In this episode of The Law Firm Blueprint, Jay Ruane and Seth Price sit down with Ryan McKeen from Best Era, LLC. Ryan, who recently transitioned into coaching and consulting after achieving a $100 million personal injury verdict, shares his journey of growing a successful law firm. He credits much of his success to Jay and Seth’s guidance and delves into the critical aspects of law firm growth, including the importance of marketing, operations, and hiring the right people. The episode concludes with Ryan sharing his vision for Best Era Consulting, where he aims to help law firms achieve success by offering tailored coaching services. He also touches on his new role as faculty at UConn Law School, where he teaches the business of law to the next generation of legal professionals. Ryan discusses the challenges law firms face, such as balancing marketing with operational efficiency, and how to overcome the struggles of finding the right talent. He also explores the role of ego in law firm management and why lawyers need to delegate effectively to scale their practices. Ryan’s experience and insights provide invaluable guidance for law firms looking to grow and optimize their operations.
#LawFirmGrowth # #Coaching #SummerSeries #LawFirmBlueprint #RyanMckeen
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, is my man Seth Price down there in DC at the price Benowitz and BluShark headquarters. But today we are joined by my state mate, I guess you can call him Ryan McKeen from Best Era Consulting, who is with us today, Ryan, if you don’t know, has a $100 million dollar Personal Injury verdict. He has grown from probably nothing, I guess you could say to that 100 million dollar verdict, and has settlements and trial victories along the way, and has recently left his firm to actually do what we’ve been talking about this summer, and that’s coaching and consulting. So Ryan, thank you for being here with us.
Thank you so much for having me, and the growth of my firm was owed in large part to the two people on this call, Jay and Seth, none of that would have happened without both of you, your generosity, your help from BluShark, Jay, everything that you gave me, including the referral of $100 million case. So, so I owe a lot to you both, and thank you so much for having me on.
Yeah it’s awesome. I, you know, there was no better firm positioned in the state to send you that referral, and I was happy to do it. In fact, I just talked to our mutual client yesterday, and I was checking in on him, and he’s doing well. He’s happy. And, you know, he says that he, you know, he’s in a much better place. And this is a man who’s paralyzed, right? And he is in a much better place because of his relationship with you and with me. And boy, just thinking about that, that’s something that I’ll take to my deathbed, that I helped make this terrible situation a little better for a person. But Seth, you’re the one who’s leading the conversation, so I’m going to turn it over to you now and and I’ll pipe in once necessary.
Awesome. Well, this is like a trip down memory lane. Uh, Ryan, I first got to spend time together at Fenway Park at AAJ, introduced by the good friend of the show, Dan Schwartz, and it’s been wild to watch Ryan’s ascension. So look, I assume that you now coming out of the gates. You’re running a firm, not easy, good days, bad days. You sort of, you know, you looked at the coaching landscape, there are lots of different options. We’ve had a lot on the summer, but when you come out, you said, hey, I could do this. You know, I could put my own stamp on it. Tell us a little bit about your thoughts, about where you see the need for coaching today, based on, you know, your trials and tribulations, and building a firm?
Yeah, you know, I think for, I think for me, one, one of which is, I’m in a good spot, and I was just like, I wanted to teach, like, innately wanted to teach. And for, I think, three, four years, I was working with Lawyerist, and I was working with law firms and Stephanie, and I just was really energized by that work, right? And so when I had the opportunity to sell my interest in the firm this spring, I’m 44 years old, and I’m not retiring, so it was like, well, what do I want to do? Do I want to build an estate planning firm? Or do I want to build another PI firm? And the thing that I was most energized by, as I sort of took inventory of my life, was teaching and helping and growing law firms and being in this in this space, and I started to work backwards from that, and I thought, well, it would be kind of a unique offering if I could take people who were really critical in my success or in the success of building a firm. Allison, my wife, who ran our operations, finance, made sure people were paid, did a whole bunch for the firm, and Brittany Green, who helped, who ran our marketing, was our marketing director. What if I took them with me and said, well, like, look, we can essentially be almost like a fractional C suite for for law firms, having been in the trenches, having done the work. And also, like, how can we, how can we scale that right? Our goal, our vision, is to help 25,000 firms. And like, there’s three of us, and I don’t want an agency of 100 people. That’s not, I’m skeptical of it. I say, I don’t want that now, Seth, but if you have me on in five years, and I’ve got 100 people, I don’t think at least Allison or Brittany would be surprised. But it was like, well, how can I build sort of different access points and different products in the space? Because if I’m just trading my time for hours. There’s only so much that I can, I can do of it. So our mission is to help firms like sort of across the board at different price points, and give them different things and give them valuable, along the way. If that makes any sense.
Well think, I think that makes total sense, you know, because and Ryan, I can remember flying Southwest from Chicago back to Hartford, sitting next to you, and we were talking about this, and you’re like, I’d love to do some of the stuff that I heard about in the mastermind, but we’re just financially not there yet. But that doesn’t mean that you won’t get there, but you need to have somebody who can sherpa you at the growth stage, at the early stages, as much as you need somebody to go to from seven to eight figures, eight to nine figures, you kind of need somebody to get you from five figures to six. Because there’s so much you need to know, right?
There’s so much. And I mean, one of the things, I mean, we have visions for products and different things that are coming down the line, like we were on a call this morning working with a developer out of Romania to help us build a bot, using leveraging chat, GPT and prompts and training and website to help law firms build systems right. I don’t know if we’re going to be able to get that off the ground, but if we can, like, that’s something that’s scalable, as opposed to firms hiring us and just having us write those systems for them, or just using Chat GPT themselves on things that are not trained. You know, I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s ever going to go live, but we’re these are the things that we’re trying to do for folks.
Well, Ryan, talk to me a bit, a little bit about what, what the vision is. I mean, look, you’ve worked with lawyers, you’ve you’ve done it yourself. You know, you clearly have an idea of what you think you can add as value to the firms. How do you, what, what’s going to be your mark on coaching like, what do you want to be able to deliver? Is it more bigger picture, scaled through Slack, or is it more sort of hands on and getting the stuff done, or accountability? And where do you see your Best Era falling in?
The mark is rolling up our sleeves, getting the hands, getting our hands dirty and getting the work done. I mean, we have, we are working with probably about a dozen firms right now, and we get very granular. I mean, incredibly granular, rolling up our sleeves, going into their data, going into their FileVine, making tweaks, making suggestions on how to improve intake process. So really getting our hands, I mean, essentially dirty, and the way in which I think of a lot of what we do and build things for our clients, we look at it as sort of a bespoke model for for what, what it is that we’re doing, is like we get in, we really try to assess what’s going on, and then we try to sit with the people as if it were our firm, again, measuring it against like, what their goals are, what they want, what their values are, what their resources are, and trying to come up with solutions to bridge the gap of where they are and where they want to be. And it’s not just like, you know, it’s specific. It gets, it gets very specific and exhausting, almost, when we do this with firms, but a lot of fun.
So I have a question for you, you know, you, you’re, you’re already working with firms, you actually have an incredible platform and following on LinkedIn. And I know we’ve talked offline about how people have reached out to you because of the books that you’ve written, and the thing, and the presentations that you’ve done, where do you see small firms struggling the most? Is it, you know, they’re under capitalized. Is it they don’t hire enough? Is it that they don’t understand, you know, the numbers? Is it they’re not investing enough in marketing? I mean, I’m sure you’ve got a gut feeling that when you approach a new a new client, that you’re saying, okay, I got to look at these top three things first and get a sense of what I’m dealing with. And so you’ve talked to so many lawyers. Where do you see them struggling?
They I mean, look most, most, all problems in law firms are marketing problems. Okay, so really trying to figure out where their marketing is, what their market is, how they’re positioned, who their ideal client is, you know, tracking, getting tracking in for how, how leads are coming in, getting a handle on that data, budgeting, targeting, push, figuring out what buttons there to push. That’s one set of problems, right? But then we spoke with. Uh, two, two law firms this week, their problems weren’t that, like they had solved the marketing problem, but they don’t have, like, the operational structure. It’s like, I spoke to one lawyer who’s got 400 PI clients and uses his cell phone to communicate with them, and I’m like, oh my gosh. One, great job and the, great job on the marketing side. But we need a whole host of other things to support your your finances, your life. So, so yeah, so it’s, it’s either on the marketing side or it’s either or it’s on the operational side. I think that those are the two, two biggest areas. And, yeah, I mean, under capitalization is a is a huge issue for small law firms. You know, there aren’t many issues in in law firms that can’t be solved with more money. Because, you know, look, we can talk business all day long. And both of you gentlemen, know, know, a ton, but there aren’t too many problems in business that money can’t solve, right? If you have more ideal clients and you have better people to work with you or work for you, you can pay, you know, a lot of these things go away, right? A lot of problems go away. So, yes, figuring out the financial component and how to grow and how to get a whole lot of clarity around what’s going on, what you’re doing and what needs to be done, is an important piece of this.
It’s funny, because I came from a perspective as marketing first, so that’s always, never been the big obstacle in my personal world. But as I crowdsource the masterminds that we go to, from Fisher’s and beyond, the thing that I see with firms, all firms, but particularly the 1-3 million dollar firms, is the struggle to find the non lawyer to run the show, to do things, whether it starts as an admin to an office administrator, God forbid, a COO at some point in the future. And to me, that seems to be one of the most challenging. Give me your thoughts on a little bit about how people can cut down that curve, both from getting somebody, reducing the churn when you get the wrong people. Because obviously that’s a huge, huge deal. But what you know, when you look at that piece, I see more people asking that, about than, just about anything else.
Yeah, our, Seth. I mean that, that is like an like, really an inflection point for firms. And my belief, both in working with law firms or within my own firm, is that about your fifth full time hire really needs to be an office admin, a person who can work with the cleaning people to make sure the vendors are there, the person who can buy the computers, the person who can be sort of a hack HR person and pre interview people, make sure job ads get posted, a person who can make sure that the bookkeeper is doing their job. And so when you’re, when you’re, when you’re when you’re growing, and if you and if you start going beyond five people without that person, you start really limiting your growth, and you start running into a whole host of problems. So what I, what I think is, you know, if you’re four people, five people, six people. You really need, if you don’t have that person, to get that person full time. And you know that we’re not talking somebody who needs an MBA from a top university or 25 years experience, you know, we’re talking somebody who is maybe the assistant manager of a Walgreens, who has the ability to deal with angry customers, the ability to deal with employees who don’t show up, and clogged toilets, and sort of look at your firm from an operational side. So I think you know critically, if you’re a firm that doesn’t have that, and you’re in that 1-3 million dollar range, you’re, gonna, you’re gonna struggle to grow past that, and as you sort of grow, you know, one of my, one of my big beliefs, is especially with the advent of technology, artificial intelligence, the business side of law firms across the board, becomes as important, if not more so, than even the delivery of the legal services, right? Because if you’re not running a good show behind the scenes, you’re going to get exposed, and it’s going to be very difficult to do great legal work.
That’s funny. This brings up memory from when we were exactly at that inflection point, Ryan, we were five people. A woman stumbled in the door. Recent college grad, Vassar grad, wonderful woman, Rebecca Berkowitz. She ends up doing every job, as you described, right from unclogging the toilets to reception, to mild bookkeeping, everything but lawyering and intake. That was, that was her job. So when she left two years later to go to Michigan for law school, she, we end up trying to hire her again. Didn’t work. Try it again. Turned out it was a four person position by the time she left. And the idea is that if you’re able to get, and there’s no, at that position, you’re talking Walmart, recent college grad. The question is, somebody who can be your ride or die, somebody to be your wing person, as you’re in those early stages. Just seems critical.
It’s incredibly critical. And then, you know, you’re, you sort of hit ceilings in this, right? And one of the other sort of painful ceilings, and both of you have blown through this through various companies, is about 25 people, okay, when you, when you’ve, that is a real pain point. And you know, every sort of person beyond 15 gets a little bit more painful. But at that 25 level, like that’s when you really sort of need your director level people, director of HR, Director of Finance, Director of Marketing, and maybe they don’t immediately have people below them to direct, as directors do, but that’s when you start needing to fill those buckets. Because, yeah, Seth, I mean that if you, if you’re growing, yeah, that you’re, that, that person who served you at five people, they’re going to be doing five or six jobs very quickly, sometime before you reach 15 people. So, you know, starting to think about that, starting to plan for that, and having the sort of experience to navigate it, because I’ve been through it, I’ve I felt all the pain, along the way, of both not, of not doing those things, and understanding the results that happen when you do them through strategic planning.
I got one more before I throw it back to Jay. You know, one of the things we see lawyers struggle with is the giving up control in different areas. And it’s, you know, a common thread throughout this coaching series. What are some of the things you think that you know are effective techniques to sort of help lawyers who feel like, you know, and to a certain extent, there are certain areas where you could do things better than other people, or the people that you could afford at a given time. How do you get over that, the Chad Dudley quote, which is somebody is screwing something up at the firm at any given moment, and I’m okay with it. How do you get to the point where it won’t necessarily be done as well as if you do it yourself.
Yeah I was on a call with a, and look, I don’t know if it’s exclusive to law. Law is the only industry that I’ve ever worked with, but there’s, there’s huge ego where it’s like, I’m the person who, I’m the only person who can close, or I’m the only person who can market. And, you know, I was talking with with a lawyer whose problem was not business. The problem, problem was the phone rang a lot, and it was like, well, I’m the only person who can close. And I’m like, well, do you miss calls? Yeah, I miss calls. Why do you miss calls? Because I’m on the phone trying to close other people. Okay, so say you get 10 potential leads a day, and you’re closing five, and you’re missing three, you know, and you had somebody who can close at 80% right? Like, you know, you’re closing five, they could close at 80% of 10. Well, guess what? Every single day, you’re signing three more clients, and so, yeah, they may not be as effective, but you’re going to capture more. And you’re, what you’re looking at right there, you know is what, like 40% growth year over year, like massive amounts of growth by that level of delegation. And if you, and if you’re screening people, you’re hiring the right people, you’re compensating them in a way that is proper, you know, over time and very quickly, that 80% they’re, going to be at 100% of what you were doing, if they’re focused and given the tools to do their job. So it takes some, you know, it just takes some humbling I think, and it takes some, some looking in the mirror. It’s also like, well, what do you want? Well, then don’t complain to me that you are having to answer the phone when you’re on vacation all the time. If you’re not willing to give this up, and if you’re happy with that, you’re happy with losing half your leads and not answering your phones. Okay, don’t, you know, I don’t know why we’re talking.
You know, it’s interesting that that you you talk about ego as being one of the biggest stumbling blocks, blocks to growth, because we’ve heard that a number of times over the course of the series, that lawyers kind of need to get out of their own way and allow people to do the jobs that you hire them for. And you know this is it brings up an interesting point. You know, back when you were with your firm, you had brought in someone to be that COO role. But can you explain to our listeners the journey it took to actually get the right person into that seat? Because what I feel that I’m hearing is people hire when the building is on fire, and so they hire the first person who shows up with a hose. And that may not be the best person to address your problems if you’re not constructively going through the hiring process when out, when the fire’s not happening. So can you talk to us a little bit about that journey?
Yeah, yeah. And, and, you know, sort of like, this plays into Seth’s prior question, which is one of the ways to persuade people. I’m a big sports fan. I know both of you are as well. You know, it’s like, you can’t have your offensive lineman trying to kick field goals. Like it just it, just it doesn’t work. And people who are good at things. We we’re all usually pretty good about a number of things, but we’re pretty great at maybe one or two if we’re if we’re really lucky. So you want people, you want a team of specialists, a team of disparate skills if you’re really going, if your goal is to scale, you need a team of of people who are really good with numbers, really good with sales. These are not one in the same people. And you know, I think one of the big inflection points for us was Seth introducing us to John Nachazel and working with the Fireproof team and really doing strategic planning for the firm, which is really what we do at Best Era, let’s look at your revenue. Let’s look at your marketing spend. Let’s figure out if we spend more accurately, what it’s likely to generate. Let’s look at what your overhead is going to be, what your profit is going to be, and let’s get a whole lot of clarity, because I think firm owners don’t operate with a ton of clarity in what it is they’re doing. They’re in reactive mode a lot of the time. And so for us, you know, with our ambitions as a, as a firm, you know, I was, I was doing, two years ago, I had 350 personal injury cases, doing pre lit. I was handling intake. I was also handling marketing, and being the quote unquote visionary for the firm. That is a whole lot of work, and to do it. And I was also trying Cruise. I was also on in trial, on on the Cruise case, just to throw in some fun. But I think when you start saying, look the way to grow, the way to the way to make more money, the way to to impact more people is to move people into these things that are that are better for them. So we found a wonderful lawyer who is amazing at intake, and the first six months of a case, we brought her on board, that took that off my plate. And as we were able to push past that sort of level of 25 onto more about 35 that’s when it really became even the directors reporting to me was a whole lot on my plate, because my goal for the firm wasn’t to be a lawyer and say, close a million or a million and a half or two in terms of revenue. My goal became to add 10 million to the top line of the firm, right? And to do that, I needed somebody. I needed John Nachazel, like, I need, like, I think, and I think in the book Fireproof, you know, Mike is about 30 people when he hires John. And I think that, that’s, that, that’s right. So I looked, no, I scanned my, my rolodex, I mean we don’t have a rolodex anymore, but, but my, my network, my contacts, and, you know, ask myself, I’m like, who, who is the most person, most like John Nachazel, just somebody who’s a total square, somebody who is a, you know, loves Excel, data, very calm, rational decision maker. And, you know, one morning Allison and I were, we were looking at a house, and our real estate agent, Allison was like, we, you need. You’re this person. You are John Nachazel. We, you, Kyle Bergquist. And so, you know, this was somebody with an MBA from University of Virginia, 25 years experience, big firms, not not law firms, but big companies, small companies, tech, finance. And I was like, okay, this is, this is the person who loves all the things that I’m not super excited about, but are incredibly important to a company. That’s what I got.
And that’s that’s a wonderful story, because I think that really helps you sort of, and it actually, it probably made your your exit a little easier, because the building, the business was set up so that you weren’t handling a million things, so when it was time for you to divest and step aside, the business could do its own thing.
Yeah, right. And I mean, it became the thing where it was like, okay, I’m getting myself out of hiring decisions. I’m getting myself out of firing decisions like that, that took up a whole lot of space, and I’m out there trying to build network, build a name for the firm. I’m out there identifying vendors who can help us bridge gaps in our our systems. And so that became my whole focus at the at the end of this thing. And, yeah, Kyle built dashboards using Domo, and, you know, it made my life a lot easier.
That’s cool. So I want to, I want to switch gears a little and talk about something. You know, we’ve been on this show for a while, and if you go back into our catalog, Seth and I talk often about how difficult it is to find lawyers to fill roles in our office, and you’re actually doing something now, which I think is super cool, is you’re actually faculty at a law school, and you’re teaching the business of law. So let’s talk about that. And the question I have for you is, the, who are the students in your class that are saying, hey, I want to learn how to open and run a law firm, you know, because that wasn’t around when I went to school. I don’t know anybody who has ever had that. So you’re in a unique position to see the future of these entrepreneurial lawyers that we all know and love.
So, yeah, I mean, you know, when you’re hiring lawyers, is incredibly hard, and one of the things that I saw at our firm was I needed to build pathways and relationships at local law schools. So we started doing a law firm lounge podcast, just talking to law students and like, the whole point of it was just to build our brand with law students in hopes that they would come and work with us, or maybe on the off chance they go into practice and refer cases to us, because we were a firm that they, that they knew, right? So, you know, it was attending career fairs. It was giving out copies of Tiger Tactics and donuts at the law school. And it was really trying to make inroads. Because, you know, look, and Seth’s in DC, but in Connecticut, I mean, lawyers come from one of three schools. They come from UConn, Quinnipiac, or Western New England. So our target audience was very small, and we tried to get out there, sponsor things, show up at career fairs, connect with students, because I was talking to the Director of Career Services yesterday, and was, when I was at UConn teaching, and she said, Ryan, she’s like, nobody wants to go into litigation, nobody. They all want to do transactional stuff or corporate stuff and and that’s a big problem when you’re Price Benowitz, or your’re Ruane Attorneys or your’re Connecticut Trial Firm, that doesn’t exist anymore. So I guess it’s not a problem for Connecticut Trial Firm. But those are, those are, those are big issues. If you can get cases, you can get systems, but you don’t have people to want to work them. So building those sort of inroads, and that’s actually how my course came about, because I was getting more involved in UConn and doing the podcast and posting on LinkedIn about law school, and that’s when the Dean of UConn Law School, Ebony Nelson, reached out and said, we’d like you to teach this. And I said, okay, so, I mean, the students are, you know, they’re people who are, I mean, there were people, I’ve had one class, so I don’t know them a ton, Jay, honestly, but there were people out there looking to build, bridge, what I would call the access to justice gap and try to find ways to serve underserved communities and understanding that running a good organization is important, both in the profit and for nonprofits sectors. There were definitely people out there who I think weren’t called to say the traditional pipeline of clerkship, bigger law firm, something else. So, you know, it’ll be interesting to discover more who the students are. But I think, I think there’s, you know, the Jay Ruanes and Seth Prices of the world, Billie Tarascios of the world, are the people that I feel are looking back at me, or felt that yesterday. So they’re out there.
So Ryan, can people email you? People who are listening to the show? Can they email you to get a copy of your syllabus? Because there’s so many people out there who would love to get an idea of what they should read at what points is that something that you can provide to our listeners?
That something I can provide. Just send me an email. ryan@bestera.io I will send you my syllabus. We and we, when we talk about Best Era and we talk about building products, one of the things I’m going to do this fall as, one of the things I’m planning to do, one of my goals, is to actually teach this course, and, you know, sell it essentially as as a product to, you know, it’s going to be called The Way Foundations. So it’s really targeted for firms that are starting up under $500,000 in revenue, or firms that are, have grown past that, but sort of struggle with the blocking and tackling. So you know, sometimes, you know, every spring training, most baseball teams, you know, they start practicing, practicing with, you know, bunts and pitchers, and covering first base as sort of a fundamental so that’s where we’re going to start. And that is a course offering that we’re going to be building into different offerings that that we are doing. But send me the syllabus.
Cool. Seth, you got any other questions?
This is great. Excited to, to watch, to watch this, watched the last project grow and excited to see you take off with this.
Well thank you so much. Seth, learned so much from both of you. This is a fantastic podcast, and thank you.
Alright, folks, that’s going to do it for us here on The Law Firm Blueprint Podcast, or The Law Firm Blueprint show? I don’t know what we’re calling it. You know, we’re gonna have to. We, probably we, you know, the problem is Ryan. Seth and I said, let’s start doing something, and we just ran right into it, and we never really set up all the foundational stuff. So this is a byproduct of people who are fast starters, but don’t think things through, uh, kind of like our law firms, and then we wind up having to go back and figure stuff out on the on the back end. But folks, that’s going to do it for us, of course. You can catch us every week, live 3pm Eastern, 12pm Pacific. Live in our Facebook group, The Law Firm Blueprint. Be sure to ask for admittance if you want to get in and see all the stuff that we have posted there. Of course, you can also catch us live on LinkedIn. Follow Seth, follow me on LinkedIn. Of course, Ryan’s also on LinkedIn. You can catch up with him as well. Be sure if you are listening to the podcast, wherever you get a podcast, give us a five star, uh, rating, folks. Thank you so much for being here Seth, always great to do another show with you, Ryan. Thank you so much for being with us, folks. That’s going to do it for us for now. Bye for now.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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