he does a great job with you know, higher end PI shops, you know, coming in doing 360s but resources needed on that are no joke hiring yourself and team members to fly into a city and sit down, you know when you’re looking at firms, many of which are trying to go from zero to a million and then you know hopefully from a million to a million and a half and then beyond, you know there’s balance they talk you know, Tim was talking a lot about like no one size fits all and everything was custom. Is it you know when you’re dealing with these groups and I, look I see it a lot through the John Fisher mastermind we see a lot of people that are sort of smaller coming up, as well as the the larger guys but the smaller guys, the themes are so central, getting a non lawyer in place, putting some systems, as you go through this. How do you balance, because if you did everything custom for each firm, they probably couldn’t afford it. If it, and, and you want to be able to do one size fits all within reason, because that makes it much more affordable and attainable for people to use. How do you balance that? You would love to be a personal trainer to each, and you probably balance that, while at the same time, the only way to really do this in an economical way is to bring people together in some sort of systematic way.
I love that question, because it’s something I’m always working toward, and the the phrase, and if a coaching client is listening to this, they’re gonna be like, oh, yeah, I’ve heard this phrase before, we talked about minimum viable stimulus, which is, can we reduce this back to just the one core element that is necessary to make it work. So let me give an example. Uh, working with a coaching client right now who, he’s taken several different marketing approaches, where he’s tried to focus on the specific referral outreach, he’s tried to publish on LinkedIn, and everything. After about five days, honestly, he just has a hard time going any farther with it. So we’ve reduced it down to minimum viable stimulus of do one marketing action per day. I don’t care if it’s a mass broadcast, I don’t care if it’s reaching out to an individual, if it’s sending a text message, if it’s putting some, a handwritten card in the mail, do one marketing thing per day. And let’s start from there, and then figure out what actually connects with you. Now hopefully, as we get people to take that minimum viable stimulus, now we can send them down a more precise path as they figure out what works with them. Like if they go, man, I love being on LinkedIn. Okay, great, go grab Justin Welsh’s course, and learn how to be awesome on LinkedIn. Or they go, man, I love sending emails, great. Let’s have you be someone who publishes two emails per week, rather than what I asked them to do normally, which is one email per week. Because you love copywriting, you’re good at copywriting. And you’re getting people responding saying, hey, we need to sit down or, hey, I’ve got someone to refer to you. And that’s good for business. So let’s get back to minimum viable stimulus. And then we can send you down the path that best fits you. Because you’re right Seth, at the end of the day, it’s got to be about what you want to do, and this, you know, in the coaching or information space, that absolutism of, you have to follow this one exact program, you have to if you if you’re not doing it exactly this way, saying these exact words, it’s all going to fall apart. I mean, how many people have gone through a sales training, and they’ve learned the script, but still can’t sell. Because they don’t really understand why they’re saying it, what they’re really saying. And they don’t understand the principles behind all of it.
Oh Seth, you’re muted. And he does this when he’s outside.
I did it outside, which there’s new construction going on behind us, hopefully its not terrible. But I’ll go down that rabbit hole, because to me one of those areas. And again, we’re going down one of many, but in a sense, it’s one I still struggle with, how to scale, because while there are amazing sales organizations out there, Sandler and others, that are great, bring it to a law firm, people shut off. And even in the personal injury space, there’s some great thought leaders like Gary Falcowitz, a friend of the show, can give you some great stuff. But when you go to the fee for service side, it’s which is majority of the world that you may be touching, you’re looking at this, and there’s just, there’s nobody out there that has raised their hand to say, hey, this is the mindset, here are the script, here are the best practices. And it’s like you’re, having to, every lawyer out there at some level has to figure that out themselves, which is pretty brutal.
Oh, 100%. And I would say some of that comes from a core idea of how many law firms are named after the partner, or partners, right, Bryce Benowitz. And there’s a way that you started to develop to sell within the practice. And it’s very hard for you to become, say, a professional sales trainer within your own organization. Look at that, enjoying a beautiful drink out of the-
The two of us are still working today.
And so trying to become a professional sales trainer, that’s hard, but there’s no professional, there are few, we should say, professional sales trainers out there working with the law firms working with these fees. And then when someone comes in, a lot of times you have this issue of the way that the managing partner or the owner would like to see sales happen, causes friction with maybe the Sandler selling system. And there’s not this opportunity to come together and say, how do we merge these things. So like when I’m working with a client, my favorite exercise to have them do is wherever it is that you have your consultation room, wherever you’re doing your selling, it could be on Zoom, it could be in person, when you come out of it, can you take a three by five index card and just write down a couple of things that went right for you during that. And if we build up enough of those index cards over time, you’re going to have this stack of wisdom. That at least is a starting point for every attorney who has to walk into one of those consultation rooms. And it gives them, if we can just develop a few little heuristics because they look at that clever phrase that Seth or Jay used, that question that they knew to ask. And then over time as they get exposure, maybe to a Sandler selling, or to some Chet Holmes material, they’re starting to match the principles that they hear over there with the materials that you’ve developed. And now we have a more endemic to your firm system.
Absolutley, I’ve never heard somebody phrase it that way. That’s brilliant. Jay?
Yeah, I mean, one of the things that we did Charley, is I actually tried, I got on the phone, we recorded it. And I sold to three of my lawyers, they pretended to be the client, and I walked them through how I would have done an intake, and then I played that, and my intake people and my sales lawyer are still using some of the things that we talked about how, you know, most lawyers focus on two areas, we use three, because people like threes, you know, we want the right result, not the rushed result, using some, you know, some things and that I think, is really helped. And we’ve recently gotten really deep into Paul Riley’s value added selling, to determine the difference between wants and needs, you know, with with, with a want, you’re willing to spend $8, for that coffee from Starbucks. And you’ll drive, you know, when you need lettuce, you’ll drive an extra five miles for the cheaper lettuce because you need that, you don’t want lettuce, right. And so you have to separate the ones from the needs. And a lot of people unfortunately, if it’s a family law case, and they’ve been served, if they’ve been arrested, if they you know, if they’re dealing with an injury, people are, you know, they know they need a lawyer, and they want to scratch that itch. They don’t want to make it a want, where they want to spend extra money. And so as fee for service, we wanted to get them, you may want a lawyer, but you, you may need a lawyer, but you want us and we can charge a premium for whatever representation that we’re doing.
Oh my gosh, it’s such a good way to put it. And what I would suggest is everyone in terms of furthering this idea that Jay has here, with your own team, work with them to understand how they buy and expose the fallacies that they articulate about how they buy, because the first thing that people will say is, well, I’m a very rational buyer. No, you’re not. And here’s my proof that you’re not a rational buyer. The statement that you say I’m a rational buyer, is a statement of superiority, which is an emotional state to be in. So you’re already choosing to take a level of superiority by being irrational buyer, and that will influence your decision. You can’t make decisions without emotion. Literally, there’s the there’s the research showing you cannot make a decision without an emotive part behind it. So let’s help them see the truth behind how they buy. Because that will get them more comfortable. Hopefully, again, moving our odds are percentages better that will get them more comfortable with the idea of wants, rather than needs.
You know, I had a life moment in business that I thought, [inaudible] Charley with and I think would be illustrative to our audience. But this morning, we’ve built up this insane intake group. Post COVID, pre COVID 12 people in an office, post COVID 25, around the world around the country being run by this rockstar. And there’s an incentive system where they get points on the call based on a whole bunch of things. And realized that in the personal injury space, there were one or two places that we were incentivizing not the way you would want as a business owner, like I looked at it I’m like man, I missed the boat on this, in the sense that you are getting a point for empathy, you’re getting a point for getting the name spelled correctly. But we’re getting one point for getting the person to sign while you’re still on the phone, which is really the most important!
That’s ten points!
Yeah, that’s exactly it. And if you gave legal advice, which is obviously a third rail as a non lawyer,
Lose ten points!
Exactly. Rather than lose one point, and point was, it’s, part of it is, is exactly that, is that we need, if we can figure out what we want. And we, this wasn’t even this wasn’t money, this was literally just points on a grading scale. Forget about anything else. But it’s like having thought, and this is happening at my own firm with as good an intake director you’re ever going to see in the history of a firm, you’re sitting there. And then if you don’t incentivize properly, or show praise properly, that it can lead to unintended, it’s true with salespeople, right? If you incentivize something, people will go in that direction. And you like it’s one of those like lightbulb moments where I’m like, if you incentivize in a particular direction, it’s going there and making sure that I set it, set it and forget it rather than continuously adjusting. But Jay, both of those things you said were exactly my reaction when I saw them.
So, I what you’ve just said completely triggered a concept that is so well related to this, which I talk about with clients all the time, which is diagnosing process versus outcome and are we measuring the process? Are we measuring the outcome? And in the past? This was something I learned, I would get very absolutist, like, oh, in that position, we should only measure the process. In that position, you should only measure the outcome and I realize, pretty much in every position, you’re going to measure part of the process. And you’re measuring the outcome side by side. Because we all want to say, hey, you know what, at the end of the day, I just want the outcome, I want you to sign the client, that’s really all that I want. But if we want to do that, with consistency over a well scaled and scaling firm, there needs to be a process that allows for a degree of consistency that is worth measuring. And then if you do have it, where 10 points is for the sign up, and you have that one person who comes in who shows absolutely no empathy whatsoever, but apparently gets people to sign you’re like, eh, whatever, you’re great at getting people to sign, you are not negatively affecting the long term relationship with the client, that just seems to be your method. Great. We really want that outcome. But for most people, they need to follow the process in order to achieve the outcome.
And I think that’s also the difference when you start, you get the person. I, so, my friend of the show emailed me the other day, I got some lady, I think she’s perfect for me, she came out of this school, she’s gonna to work with me side by side, he sent it to one of those recruiting coaches, who’s amazing, who says don’t hire and I’m like, look, it’s, sometimes you need that multitask person that may not fit into the right boxes that may, person may not get there once you’re at the larger size. But can you get, as you scale, and that’s what I think makes the intake global situation that we have great is that you do need to make sure that people are rowing in the same direction, you’d love to. But you also want to make sure that if somebody is closing, but they have a lower score on one or two other things, that you’re not closing it off that you’re so process oriented, that you forget about the results.
Oh, it turns out that being a mature adult and business owner means you have to have balance in the way that you handle these things.
But it’s harder when you delegate because balance, now you’re expecting somebody who’s amazing to balance and you know, what bal- they have 25 people to deal with, balance is not really what you want, you want to be able to go with zeros and ones. And you may lose a rock star in there. I hope we don’t, but that you want to be able to. But it’s, if you can adjust it so that it allows somebody who is less empathetic, but gets the job done. The reason you want the empathy is to get the signature, not that you don’t want people empathetic in general, you don’t want to to be a counter to it. But if somebody is non empathetic, they’re not obnoxious, but they get it done. Can you make sure that you’re giving a little bit of leeway? And I think it also depends on when you’re asking for money. There’s a different calculus than when we’re asking for a signature.
Yeah, for sure. I mean, the money conversation in family law, and DUI, criminal defense is so much different than the intake process in a personal injury. It, they’re almost two different industries. I mean, you know, just because there’s psychological things that you have to consider, there’s obviously budgetary concerns and that type of thing. But Charley, I want to ask you something, before we go to too long into this, because I think it’s, I think it’s something that our audience can can learn from, you know, you’ve been in this space for a while. But Law Firm Alchemy really is a new entity that you are building, at the same time, you’re helping lawyers build their firm. And one of the great things about that, I think, is that you’re able to see and be intentional about your own growth. When sometimes lawyers they put on the blinders, and they’re like, well, I’m gonna keep going in this direction. You got to say, Wait, you’ve got to hit the core fundamentals first. So let’s talk a little bit about that. Are you seeing you know, a crossover, corollaries, whatever you want to call it, to growing your own business and helping lawyers who are saying, well, I already know everything I need to know. Just tell me what to do. And I’ll get there.
Yeah, I mean, I’m just I’m copying the same playbook that I’m giving to coaching clients. Like let’s talk about referrals. For example. The referral playbook that I lay down for any coaching client is, and the very fast version is, you should be doing a weekly email you should be doing a monthly print mailer, you should be doing two in person, ideally, meet ups per week, especially if you’re a younger, firm, a lot of nuance that goes into it. We don’t have time for all that. What am I doing in my own business? I’m doing meetups every single week, mostly via zoom because of the way that my business is organized. I send a monthly print newsletter out free to a large list hundreds of folks,
I get it, I read it every time I get it.
I love it. I love to hear that.
I’m not sure I’m getting my print one.
We’ll make sure you get it Seth because,
I appreciate that
Because I will tell you
Some poolside reading, I gotta get something.
There you go. I do name drop in there as well. So look for the bowl. That’s where the names are. And so I’m sending that newsletter. I’m send, now I send even more than one email per week. That’s the nature again of my business and adapting to it. But I’m following that minimum stimulus that I put down for everyone else. Revenue per employee metrics that I talk about with law firm owners. I’m using that in my I own business almost on a one for one scale. Yeah. If it’s a good principle across multiple businesses, I’m going to follow that principle otherwise, I’ve probably designed a flawed principle and why am I sharing that with my audience?
Do you think, there’s something that I’ve always struggled with, because I saw the late Stephen Fairly who was somebody, there are things that may work for you in a b2b business development that are not best practices for a b2c. And there’s certain things that overlap no matter what, culture and looking at your metrics and things like that. But that from a marketing point of view, you’re doing things that might, maybe an outside general counsel in a community would do, because those are very similar and analogous what you’re doing, but that there’s, there, you, that there’s a fine line that I see, some coaches go down where hey, this is working for me, it should work for you. And I’m, you know, Jay doesn’t like the word depends, but there are, it does depend on the practice area you’re in and how you attack certain things.
Probably the best analogy there would be, or the best framework would be talking about timing. So the people that I’m dealing with, a lot of the timing is built around the arc of a business day, right. So I’m thinking about that, both what is best within the business day, which is going to say, schedule a discovery call during a business day, because they probably don’t want to do that on the weekend. On the other hand, the weekend may be a great time to send an email to them, because most business owners treat their business as their hobby as well. And they’re checking their emails on the weekend. And they may be just sitting around and have time to digest what I have sent them, as opposed to sending them an email at 4:30pm on a Wednesday, and there’s no way that they’re going to read that email and take it seriously. Whereas if I’m emailing to say, consumers, I’d be looking at lunch hour emails, okay, they’re gonna go pop in on their personal email during their lunch hour. So as a send time between say 11 and noon, or maybe as late as one o’clock, is that appropriate in order to capture them? But I also don’t have to think about and I know you guys have talked about this stuff, after hours phone answering, that’s not something that I may be paying a lot of attention to, but a firm a law firm, I want them paying attention to that.
It’s really interesting that you bring that up, because you know, the original Tiger Tactics book started from a Slack conversation with Ryan McKeen, myself, Billy Tarascio. And we would, we would be slacking each other at nine o’clock on Friday nights, it became our, we were going back and forth furiously. And it was our Friday night thing. And it was because our week was done, dinner was done.At that point, all the little kids, they’re all in bed, and now we’re sitting up. And that was our chance to do that. And so I love the idea of reaching out at nights and weekends when, when other scaling business owners might have more opportunities to digest what you’re doing. I mean, you know, one of the things, Charley, that you talk about a lot today, and I know I’ve seen it in what you’ve sent out to me is the opportunities that exist offline to really build your business at the early stages. Can you talk to me about why so, what I don’t know, maybe it’s me. And I’m sure Seth can speak this. So many lawyers just want to write a check to digital marketing and be done with it. But they don’t want to invest in something that can provide them with so many more dividends. I mean best cases, my best referrals. You know, they all came via relationships, not via digital marketing, right? I mean, digital marketing has its place. I’m not gonna say that it doesn’t. But why not spend your early time on developing a solid referral base? Right?
Yeah, and so let’s, let’s go into the common idea about referrals, which is there a high margin option, because you’re not spending dollars, you’re spending time, and look, we can get into referral fees and start parsing all this out. And somehow it all comes out in wash, but the perception is, referrals are a higher margin opportunity for you early on, you probably have time. And part of the reason that I know that you have time is because what is known as Parkinson’s Law, which is a task will fit the amount of time allotted to it. Most law firm owners who are still operating within the law firm as an attorney, aren’t you probably putting a lot of extra work into client files that are really them just kind of looking essentially at an open file not necessarily working on it. It’s why I’ve, I’ve worked with family attorneys who have discounted their own billables because they realized that that wasn’t really you know, 1.2, that was that was a point six or whatever. And so I know that there’s the time available to invest in this, the great part because I’m very much, Jay when it comes to marketing. The word I love is and. I want everyone to be an and marketer, not an or, not a but but and. It’s I’m going to do referrals and I’m going to test LSAs, and I’m going to invest in SEO and when the time is right, I’m gonna invest in broadcast advertising. I’m gonna go for radio. I’m gonna go for OTT. Yeah, Seth?
I’m gonna push back a little bit.
Ok
Because I love it. That’s great. But shouldn’t it be a prioritized and?
Yes.
You know, if you’re, you know, some of those things because we hear OTT, great, right? I have yet to find anybody outside of some mega players that have crushed it with OTT, where a lot of money, like sort of like the geofencing of emergency rooms, there’s a lot of stuff out there, that sounds great, but really digging down to what is my order of operations, because the end can get you in a lot of trouble by, hey, the referral stuffs what’s gonna get you to 500,000 or allow you to have the money to hire some staff and do things. And yes, it’s sweat equity. Is there a caveat that if you go too much, and you can hurt yourself?
Oh, absolutely. I appreciate you offering that clarity like, that’s a classic. You’re listening for the audience and understanding they’re starting to write down and, and their budgets getting way overloaded with marketing, there is a good order of operations, kind of going back to Jay, the origin of the question you’re asking, starting with a lot of that referral marketing is a very smart investment. Seth, you know, you have the half million, that’s usually the number I’m using as well, that’ll get you to that half million dollar mark. Before we need for sure, we need to start talking and, and we can talk and in maybe some publishing, some platform publishing, can there’s a 30 day challenge, I often will issue, can you choose a platform and publish every day on that platform for 30 days straight to see if it’s the right platform for you? Another and, oftentimes early on, would be testing out the LSAs to see if it’s right for your market in your practice area. Because sometimes, you know, I’m sure as you all have seen, sometimes it zeros out in the community, and sometimes it’s the next million dollar opportunity for you.
100% Yeah. LSA is the greatest example, in PI, it almost always works. But in criminal it’s 50/50. And you just don’t know if you’re one of those markets until you try it.
And it’s the until you try it phrase. Yeah, and you’re right with the phrase until you try. So with the referrals, you’re investing in that offline marketing, getting the coffees, getting the lunches, sending handwritten cards, you know, I have a stack like over here next to my desk. This one, I’ll hide the name of who it’s going out to. Actually I’ll break a little surprise Seth, there’s currently a card that is about to go in the mail to you. Jay, you’ll get one as well. I have pre stamped, ready to go envelopes next to my desk I can slip a card to at any moment. I actually haven’t, I paid my kids to pre stamp all of my envelopes.
That’s awesome.
They can make-
That’s great.
Yeah, it’s a fun little task, a little evening thing for them.
I can’t even get my 10 year old to address them.
So, I have a almost seven and soon to be 10 year old. Admittedly, I’m a little nervous about the handwriting. But it is kind of a cute thing to see that possibly. Or they’re really, really worried about what happened to Seth.
We got, I got, I got my 10 year old in the back room, I got rid of my shredding service and bought a commercial shredder. And now my 10 year old comes in once a week and he’s my shredding guy, I’m paying him. It’s going into a Roth IRA for him. So it’s a 10 year old who’s maxed out his Roth IRA.
The anger management therapy you don’t need as much. You can get it all out there.
Absolutely. These are the things that you got to do. Right?
Yeah, getting the family involved. It’s a lot more fun. Yeah, yeah, going down that referral path, just, it’s amazing this, this card will cost me $2.25. You know, to send out, all things considered. And I’ve had cards that are worth $10,000, go out the door. I’ve had text messages worth $20,000 go out through my phone. It’s, in a world where so much is about at scale. You don’t ignore scale. But what you think about is if everyone is trying to do everything at scale. Let’s go and do some of the unscalable things. I have a client, Andrew Ayers, who talks about how he tries to balance the unscalable with the scalable, and that unscalable has a massive impact, if you are consistent about it, the worst thing that happens is someone is like oh, that sounds like a great idea. handwritten cards, awesome. They send three or four of them and think that all their problems will be solved. It’s like no, you probably have to send 100 times that before you start seeing real impact. It might take a year, two years, three years before the person who sent a handwritten card to ever sends something back to you. But they give up at the beginning. Because they want that instant gratification. And they don’t understand frequency. They don’t understand consistency, and the multiplier, compound interest, whatever term we want to use for it.
Yeah, I mean, I skipped ice cream last night and I didn’t lose any weight. This morning? You know what I mean? That’s the thing people, you know, and I think now more and more people are expecting and wanting the instant gratification. So if you’re willing to put in that I’m on the stuff that doesn’t give instant gratification, you’re gonna stand out to your audience for sure.
Look at a podcast platform. How many under five podcast, lawyer podcast accounts are there? I’m sure a gazillion?
Yeah, truly, and it is a shame I, when I talk with clients, I’m like, Look, I want you to win as soon as possible. But there’s also part of me that wants you to have to deal with the hard work of it. Because if you send, let’s say, you send a referral letter and I have a lot of folks send out these referral letters to kick start making connections and lunches. And some of them report back and like I sent out 25 letters and eight people reached out, I’m having these lunches, and I’ve gotten referral partnerships, like that is fantastic. You still have to follow up with the other 17, just FYI, like sorry, let me bring it down back to Earth, and we need to send the next batch of 25. And then for the person who received one response, you have to stick with it. You now have 24 other people to follow up with and you still have the bat, the playbook stays the exact same. Because we’re playing a long arc here and odds based long arc. That’s what we want.
Yeah, so many people want instant when you realize we’re in this career for 40,50 years, you know, there’s opportunities to go. But, Charley, thank you so much. We went a little long today, folks, but it was well worth it. I got some great takeaways. I actually was taking some notes on the side of things that I want to do now based on this conversation. So I’m psyched about this. You know, we got some more time in the day. I’m going to I’m going to get to work. You’ve inspired me, Charley. So thank you so much for being with us here on The Law Firm Blueprint. Folks, that’s going to do it for us this week here on the law firm blueprint. Of course, if you want to take us on the go, you can subscribe to The Law Firm Blueprint podcast, wherever you get your podcasts and we’re up to, I don’t know, five or six seasons, you know, hundreds of episodes. We didn’t just stop at five, like some lawyers who had an itch to start a podcast and then give it up. Seth, any final words?
No thrilled, thrilled to have Charley here. And, you know, can’t wait to break bread and personal again soon.
Agreed. Gentlemen, thank you so much for the time. And if you’re listening to this show, leave a review. As a fellow person who has a podcast, Seth and Jay are putting out some amazing content. They’re connecting you with some amazing people, leave that review. I can promise you, they see them, read them, and it makes a difference.
And one of those amazing people is our friend Charley down there. So thank you so much for being with us. Folks. That’s gonna do it for us. You can always catch this live in our Facebook group,The Law Firm Blueprint at 3pm Eastern, 12pm Pacific every Thursday, as well as live on LinkedIn. Thank you so much for being with us. Bye for now.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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